Frank Giampietro

▶0:00IntroWelcome to the Built by People podcast,

▶0:02Hostwhere we share the stories and insights

▶0:03Introof the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce.

▶0:37HostI'm excited to welcome Frank to the Built by People podcast. Frank, thank you so much for joining us today. And as a starting question, I always like to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:47GuestYeah, like many people, when you're on campus trying to figure out what you're going to do for the rest of your life, I was curious about what everything was going to bring and couldn't decide what I really wanted to do. So I decided to become a consultant. And I thought I'd do that for a few years and that would give me a career path into something else. I spent the next 28+ years in the consulting space, variety of different roles, all focused on large-scale change, culture, leadership alignment, a lot of times during transactions. Lucky enough to take on a number of leadership roles through that time. In 2019, I found myself at Ernst Young leading our people consulting business in our East region. And like for everybody else, in the spring of 2020, COVID hit and we pivoted to remote work. And a few weeks, maybe a month into us working remotely, I get a call from our America CEO and she's like, hey, I know you've been doing some work with clients, helping them with the changeover to remote work and thinking about how they're going to manage workforce. Are we doing much yet thinking about what work is going to look like after we all return and like what learnings we should be incorporating. I said, I don't think a lot of clients are really getting there yet, but I said it'd be really great to lead the way. And so I get the chance to actually do an engagement for EY to help us really think about the employee experience in the future. And through the work that we did, we came out with a number of principles that we said, this is how we want to really reshape what the employee experience looks like post-pandemic. One of them was this idea of well-being as a business imperative. We basically said, hey, we've always cared about our people. It's always been a part of the experience. We've never treated it as if it was a business imperative, like it was going to really be fundamental to how we ran the firm. And our executive team loved that idea and they said, great, how do we do that? And so we put a series of recommendations together as any consulting team would. One was to have a sponsor, a partner-level sponsor leading the charge. And we said we thought we should have a chief wellbeing officer. And at that point, the executive team turned around and asked if I was willing to do that. And obviously an incredible honor to get the chance to take that on. Of course, I said no at the beginning of it because I felt completely unqualified for that and didn't look at myself as a role model for it, but was convinced that we had a great team around. Which we do, and it's been a

▶3:14Speakerwonderful 3 years now in that role.

▶3:17HostFrank, can you tell us about a time when you saw employee well-being directly impact business performance, and how did you measure that success?

▶3:26GuestYeah, listen, I think we can probably all relate to this on a lot of levels. I think the first time I saw it negatively impact my performance, I was a year or 2 out of school. I remember I was working on a proposal, and we pulled an all-nighter. I literally worked 27 hours straight. And drove home on the back end of that. And I remember getting home and realizing I couldn't even really remember the drive home. And I'm like, I probably shouldn't have been driving. And then I thought about the fact that I'm like, if that impeded my performance in that way, I wonder how good the quality of what I was writing on that proposal for the last few hours was. And I really remember all the way back then thinking, like, working more hours and working harder can't necessarily relate to better. And that sort of stuck with me. And I think we can probably all relate to points in our careers where we had that time where maybe we weren't physically feeling 100% or maybe mentally and emotionally we weren't 100%. And we knew that was bleeding into the work that we were doing. What we wanted to do at the firm when we came up with this idea of the business imperative was to see whether we could actually mathematically prove that. And then what insights would that generate for us? And so what we started looking at was self-reported wellbeing. We'd ask people, were they able to experience a level of wellbeing that was appropriate for them at the firm? And then we were able to look at different measures and metrics that tied to that. But then we were also able to look at different business outcomes. So we could also then look at, are the people more likely to leave the organization who are reporting a level of lower wellbeing? And of course they were, not surprising, but it was really nice to be able to look at that and say, it does look like it has a direct impact on the ability to retain people. But we also looked at things like revenue growth, and we were able to look at the account teams for the clients that we serve, and we were able to look at people's well-being and the drivers that supported that well-being and know that the people who were reporting higher well-being were actually driving higher revenue growth. So yes, of course, the things like retention matter, but we also know all that discretionary effort that goes into innovation, creativity, and providing excellent work product and ultimately growing revenue has a huge impact as well.

▶5:39HostFrank, I want to talk about the Vitality Index dashboard. Could we start by just having you define it?

▶5:45GuestYeah. So I said we were curious about this concept, and the first thing we did was we brainstormed 100 things we thought we could measure related to well-being. We said, okay, we got to whittle that list down. And we did a 2x2 and we said, What do we think has the highest impact and what can we actually get our hands on pretty easily? And we came up with a set of 25 measures and put it into a dashboard and rolled it out to a pilot group of leaders. And we asked them over a series of months, do you find this data valuable? Is it giving you any insights about managing your people differently? And they said a couple of things. One, they said, we love this. This is really great data that we've never seen before, at least in this way. And two, we have absolutely no idea

▶6:30Speakerwhat to do with it.

