From Day One

When Disaster Strikes: How HR Leaders Can Help Employees Recover

Until not long ago, corporations thought mainly of themselves and their operations when it came to natural disasters, focusing on their business-continuity plans (BCPs). But the Los Angeles fires, the pandemic, and other recent calamities have persuaded employers to build the well-being of their workers and their communities into those plans and responses as well. The Los Angeles fires that began in early January have decimated entire communities, killed more than two dozen people, and displaced more than 180,000 people. Companies including Netflix, Disney, Google, and NBCUniversal have collectively pledged tens of millions of dollars in the form of donations and relief programs for their employees and local citizens affected by the destruction. Among the creative ways to help: Disney opened up its wardrobe warehouse to offer clothing to employees and their families who lost their homes. With natural disasters becoming more frequent, employers are cementing their role in disaster-relief efforts as part of their increasingly holistic support of employees in their lives outside the workplace, offering programs ranging from mental healthcare to financial well-being programs. The overall goal: to be a source of stability in times of turmoil. From Day One asked HR leaders and benefits providers how they’re stepping in to help, and what others can do to pitch in. Their responses:Prioritize Employee Safety and Basic NeedsFirst, ensure employees can evacuate safely, have food and water, and can find a place to stay. Those immediate needs are what Jolen Anderson, chief people officer at the coaching platform BetterUp, calls “level one.” Employers themselves aren’t often capable of furnishing these things directly, but they can connect employees with disaster relief organizations that are ready to help.The emergency-grant platform Canary helps with immediate needs, including temporary housing, food, or lost income. “We are able to stand up new programs for companies and their affected employees very quickly in response to events like the LA wildfires,” said Canary’s head of marketing, Catherine Scagnelli. For DoorDash, Canary created a relief specifically for Dashers affected by the fires in LA, and Canary is extending opportunities to qualify as the disaster continues and many are unable to work.Reach Out to Employees Affected“Show up with empathy and understanding of what’s happening across your organization,” said Anderson. These messages of support should come from both HR and line managers, who are closer to individual workers and their needs. Executives can do the same. Disney CEO Bob Iger told the New York Times that he’s been calling employees affected by the fire, saying, “I want them to know that people at the top of the company are looking after them, that we care.”Tap All Your Benefits ProvidersChristopher Smith, VP of benefits at Universal Music Group, whose HQ is in Santa Monica, told From Day One he and his team are combing through every benefit and program they offer. “I am diving into all of our benefits, carriers, vendors, and partners, and saying, ‘What can we do? What phone numbers can we provide?’ It may not be a benefit, per se, but what resources can we put forward that can help people and potentially save lives? When you look at it from that angle, you become very creative.”Assets like “EAPs, well-being coaching, and time off” that companies can directly supply are what Anderson at BetterUp calls “level two” resources.Establish Clear Communication ChannelsMake a plan to communicate with your employees about where they can find help. Aggregate and organize a list of websites, portals, phone numbers, and relief organizations, and include company paid time off and leave policies. Make the list available to the entire organization so employees who are affected know what’s available–and those who aren’t directly affected can help get their colleagues back on their feet.One CEO told Employee Benefits News that her company, Emergenetics, is using every form of communication possible–like phone trees, text messaging, and internal platforms–to stay in touch with their workers. “Create an email address for inquiries related to the wildfires, so you can build a repository of questions, which helps build internal FAQs that can be continually updated as the situation evolves,” she said.Jerome Krausse pushes his mother-in-law in a shopping cart as they evacuate from their home in the Pacific Palisades after a wildfire swept through their neighborhood. