The following is a transcript of our podcast conversation with Daniel Bolus. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
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Sarah
Hello and welcome to Humans Beyond Resources, an HR podcast by Reverb where we cover topics from culture to compliance. Reverb believes that every decision a leader makes reverberates throughout the organization. From hiring your first employee to training your entire workforce. We believe in building healthy, inclusive cultures that engage your team. I’m your host, Sarah Wilkins. Excited to welcome Daniel Bolus, CEO and Founder of Club Health, to talk to us about personalization of wellness benefits. Welcome, Daniel. So glad to have you.
Daniel
Thank you. Good to be here.
Sarah
I think it would be great just to start by sharing what Club Health is and how did you get started?
Daniel
Good question. So, Club Health is a modern employee wellness platform and it’s proven to be up to three times more engaging and impactful than a traditional wellness stipend. So how it works, you simply give your employees a monthly wellness stipend and they can choose their own health and wellness subscriptions from our curated marketplace. So this includes products spanning mental health, fitness, nutrition, family life, financial wellness, chronic disease management, and more. And so we handle all subscription management and distribution in the central platform to make it as simple and engaging of a platform as possible. And we actually got started during the Pandemic as a response to the growing need and demand to improve and update our corporate wellness offerings, especially for distributed teams.
Sarah
That’s great. We’ll get to this in a moment. But I like how expansive it is on what is provided. Right. Because wellness is very expansive. Why is wellness important to you? And to expand on why you started this business during the pandemic.
Daniel
Yeah, so just a little background on myself. I come from a big fat Lebanese family in Birmingham, Alabama. Shout out to them. And wellness is important to me because I’ve seen firsthand how sometimes narrow definitions of wellness can really negatively impact individuals from diverse cultures. So just a personal example about my personal life is I’ve really tried hard to get into meditation and kind of the culture around meditation is predominantly what I would call like speech based meditation. So you have someone speaking in a very soothing tone, which can be really great for a lot of people, and walk you through different exercises, but that just never really worked for me. And I thought I had a big problem around meditating correctly and I kind of thought I was a meditation flunk out. And what I realized is someone one day approached me and asked if I had ever tried music therapy. And I thought that was very interesting because I’m a musician, I played saxophone my whole life and I was like, I didn’t even know that was a thing. That’s awesome. And so I tried it. And I actually really enjoy music based meditations and using that has helped me kind of press my emotions well and kind of move on. And I think that is something is just a small example about how important it is to make sure that your wellness offering is inclusive to your broader employee population.
Sarah
Thank you for sharing that example because I feel like a meditation funky. I have tried and tried but I have never tried the sound therapy. So maybe, just maybe that will work for me. So thank you for sharing that. Of course, you just mentioned kind of making sure your wellness programs are inclusive. And so I think I want to dive into like how do you define wellness, right? And not just a very exclusive way, right?
Daniel
I think that’s a fantastic question. It’s also a very tricky question because the answer in my opinion is that there isn’t a definition. And I think that’s very important, especially as leaders of organizations, to recognize that there’s not one fixed definition for all of your employees as to what wellness is and kind of allowing yourself and your programs to think about wellness flexibly and maybe listen to stories from your employees about what it means to them. Now, if I had to define it for myself, I like to think about wellness as everyday health. So daily health. And I think that’s so critical and kind of why we’re branded as Club Health and we focus on this concept of daily health is because we really think that sometimes wellness gets sidelined as this nice to have if all your ducks are in a row and you can kind of add it on as like some icing on the cake. If everything’s going well. But in the context of thinking about it as daily health, suddenly it just helps reframe how important this actually is because what you do in your everyday life really defines your overall health and wellness. So I just think that’s a good way to think about it.
Sarah
I like that the everyday health because I know we hear the term self care and it feels hard to prioritize those things, but it’s really important to think about how you can fit those things into your everyday versus making it this big, huge thing that you need to always make a lot of time for.
Daniel
Exactly.
Sarah
So given that the definition can be really different based on the individual and you’re working with a company, where do you start as far as defining a wellness program that is inclusive and gives people the opportunity to use what is best for them?
Daniel
Yeah, I think that’s a great question and to kind of maybe not answer it, but to answer it, I think to start is just to start. A lot of times we shy away from maybe thinking about wellness in more complex ways and how we can improve on existing programs that we may have or just kind of these standard wellness programs that already exist. And I think it’s very important, especially as we broaden that definition of wellness in our corporations, to start by actually thinking more complexly about it and talking to employees and seeing what’s on their minds and what they value and what’s important to them. And so just in our own platform, Club Health is kind of how we do that through this marketplace approach where employees can select the benefits that are most important to them in this larger wellness context. And that provides a great way to kind of get insights as to what your employees care about. So we kind of anonymize what employees are actually buying, but we can provide aggregated insights, and some of the results can be quite surprising on an organizational level and can be very beneficial to understand as a leader.
Sarah
Yeah, that’s great. And I like how you said just start and then also ask people. So I think one way that you can ask is through some type of engagement survey or benefit survey or what kind of support the team needs. Another thing would be a pilot. I know we personally ran a pilot with Club Health with a subset of our employees, and we found that to be really successful and it allowed everybody to kind of personalize what they wanted to use. So I’m excited because that pilot informed our ability to roll that out to the rest of the team yeah.
Daniel
And shout out to Reverb. Shameless plug. But what I love about working with a company like Reverb is that exact kind of flexibility to try new things and ask for feedback and learn and adapt. I think that’s one of the most powerful qualities you can have as a company and as a leader.
