The past two years have been a challenge for everyone, not just physically, but also mentally. Many people’s lives look a lot different than they did two years ago, increasing the need for mental health support and assistance. To highlight some of the programs and benefits that Aon has implemented to promote colleagues’ mental health and wellbeing, this week’s host, Diversity Solutions Senior Leader of Global Spend Management Shelly Brown welcomes Chief Culture Officer Kelli Clark and Deputy Chief People Officer Anthony Scattone. Together, they discuss best practices for supporting colleagues in a virtual environment and some of the benefits of Aon’s multi-dimensional wellbeing programs.
The past two years have been a challenge for everyone, not just physically, but also mentally. Many people’s lives look a lot different than they did two years ago, increasing the need for mental health support and assistance. To highlight some of the programs and benefits that Aon has implemented to promote colleagues’ mental health and wellbeing, this week’s host, Diversity Solutions Senior Leader of Global Spend Management Shelly Brown welcomes Chief Culture Officer Kelli Clark and Deputy Chief People Officer Anthony Scattone. Together, they discuss best practices for supporting colleagues in a virtual environment and some of the benefits of Aon’s multi-dimensional wellbeing programs.
Additional Resources:
Ep 6: On Aon’s 2021 Global Wellbeing Survey with Stephanie Pronk
The One Brief: The Pandemic Has Left Us All Burned-Out — Here’s How Employers Can Help
The One Brief: Why Workforce Wellbeing is Vital to Company Performance
Tweetables:
“Pandemic or not, a priority is driving and establishing connections across the team.” — Kelli Clark
“Real people connections… are an overall contribution to our sense of wellbeing.” — Anthony Scattone
“To a greater and greater extent, we recognize the importance of the emotional and mental health aspect of employee wellbeing.” — Anthony Scattone
Voiceover:
Welcome to “On Aon,” a podcast featuring conversations between colleagues on, well, Aon. This week, we hear from Kelli Clark and Anthony Scattone around wellbeing at Aon. And now, this week’s host, Shelly Brown.
Shelly Brown:
Hello. My name is Shelly Brown, and I've been a colleague at Aon for five years, leading Aon Diversity Solutions, our strategy engaging small and diverse partnerships across the enterprise. And it's my pleasure to welcome Kelli Clark, Aon's Chief Cultural Officer and Anthony Scatton. Anthony is Aon's Deputy Chief People Officer. Kelli has been a colleague of the firm for three years and has 20 years of experience leading culture, change, and communication strategies and initiatives across a variety of industries. She's a storyteller and a strategist, and she uses her communication ability and passion for people to create thriving team cultures, keeping colleagues engaged, informed, and excited about their work. She is also an Executive Advisor of C-suite leaders. Kelli, welcome. Thank you for joining.
Shelly Brown:
Anthony. Anthony Scatton has been with Aon since 2019. He joined the firm as the Global Head of Total Rewards. He was previously the head of Total Rewards for United Airlines, and prior to that spent 18 years leading teams and serving large market clients and the retirement benefits consulting businesses of Willis Towers Watson and Marsh & McLennan. Kelli and Anthony, thank you both for being here today. I do appreciate your time and your contribution to the discussion ahead. Before we get started, I want to jump in with a warm up question for you. We're nearly two years into the pandemic, how are you both doing? How are you coping personally with the challenges that we are all facing during these times? Anthony, we'll start it off with you.
Anthony Scattone:
Hey, Shelly, thank you so much for having me here today. It's great to be part of this chat with you. On your question, how am I doing? Depends on the day, most days, pretty darn well, fortunately, but there are those days where they could be better. Overall I'd say we're coping. We miss the things that we used to be able to do 24 months ago, in particular being in the physical presence of others, like there's no substitute for it. So I miss the energy that you derive from those interactions. And I really, really miss traveling both professionally and personally. Those are the huge things that I miss. That said, we're adaptable creatures and we are adapting to these times. And so it's been pretty good.
Anthony Scattone:
We've been fortunate to stay healthy this whole time and be able to adapt from a work perspective pretty well. And if you had asked me two years ago like, "Could you work in this environment where you're virtual all the time?" I would've said, "Absolutely not, not for me. Can't even do one day a week." And here I am five days a week, sometimes six. Five days a week, totally virtual and I actually prefer it. So overall I think that this experience has taught me a lot. So I guess I'm coping.
Shelly Brown:
Anthony, I'm glad to hear you're doing well. Kelli, same question for you. How are you doing?