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)Equip Your Employees to Help Each OtherEmployees not affected by the disaster may be eager to step up and help their colleagues. HR can point them toward disaster relief organizations and donation funds as well as programs for donating paid time off.E4E Relief, which provides emergency financial relief to workers through their employers and colleagues, is currently working with companies including Disney to get financial grants distributed to those affected by the wildfires, and help their colleagues contribute to the relief efforts.Make Mental Healthcare Readily AvailableMental healthcare resources are key for employees who experience climate disasters, who can suffer lingering effects. Mental health first aid in the form of EAPs or counseling is a quick way to supply help quickly, but employers should also prepare for future needs.Jyoti Mishra, associate director at the University of California Climate Change and Mental Health Council, has studied the effects of wildfires on mental health. The impacts can last for years, according to her research, and those who experience fire disasters have higher levels of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress. “Our work has shown that it’s hard to pay attention to a singular thing when everything around you feels like it’s threatening you.” she said in an interview with CNN.BetterUp’s Anderson recommended that employers train managers to have conversations with their employees about what they need. And Duke University professor of psychiatry Robin Gurwitch told EBN that “employee resource groups, training leadership in psychological first aid, and other types of company-based programs can make a difference in how employees get through and recover from their ordeal.”Remember That Families Are ConnectedEven if your employees aren’t located in the Los Angeles area, they may have family and friends who are. Give your staff the time, space, and resources to help their loved ones. “Although our systems tell us who may be individually impacted, I don’t necessarily know who has a family home in that area, who has grandparents in that area, who has extended relatives in that area, or who has friends in that area,” Anderson said. She taps line managers for this information.Use What You HaveCompanies can use the resources and real estate they already have to support their staff and community members. Gap Inc. worked with DirectRelief to provide free N95 masks at brick-and-mortar stores across Los Angeles County, and Starbucks is handing out free coffee to first responders.Know Your Lane, Respect Your Limits Britt Barney, the head of client success at the financial-wellness platform Northstar, has been working with her team to gather resources for their clients in the wake of the LA fires. In the short-term, she said, people need help filing insurance claims and finding temporary housing. That’s not something her company can help with directly, but because Northstar can see all the benefits available to their clients’ employees, “what we can do is help people understand what benefits they have access to,” whether that’s mental health or short-term leave or backup childcare. Barney said her company is getting ready to provide services down the road, like helping people access their emergency funds, rework their budgets, and find the money they need through assets like company equity. “In the long term, people are going to need a ton of financial help,” she said.Prepare for Next Time“Given recent times, organizations have had to develop a playbook on how they approach these situations,” BetterUp’s Anderson said. Such playbooks and disaster readiness plans are cross-functional projects, requiring HR, communications, legal, and business leaders to ensure employees are kept safe and the business can function.“The evidence supporting corporate leaders’ being proactive, which we see again and again, is the volume of inbound requests just after a disaster has devastated a community,” said Matt Pierce, CEO of E4E Relief. “The Los Angeles wildfires represent the most recent example, but our team fields these inquiries from all over the world regularly.”Anderson reminds employers that these plans have to be tested with tabletop exercises and scenario planning. “Your managers have been empowered and enabled with the right sense of empathy and resiliency,” she said. “You can never fully predict a crisis, but certainly investing in organizational-development resources, planning, and capability-building—so that you’re as prepared as one can be—is increasingly and incredibly important.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a From Day One contributing editor whose work has also appeared in the Economist, the BBC, the Washington Post, and Fast Company. Erin Behrens is an associate editor at From Day One.(Featured photo: A wildfire burns in the hills north of the San Gabriel Valley community of Glendora, Calif., on Jan. 16, where authorities ordered the evacuation of homes. AP Photo by Nick Ut)