▶6:33GuestSo we knew we needed to move to the next version of it. And what we've done since is we've whittled that list down to 12, and we did that through data science. So we went from what do we think is important to what can we prove out. A little bit about what I talked about in the last question where we were talking about kind of the business piece of this, like we wanted to prove to different business outcomes. So we only show things in Vitality Index that do prove either retaining our people or growing revenue and people's well-being. Those 3 categories, those 3— I'm sorry, the 12 measures fall into 3 categories. Those 3 categories could be sentiment data, what people are telling us about how their experience is feeling to them every day. Operational data, things we know about our people based on what's sitting in our system somewhere, or program data. When people consume things that we make available to them that we actually know impacts their well-being in a positive way. So sentiment data could be things like, I feel like I can be myself every day, a measure of psychological safety. An example of an operational piece of data could be whether people are getting regular time off. We know how many hours they're working each week. We know whether they're taking regular vacation time off, and we know those things both have a strong correlation to wellbeing. Program data is things like we have a financial wellbeing program that we make available to all of our people. We actually know when they take advantage of that program, they report higher levels of wellbeing and they're more likely to stay at the firm. So we look at data across all

▶8:06Speakerthree of those different categories.

▶8:10HostFrank, how does that index help leaders make proactive decisions about their team's well-being?

▶8:15GuestThat's my favorite part, right? So, like, the data is interesting, the insights are even more interesting, but what we really want is action, right? We want different leaders to be able to take action based on the data. Give you one example. When we were taking one of our account leaders through the tool and showing results for what is one of our larger accounts, his results for the team was really good. And just with a couple points and clicks, what we can see is not just what a score is in one of those categories I mentioned, but where are the high and low outliers? So who are the parts of the population that are doing really well and not well? One of the things we measure is this idea of impact or mattering, right? Because one of the things that we know from a well-being perspective is we want to matter every day. And so we had a question in there around that. And he noticed instantly that the low outlier was our Jacksonville office in that case. And there, that client's based in Charlotte, so that team tends to not spend as much time with the client. And so instantly they were like, you know what? They don't feel as connected to our clients. We need to get down there, spend some time with them, help them understand the impact of all the work that they're doing, and then also get them up to see the client a little bit more frequently. Like instantly they thought of a solution around that. In other instances, one of our other teams, they noticed that we have a question around, I'm able to have healthy habits. So basically I'm able to care for myself. And the Hoboken office happened to be low in that particular team. And yet when we looked at the hours, because that's another category, they were right in line with the other offices that were supporting that client. And so then we realized it wasn't a matter of too much work. It was some norms that were going on in that particular team. And so went in and did a session with that team where they could establish norms around flexibility and boundaries and different ways of working that allowed them to still deliver everything they needed to deliver, but feel like they could get time and space back for themselves. So a lot of this stuff isn't really complicated. It's just shining a light to know who needs help and what do they need help with.

▶10:23HostFrank, when was a time you had to convince skeptical stakeholders that investing in employee wellbeing was a business imperative, and how did you make your case?

▶10:33GuestYeah, I think there— we've encountered that with a number of teams along the way, and I always treat it as a fun challenge. The two things I've really found is you've got to look at both the quantitative piece and the qualitative piece. Bringing some data is really important. We are a business like everybody else and financials matter. So showing them how people's wellbeing will actually impact the bottom line is a great place to start. A lot of skeptics will continue to try to find holes in the data because they're entering the conversation with a mindset around that. What I find really helpful in those instances is actually putting a face to it. So one of the things we did at one point was we actually had people record videos and send them in when they had a great day and when they had a really challenging day. And we made a whole montage around it. And you saw these people celebrating with their team when they had just a really big milestone and how great that felt. You could feel the emotion of them coming together around it. And then you saw people crying when they were struggling to get through the day and really just struggling to figure out how the next day was going to be better for them.. And when you show that, we sometimes forget leaders are people, and even the skeptical ones have big hearts. And when they see that, they say, you know what, I want more of those people that are celebrating, and I want to figure out how I help those people that are in need. So I do think you need to come with the financials, but I think

▶12:01Speakerputting a face to it's really important as well.

▶12:05HostFrank, how does your organization's approach to mental health support extend beyond workplace to include families, and what results have you seen from this holistic approach?

▶12:16GuestYeah, so we're really blessed to be able to provide a benefit to our folks that provides a full continuum of care from sort of self-help resources to wellbeing coaches all the way through to 25 free therapy sessions for not just all of our employees, but all of their household members, even if they're not benefit eligible. And that was really important for us because one of the things we realized is Well-being is hugely a social component. There's a huge social component to that, right? It's not just how am I feeling, but I'm affected by those people around me that I care the most about. And if they're struggling, then I'm struggling. And that has an impact on me and ultimately on my performance. And so it was really important for us to offer something that didn't just include our employees, but included all of their household members

▶13:03Hostas well. Frank, what parting advice would you like

▶13:06Guestto share with our community? I think some of the work we do is really hard work. And so my advice is to stick with it. We're 3 years into the journey that we've been on, really trying to reshape how we work every day, how we run the firm to support well-being. And I often say we're just at the beginning of that journey. So I think a lot of organizations, if they don't see results in 6 months or 9 months or a year, they go like, are we on the right track? And so really figuring out ways to show progress is important, but knowing that this is a journey and it takes time and it takes a lot of investment and making sure the organization is ready for that and willing to take

▶13:45Speakerthat on, I think is huge.

▶13:48HostFrank, thanks so much for joining us today on the Built by People podcast.

▶13:51GuestThanks for the invite, Dave.