Kelli Clark:
Thank you, Shelly. It's great to be here. And Anthony, always great to be with you. Similar to Anthony, I would say either the pandemic has made me totally crazy or maybe creative. But in all seriousness, I have two young kids. And so much of the time during the pandemic for our family has been spent keeping them safe. We've also waited while loved ones have been diagnosed with and endured COVID and know how scary and heartbreaking it can be. And so you add that onto the day to day decisions where everything becomes a risk assessment and it sure is an interesting time. In our family, we've been focused on a lot of the things that Anthony mentioned, like trying to bring meaning in new ways. And so on the personal side, while we haven't felt comfortable traveling and oh my gosh, Anthony, I cannot wait to get back to traveling again.
Kelli Clark:
We've tried to create some fun experiences at home. And so whether we've been or not, you'll have to ask our kids, but we've created camp Clark. So this summer we had a morning wake up song, camp t-shirts, arts and crafts, and a couple fun spirited competitions. And the real craziness is trying to take advantage of the frigid Chicago temperatures. And so we put an ice rink in our backyard and it's proven to be more fun than we imagined.
Anthony Scattone:
That's so fun, Kelli, I'm jealous.
Kelli Clark:
You're welcome to come over anytime.
Shelly Brown:
Very nice. Got a hockey player here, so we'll put the skates on and we'll stop by.
Kelli Clark:
It sounds like we need a competition over here, a hockey competition.
Shelly Brown:
Well, thank you both for sharing. Let's jump into the business at hand. Related to our warmup question, what changes have you both made with how you work with your teams and how you help them manage the ongoing challenges of a pandemic world? Kelli, why don't you kick us off and then Anthony?
Kelli Clark:
Sure. Really I would start by saying it's really hard to imagine that and believe really that we're entering our third year of working like this. And so as I was thinking about this question, for me, pandemic or not a priority is driving and establishing connection across the team. And so I feel strongly about and work really hard to ensure that the team is connected to each other and connected to their work. And we've done a number of things to really do this in a virtual world. So we've done things like everybody has done, the virtual happy hours, the virtual lunches, the virtual get to know you sessions, but we've also leveraged technology to create these virtual water cooler connections where colleagues get paired randomly. They've volunteered to participate and then they get a get to know you question. And so that sparked some interesting discussions across the team and we've even done a virtual cooking class together.
Kelli Clark:
But I've also tried to do this in terms of connection to work. And so we've been successful at things like virtual strategy planning and brainstorming session. We share a lot of thought leadership with each other. The team has gotten comfortable sharing videos that they've seen or articles and podcasts. So they've done a really great job of that, but we've also tried to use this time to strengthen some skills that maybe we brushed past in our former lives. Things like doing our work in places where we get the most creativity or inspiration or where we need to spend our time that day, where it makes sense, building our schedules to manage the demands of our personal lives while also delivering for our clients.
Kelli Clark:
And so there's been some up skilling in that area, and also along the lines of being planful about the time off that we take really focusing on what we need for our overall wellbeing. And then how do we as a team come together to support each other to cover while people are out to give people true time away? So things like that are just a few of the things that I've been doing on my team.
Shelly Brown:
Kelli, thank you. Anthony, same question for you. What are you doing differently at work these days?
Anthony Scattone:
Yeah, thanks, Shelly. I'm so impressed by all that Kelli has done and I'm part beneficiary of the work that she's doing. So I'm really grateful there. For me it's been really all about flexibility and then role modeling what that flexibility means for the team and I genuinely support it. So when I step back, I think about this as work and life, work life balance, really work life integration. These things have never been woven together. So seamlessly as they are today, and they're really inseparable in this world, you're working where you live, where you sleep. So for me the focus has been, how do I be as flexible as possible to accommodate the team having these things together and giving them the space to manage that balance or that integration in the way that serves them best?
Anthony Scattone:
Does it mean that you have to step away during the traditional work day in order to take care of a family allegation or an appointment or run an errand, do laundry, for example? Or on topic, like prioritizing your wellbeing, taking a moment away just for your mental sanity or for a run and letting people do that and being completely okay with it. That to me is the number one thing. I can do that safely because I know that we're all for the same reason. We're driven by the same purpose, we have the benefit of being supporters of our colleagues. We feel passionately about that the entire team does. And so we can do this safely because we know that at the end of the day, we're going to find a way to give our absolute best to our colleagues while still taking care of ourselves and our other parts of our lives.
Anthony Scattone:
And then trying to make it real with my own experiences. So how do I show up in meetings or not show up in meetings as the case may be to make it real for them that it's okay. So try to take real time away from work. As Kelli said, when she was going to get off a video, how do I take this beating on a phone call and actually have more focused on walking around the neighborhood while doing myself some good in burning calories? Checking in on people at the start of a meeting or a one-on-one. What's going on this weekend? How's your family doing? How's your dad, so on and so forth? Like these are the real people connections that I think just help us connect on an emotional level. And it's a contribution to our overall sense of belonging and wellbeing. So that's where my focus has been, but I'm looking forward to hearing some tips from not only from Kelli, but from you, Shelly.