By Katie Chambers | January 14, 2025

Developing Leaders Who Can Balance Productivity with Individuality

When Carlos Pardo joined Microsoft 20 years ago as an intern in sales, he knew his ultimate goal was to work in finance. So, he took a gamble and reached out to the CFO, Roberto Palmaka, and asked for a coffee meeting with the note, “I’d love to work for you one day.” Palmaka agreed. One coffee led to two, which led to three, and when a finance opportunity came up, Pardo was top of mind. Now as chief learning officer, Latin America at Microsoft, Pardo is responsible for helping workers navigate their own individual career paths and encouraging leaders to be as generous with their time, expertise, and resources as Palmaka, now a close friend, was to him.In managing a diverse and flexible workforce, today’s leaders need expertise well beyond their technical skills that got them into management roles. How can employers identify and develop leaders with the human insights, confidence and authority to make myriad decisions a day about the people they supervise? How can they set high expectations as well as embracing the individuality of team members? Pardo and other executive panelists tackled these questions at From Day One’s Miami conference.A Culture of Learning and CreativityEncouraging curiosity and professional development can help workers grow in a way that is unique to their own personalities and paths. At Microsoft, this is integral to the corporate values system. “Learning is a celebrated part of Microsoft’s culture and growth mindset,” said moderator Michael Butler, business reporter at the Miami Herald.“We look for everybody to be a learn-it-all versus a know-it-all,” said Pardo. The company promotes this through Learning Days, full days dedicated to professional development at whatever skill an employee chooses. Learning is also integrated into performance management systems, with the goal of having workers articulate lessons learned from both successes and setbacks.Along with encouraging learning, leaders should promote creativity to encourage individuality, in a way that is actionable and sustainable. “Most people think that creativity is about coming up with possibilities. It’s actually not just that. It’s at the intersection of possibility, constraint, and purpose,” said Steven Kowalski, principal, organization & learning evolution at Genentech. He suggests leaders “craft a purpose that’s both meaningful and durable and that has some tension in it.” Embracing Individuality and Fostering InclusionAI can provide transparency and empowerment when it comes to skills matching, career mapping, and professional development, driving employee engagement. Technology can help you understand the skills of current talent or potential candidates and match them with available roles within the organization, says Andrea Shiah, head of talent strategy and transformation at Eightfold. “When you give that transparency, suddenly your employees understand where they can go instead of having to know somebody or [already] understand roles across the organization,” Shiah said. “If you allow your employees to see that, they’re empowered to drive their career in whatever direction they want to go.”The executive panelists spoke about "Developing Leaders Who Can Balance Productivity with Individuality"This kind of transparency also has a marked impact on DEI. “Diversity really rises when it’s no longer who you know, but what you know,” Shiah said. Another way to foster inclusive leadership, says Abbe Partee, VP, head of certified learning and development at DHL Supply, is simple: “Understanding the importance and treating each of our people as humans.” DHL Supply makes this a core tenet of its leadership training program for frontline supervisors. “We’ve got such a diverse group in our workforce today that it’s really important that the people who lead the majority of our population know how to be good leaders and know how to be inclusive. Productivity is great, but that human side is absolutely first,” she said.Today’s multigenerational workforce poses unique challenges and opportunities. “This is the first time we’ve had five generations of people in our workforce,” said Rocki Rockingham, chief HR officer, GE Appliances. “Our frontline managers now need to be retrained and think differently about how they have workers who are Gen Zers or Millennials who want to work differently and who need different things and who have different expectations. When you create a learning environment, it has to be an environment where people learn the way they need to learn.”Supporting Long-term Career DevelopmentThese early career employees are especially invested in career development opportunities, so employers must keep innovating to attract and retain young talent. Partee says DHL Supply offers a platform called Career Marketplace, that shows employees all the training development opportunities and open roles in their area. “We also have extensive talent panels and employee development reviews,” she said. “We spend a lot of time each year talking about people and talking about their careers. How can we help them? How can we sponsor them to make sure that they can have a nice, successful space in DHL?”Genentech offers something similar, called Career Center. “This is founded on two core principles. One is [that] career development is actually part of your job, so you don’t have to sneak there during lunch or after work or before work. And then the career lab is not a place that’s focused on outplacement. It’s about positive internal development,” he said. Career consultants can meet with employees to discuss personalized next steps and guide them through internal learning and development initiatives.Microsoft too, Pardo says, offers internal mentorship programs, both as a way for younger employees to grow and for more senior employees to give back and share their talents. Optional projects are another “really powerful way to allow your employees to learn,” Shiah said, “in addition to just coursework.”Partee notes that junior employees need not just mentorship, but sponsorship. “A sponsor is someone who [speaks well] about you when you’re not in the room,” she said, noting that this is especially crucial for underrepresented groups who might need added support in those behind closed doors conversations. Employee resource groups (ERGs), Rockingham says, help expose diverse employees to those resources and empower them to follow up. “I encourage you [as leaders] to involve yourselves with different groups across your organization, because what it does is it provides exposure on a different level, so that you see people and that people see you,” she said.This all comes down, Kowalski says, to “a spirit of generosity.” Leaders and colleagues should be ready to support other people’s uniquely individual priorities, allowing everyone involved to grow. “To be a sponsor, to be a mentor, to be a coach means, in an organizational context, being generous with your time, with your wisdom, with your intuition, and with your social capital.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, On New Jersey, and CBS New York.

