Wellness is Integral to Our Success

We are done with the either/or workplace. We can’t keep choosing between meaningfully supporting the world or getting a paycheck that allows us to meaningfully support our families. And no longer do we want to either have exciting, impactful careers or have regulated nervous systems and a life of wellness.

We’re in an era that is asking more of ourselves and our workplaces – a time for the both/and.

As a former organizational consultant with McKinsey I was embedded as a client counselor alongside different HR leaders for months at a time. Every HR leader I partnered with was a competent strategic businesswoman who was holding more than her fair share of emotional labor. She was emotionally supporting her business partners, her HR team, and many times overextended emotionally in her personal life. All while trying to consistently justify her value and the value of her team to other functions in the organization. She was also getting pinged constantly by Slack, email, and texts; all contributing to a sense of overwhelm that felt unjust and unsustainable to me.

When employee morale was particularly low at one client, I remember the CFO casually suggesting to my client, a senior HR leader, that her team should consider organizing a cupcake party. The misogyny and misunderstanding was overwhelming. She was already burnt out, and she was not recognized as the strategic partner she was— capable of way more than cupcakes. What was needed wasn’t a bandaid; it was great HR leadership and a system that would support it.

Every HR leader I have partnered with had three things in common: they cared deeply about their organizations and the wellbeing of the people in it, they were overworked and undervalued, and they did not have organizational trust or capacity to be as innovative as they wanted to be.

It was how I saw HR leaders treated that made me resist becoming one for so long.As the People & Culture leader at Daymaker, with a CEO who deeply believes that investing in culture is fundamental to success, I am committed to building a new kind of HR playbook for our team based on three counter-cultural pillars.

1. I deserve to be well. I was diagnosed with Crohn’s last year, and I am not sure without the stakes being so high, I would have had the courage to make big changes in my life to validate and protect my wellness. But having made those changes, I now understand my wellness is critical to my success as a strategic business partner.
2. The team deserves to be well. While part of this is an individual responsibility, the norms we cultivate and celebrate in our workplaces, how connected we feel to each other, and the systems we operate in all greatly impact team wellness. When we feel more seen, celebrated, and trusted by our colleagues, the chance that we can ask for what we need to be well is higher. The fulfillment we get from our work is higher.
3. When we can contribute to other’s feeling well, we help ourselves and our teams feel well. We are all interconnected; when we see other’s suffering, we feel it…we suffer. When we have a chance to feel needed and to contribute to the well-being of others it reminds us of who we are; that we are full of love. That we want to see each other thrive. That we want all living things to be well.

If these counter-cultural pillars of wellness are inspiring to you, I offer Daymaker as one solution to help move your organization in that direction.

Daymaker helps companies run employee giving campaigns that enable teammates nationwide to support specific children from local nonprofit partners. Our unique one-to-one giving model allows your team to learn about a child’s dreams, interests, and background, purchase gifts from their wishlist, and write a personalized message to them. And on your organization dashboard, everyone can see each other’s donor messages and learn about the children your team has supported this Holiday season.

We work strategically with HR leaders to design a giving campaign that will be meaningful to their organization, and then build the communications and landing page to make it run smoothly. We take all the headache out of the giving process – allowing remote and dispersed teams to make local impact across all offices without juggling 6 different giving programs. That means you receive a custom URL, personalized toolkit, designed and branded graphics, a Slack or Team integration, and a company impact report at the end of the campaign – all without any more items on your to-do list.

Why does this matter? Because wellness requires connection, but high quality team opportunities shouldn’t mean more burden for you. We’ve figured out a new way to do corporate giving, completely online and completely connected. Gone are the days of collecting money and “tossing it down a well.” Our one-to-one model offers complete donor transparency and authentic connection. The results are phenomenal: 78% of employees report being happier to work at their company because of Daymaker. One of our company leaders actually told us recently, “the best team bonding experience we’ve ever had was picking out together which kids to support on Daymaker.”

We are a resource for HR leaders, so that they can engage and enrich their teams and receive more support themselves. No more either/or.

HR at its best is being able to take care of ourselves, our people, and our communities. Daymaker is a solution designed to remind us that when we have a chance to give together, we get more than we give.