Shelly Brown:
Well, Kelli and Anthony, thank you both for sharing. I got some good ideas from you there. Scratch out those in my notes here and see if we can put them into practice. One thing that we do on our team is when we have internal team meetings, we do video optional, give yourself a break. A lot of times we're talking to internal and external clients, and you always feel that need to connect and be on if you will, or only put air quotes around on quite fittingly on Aon podcast. But giving yourself a break there gives you a chance to stay comfortable, stay confident and be your best self as you as you continue to go about the work ahead.
Kelli Clark:
Shelly, can I jump in for a second, because Anthony, actually you bring up a good point. It's making me remember, actually we had a meeting one time and you had sent me a message and said, "I'm going to do this as a walking meeting. So lace up if you're game to do it with me." And then you walked to the lake and showed me a picture of the lake, which actually was beneficial for me because I miss seeing the lake every day. And so it's really funny how something that can be beneficial for you is also something that gives life and makes somebody else's day just a little bit more interesting, gives them a little bit of a perspective that they might not have seen. So I think your role modeling, Anthony, that exact-
Anthony Scattone:
I remember that one.
Shelly Brown:
Okay. So you're both city dwellers. I live in the burbs, that notion of a walking meeting yet, that's pretty cool. I'm going to have to adopt that. Thank you both for sharing there and the chance to get a look at Lake Michigan at any time, certainly appreciated. You're a hearty soul to brave the winter weather in Chicago though. So Anthony, let me ask you our next question. Thinking about supporting in our colleagues and let's build on that. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the programs that Aon is offering to their colleagues to help them from an overall wellbeing perspective?
Anthony Scattone:
Yeah, really happy to share that, Shelly. Just starting out real high level, the way we think about wellbeing is it's multidimensional. It's about not only the physical wellbeing of a colleague, which is the traditional sense that most firms have focused on over time, but to a greater and greater extent, we recognize the importance of the emotional or mental health aspect of it, the financial dimension and the social interactions component of it. And it's all of these things together on an integrated basis that really serve up one's wellbeing, support their wellbeing. And so what we try to do as a firm is we try to look at it with all of these dimensions and put in programs and support mechanisms that kind of attack each of the dimensions, recognizing that people have different needs at different points along the journey, and sometimes it's financial and sometimes it's emotional and so on.
Anthony Scattone:
And the way we do it as a global firm, because every country is so unique in terms of what the social security system provides, or what the typical practices are, what the culture is, we have a lot of different programs in a lot of different markets. So it's really, really diverse in that way. But there's a few I'd like to highlight today while we're together, because they're really interesting to me. And one of the biggest, our most interesting ones on my list is what we've been doing with time off to support wellbeing. One program we've introduced during pandemic was that the idea of a Global Holiday and the idea of a Global Holiday was not just to give people time off because you have time off. The real power of the Global Holiday was the global part.
Anthony Scattone:
And the way I think about it is we're creating a program where we're basically shutting down the firm for a day or two days or whatever the case may be when we declare a global holiday so that when people take that day or two days off, they come back to a relatively empty email box and they're not spending the first three hours of the day catching up, or even worse sitting there the night before with their family dreading the email log that they're going to walk into. They can legitimately take the day off, relax, not worry about the world racing past them and come back and everybody starts fresh on that next day. That's to me been a huge gift that I've enjoyed receiving.
Anthony Scattone:
And I think many of our colleagues have really appreciated and the program has been pretty successful from what I can tell. Another example of the time off space is how we are supporting the physical wellbeing of colleagues in terms of, for those who've chosen to get vaccinated, we offer 16 hours of a paid time off for a colleague to get that vaccination to recover for many side effects, et cetera. Just another way to support them, easy to do for us, just to take away barriers from people taking care of themselves, because we really feel strongly that it's the right thing to do to take care of yourself. It makes us all better.
Anthony Scattone:
And then another program I'd like to think through or talk about today is a new program for us in North America, but not a new program to Aon is something called Mental Health First Aid. This is getting right at the heart of that emotional wellbeing, recognizing that it's okay to not be okay. You have those days where you're just under a lot of duress and stress, or in some cases you have more days like that than we all want. And so how do we use this wide net of colleagues interacting with each other to flag where we might need to provide some more support or help a colleague navigate to the right support? And mental health first aid is a program that helps us do that. We've had in Australia and the UK for a while, it's been super successful. We're rolling it in North America and hoping to take it around the world where it fits, the markets that it fits best.