Seeing the Benefits: Why One Total-Rewards Leader Loves the Work

If you work a desk job in the 21st century, it’s not always clear what becomes of the effort you put in. White-collar workers too infrequently get their hands on products, find out who uses their ideas, or see the fruits of their labor. That’s not the case, however, with employee-benefits leaders, according to Kimberly Young.Young is the SVP of total rewards at Amentum, an engineering and technology giant with 53,000 workers across 80 countries. Young has worked in benefits for more than 20 years, having started her career supervising pension plans in the early 2000s. Young got hooked on the profession because she could see the effects of her work–and she found it immensely rewarding. For instance, if programs to manage chronic conditions among employees are effective, those results show up in the better health of the workers, and “if claims are high, you can trace back to the cause and you can see the measures you’ve taken to curtail or increase employee engagement in those programs,” she said.From Day One spoke with Young about the changes she has experienced in the benefits space, how to deal with the barrage of new benefits in the market, and what skills have made her team successful in 2024. Excerpts:Q: Where have you seen the greatest changes in benefits in your career?A: The needs of employees have changed. From maternity-leave benefits to family-leave requirements to GLP-1 drugs, bariatric surgeries, and legislation around women’s rights and abortion care–just a whole plethora of life events that happened to employees. What’s also changed is the role that an employer and their medical benefits play in an individual’s circle of life.Q: Is there an accomplishment you’re most proud of in your career?A: I worked on a panel of leaders who managed all of the benefit programs for a certain group of companies. We had to totally redesign our healthcare platform and put in high-deductible health plans because of the financial position of the company. It happened at a time PPOs were the prevailing plan and high-deductible health plans were uncommon. The company filed for bankruptcy, and we had to reduce cost dramatically, so we went full-replacement HSA to lower cost while providing quality coverage to employees at a time when HSAs were not that popular. It was a difficult transition for employees because they were not used to the high out-of-pocket expenses for medical or pharmacy costs. The employee education and engagement that went along with delivering a critical, difficult message–it was challenging–but at the same time it was rewarding because it worked.Kimberly Young, SVP of total rewards at Amentum, has spoken at From Day One conferences on employee benefits (Company photo)Q: What did you learn from that experience?A: My biggest takeaway was how to deliver a difficult message. I also learned the empathy you need to have for the employee side of the house, understanding what it means when they’re getting news about increases or changes. Not all employees have the same needs, but if you know that about 20% of your population have very critical healthcare needs, you know those changes will impact them the most.Q: Are you a naturally empathetic person?A: I think so, but I also think it happens naturally over time, hearing employees tell you their stories, tell you their situation, tell you the impact the changes have had on them. You come to understand some of the complexities employees deal with when they’re caring for a family member or a spouse who has a very significant medical condition. If you don’t have empathy, you get it. Sometimes we get lost in the day-to-day, the production numbers, everything else, and if we’re not close to it, we don’t really understand the impact that these changes have on individuals.Q: Amentum has had a big year: A merger and going public, plus a new chief people officer as of early December. What have you learned in 2024?A: That you have to be resilient. Stick to your priorities as best you can and tackle one thing at a time. I’ve learned resilience because it can be overwhelming.Q: What is your biggest day-to-day challenge right now?A: Right now, we’re going through an integration as a result of the recent merger, so trying to manage multiple priorities and strategic initiatives that include harmonization of existing programs between both companies that will ultimately enhance the employee experience and provide better health outcomes.Q: What about long-term challenges?A: I’m figuring out how we position ourselves as best-in-class from a benefits perspective. With all the new features out there and the trends that are in the market, you want to make sure you’re implementing programs that have engagement as well as quality outcomes.Q: What is your busiest time of year?A: The busiest time for me is March to June, doing the diligence review to prepare for recommendations for next year’s benefit programs. That time period could include RFP outcome reviews, pricing strategies, condition-management options, or adding and changing existing programs on the menu.Q: I’m sure you’re being pitched on a new platform or benefits idea all the time. How do you decide what’s worthwhile? A: Like most large companies, we work with brokers and consultants who help us do RFPs and wade through affordability and quality. But for benefits leaders, it boils down to what’s happening in your population and what do you need to help solve for your population. I don’t think one-size-fits-all if you’re seeing trends in things like cancer or [musculoskeletal conditions]. You need to bring in programs to help remedy and treat those and drive better outcomes. But cost is always a top concern and while you also want to manage what’s happening in your trends.Q: What are the best new ideas in benefits today?A: I think it’s on the wellness side of things. The challenge has been to get employees engaged in benefits not only when they need them or when they’re sick, but to get them engaged in the benefits when they’re well. So there are all kinds of wellness options out there from mental health to gym memberships to pilates classes.Q: What would have made this year more successful?A: More resources, I suppose. You can always offer new, more engaging benefits to the menu, and you can only do so much with a budget.Q: What made you successful this year? My team made this year a success. It’s not I, it’s we. I have a whole team of people that we collaborate and work with, and we wouldn’t be successful without them.Q: What are the most important skills on your team?A: I think they’re very detailed and analytical, and they’re great problem-solvers. You can present a strategy, but you have to have people who can pick it apart and go down to the details, find the issues, pinpoint the errors, isolate the gaps, and help bring solutions.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Business Insider, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.(Featured illustration by Nuthawut Somsuk/iStock by Getty Images)

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