Sarah
Thank you. Thank you so much. It’s been great to work with you all. Yeah. To keep going on like wellness programs. And what have you learned? You just mentioned flexibility to try new things, but what else have you learned about what makes a wellness program successful at companies?
Daniel
Yeah, I guess I’ll start answering that by describing certain metrics we look at to see if a wellness program is working. And I think one of the top metrics, it’s pretty basic, but just sheer engagement. And are employees actually involved in the program? Are they signing up to things? Are they coming back to the program and maybe adjusting what they’re doing? And I think that’s just so important because, again, often wellness gets sidelined and employees may get lost as far as where does this actually exist in my company benefits? And so that’s something we track very closely, just the sheer amount of engagement. Because, again, you could have the best wellness program in the world, but if employees aren’t engaged, it’s not super meaningful. Right. And so I think engagement personalization, like you said, is super critical, especially dealing with health and wellness. It’s very personal. Right. And everyone has a different journey and kind of needs different things at different times of their life. We all have different stages of life that we go through. So I think that personalization and diversity of offering is really important. And then like I said, just kind of taking the time as the leader, yourself or whoever’s deciding to deploy these benefits as to learning what wellness means, not just for yourself, but for those around you, I think that’s so important. Often we see leaders who are like some of the healthiest people I know individually, but it can be easy to maybe kind of impose how you’ve become healthy in your wellness journey on your organization. And I think it’s so critical to understand that different people respond to different ways of their own wellness journeys and just being open to that is really helpful.
Sarah
That’s great. Yeah, I like that you pointed out the leader has a part in it as well. Right. It’s not just implementing it and saying, this is how I did it, but modeling it, learning how it can be personalized to everybody and having that approach where people can use what they need allows that personalization. What are some common challenges in employee wellness that you see? Either challenges that people are facing or challenges that companies get into with these programs?
Daniel
Yeah, I guess kind of similar themes to what we’ve been talking about. One is kind of understanding that engagement piece. So again, even if you have a lot of amazing wellness benefits that kind of span your organization, just understanding where people end up interacting with that is important. And if they truly understand what benefits are available to them and how they approach those and when they approach those, I think that’s very important. I think leading to your point, leading by example is really important. I saw a recent article that I think Reverb posted this about how critical and important a role your boss plays in your wellness. And I think a lot of leaders don’t quite understand just how large of an impact they personally have on the people that they are leading. And it’s just little things like as simple as just to give a random example, this didn’t happen, but to highlight something small that makes a big impact. If you’re talking about meditation, for example, in your
Daniel
company and say your leader just has that ever so slight eye roll or it shows some super small way that they don’t really understand what meditation is or they don’t agree with it, actually. Do you think that has a massive impact on how the rest of the organization feels about these kind of diverse wellness offerings and their understanding of how okay it is to engage in some of these mental health exercises that can have some stigma behind them?
Sarah
Yeah, the leading by example is so important and I think our leaders, or Mikayla in particular, really models a great I’m going to go out and take a walk right now and make sure people know like, I’m unplugging for a bit. It’s sunny outside or really unplugged during vacations is another way to kind of work on your health. Right. And so having a leader model good things and steer clear of wellness is a great example of that.
Daniel
Absolutely. It’s so important. If you’re a leader, just understand how critical it is for you to model that.
Sarah
Yeah, absolutely. What can companies do to foster a culture that supports well being beyond we’ve talked a lot about a lot of the things you probably already mentioned really fall into this, but yeah, any kind of ways that you would add or sum up what we’ve been talking about?
Daniel
Yeah, I think you just mentioned it. And that’s also super important as a leader to understand. But when you mentioned that your CEO, Michaela, when she says, hey, I’m going on a walk. So how I would compare this to wellness is, again, thinking about wellness as daily health. Daily health takes time. Right. And if your organization, if there’s no time built in to practice daily health, then it can be really overwhelming to go through a whole day at work and then go home and do all of your home responsibilities and then you’re exhausted and you’re like, oh, I should focus on daily health. And then you’re like, Or I could just go to bed. And I think it’s so important for leaders to model that, right. That not only that they’re doing these things, but they’re taking time, potentially during work hours to do so. And I think that’s just so valuable and goes such a long way.
Sarah
It really does. I love that because it gives me the permission to step out when I need to. Right. Yesterday it was sunny outside. We’re in Seattle, and so it was sunny and I just walked outside and I stood in the sun for like a minute and I came back and told the team and others went and did the same thing because it just gave me energy. And then it allowed others to take that little pause, go get some energy from the sun and come back refreshed.
Daniel
That’s great. I love that.
Sarah
Yeah. I’ve realized how important sunshine is to me. Any closing thoughts or things that you would want to say to leaders in companies that are trying to figure out what to do with wellness and their team?
Daniel
I guess, first of all, thank you for listening. I think to our point of just the first step is to get started. I think listening to different ways companies are doing this is a great way to get started. And just thinking about it, even if you don’t end up implementing anything, I think just exploring the concepts is a great foundation that you can then share with your team and start building that culture where eventually one day you do add these benefits to your benefits offerings. So I just think I think a lot of times in podcasts, we don’t thank the audience enough for listening to the topics that we’re talking about. Thank you.
Sarah
Yeah, thank you. Thanks for acknowledging that. And I think, like you said, just getting started is something as simple as encouraging people to go on a walk. It doesn’t need to be a massive program or have a lot of spend associated to it. It’s just how do you help people do those things daily that contribute to their overall well being?
Daniel
Wonderful.
Sarah
Thank you so much. It was really great to have you on today. Thanks.
Daniel
Great to be here. Thank you.
Sarah
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