Anthony Scattone:
But I'm really, really proud that we're doing things like this and communicating and trying to destigmatize mental health concerns so that we can really get past them and be more productive and better connected as colleagues and people. And finally, as a reward person, I can't help but throw out one more program on the financial side of wellbeing, and that is the Aon United Growth Ownership Plan that we introduced a few months ago. And while it is a stock based program that some people may think of as compensatory, it certainly helps us align with shareholders and benefit and the growth that we create together.
Anthony Scattone:
So all of those are laudable aspects of the program, but it is also a financial wellbeing program. And part of the thinking that went into the program was, what can we do to make us all better consumers or financial information, better stewards of the resources that we have for ourselves and our families as we prepare for big moments in life? Moments that matter, weddings, buying a car, buying a house, retiring, which I look forward to doing sometime in the not distant future. A program like that helps us get a better sense of how financial markets work, what does the stock market operate, just makes the better consumers that information and it makes us more powerful. And so that's a really cool program that you don't think of as a wellbeing program, but it's absolutely intended to be part of a wellbeing story. So I've been rambling on too long on that, Shelly, but it's such a fun topic for me and I'm just excited to share it with everybody listening.
Shelly Brown:
Anthony, you hit on some really fantastic experiences there. The global holiday has been a welcome treat. So just a little feedback for you and the other stakeholders around the table, and I'm particularly pleased about the growth ownership plan, enabling colleagues to continue to share in the success of our journey in the firm. Thinking ahead, I'm also interested in learning a little bit more. Kelli, this is for you about your perspectives on the Global United in Kindness Xhallenge that Aon launched last year. Tell us a little bit about what it is and tell us a little bit about its why, why was it created and how is it continuing to thrive today?
Kelli Clark:
Sure. And I must say, Anthony listening to just you hit on a couple of the programs that we rolled out this year, I say this all the time, but I really am proud of how we have invested in our colleagues, how we've up for each other. And while none of us would've expected to be living through our current reality, it is such a gift to be part of a firm who puts colleagues first in. As we continue to think about 2022 and how we're going to focus on delivering for our colleagues, these things are things I'm really proud of and grateful that we can build and that we can experience as colleagues at Aon.
Kelli Clark:
Shelly, I'm glad you mentioned the United in Kindness Challenge. This was actually a personal favorite for me this year. And as Anthony mentioned, we run a variety of campaigns and programs. And so this was one that the team wanted to do for some time. The idea is pretty simple, but the impact is pretty profound actually. And so it's based on this concept that when we focus on being kind to ourselves, to each other, to our communities and to our world, it increases and improves our mental and emotional health. And so the campaign was essentially a challenge for colleagues to just log acts of kindness that they saw, that they did, that they witnessed, or that they experienced for a period of time.
Kelli Clark:
And throughout the campaign, Aon colleagues logged more than 5,000 acts of kindness all over the world, and you could go into a little interactive map and click on the stories. And maybe if I can just share a personal story real quick, actually while the campaign was running, I woke up one morning to an email from one of my neighbors who was letting our community block know that their pride flag had been ripped off of their house during the night. And so they were asking for the neighbors to be watchful and just letting everybody know what had happened. And almost instantly, our neighbors started replying to the email with notes of support and condolence and offering to allyship. And one neighbor replied and said, "You know what, I'm going to go get my pride flag and I'm going to hang it up. And if anybody wants one, I'm going to go buy some today and I'll drop them off at your house."
Kelli Clark:
And all the neighbors started replying and responding. And before the end of the week, our street was lined with these beautiful rainbow flags just flying on every house. And as a family who is part of the LGBTQ community, watching our neighbors show up in support and kindness and allyship left a personal mark on our family that we won't forget. And my daughter who watched the whole thing happened really couldn't believe her eyes. She got her roller blades out and roller blade up and down the street and counted the number of flags she saw, told all of her friends.
Kelli Clark:
And so the idea behind this campaign was just that this was my neighbors and I just watched it happen before my eyes, but the United in Kindness campaign was an opportunity for our colleagues to just share stories like this with each other. They're heartwarming, it reminds us of the good in the world and it gives us an opportunity to share some of that good with each other. So this year the team is focusing on gratitude, but again sharing these acts of kindness help boost everyone's spirits just a little bit more.
Anthony Scattone:
That's so cool, Kelli. What a great story.
Shelly Brown:
Indeed. Not only through your experience, but also that of your family and your child. A way to model the change we want to see in the world. Really appreciate you sharing that story.
Voiceover:
This has been a conversation “On Aon” and wellbeing. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this week’s episode, tune in in two weeks for a discussion on Aon's early careers program. To learn more about Aon, its colleagues, solutions and news, check out our show notes, and visit our website at Aon dot com.