It's Personal: The Business Case for Caring

By Lorna Borenstein and Laurence Minsky

It's Personal: The Business Case for Caring thoughtfully examines the Human Connection Movement™ in the workplace, which is fueled by a growing desire among employees to feel more connected to one another and as a result, better connected to their jobs. This movement, which is especially important given the challenges of today's new work-from-home environment, has transformed the role of employers into the benefactors of wellbeing. It's Personal: The Business Case for Caring serves as a strategic and tactical guide for company leaders who want to embrace this transformational change, improve employee engagement, and drive business results.

Written by Lorna Borenstein, founder and CEO of the on-demand wellbeing engagement solution Grokker, It's Personal: The Business Case for Caring can be used by leaders to justify why creating a caring environment is a vital corporate strategy -- not just because it's the right thing to do but because it's the smart thing to do. The chapters have been organized to build one from the next, starting with an examination of employees' changing needs and concluding with the practical aspects of managing workforce culture and benefits. In addition to the author's insights — backed by a combination of data and real-world experience — It's Personal: The Business Case for Caring includes testimonials from business leaders at the most innovative employers, showcasing real-world examples of organizational caring in action. These guest perspectives from leaders at companies such as Aetna, Southwest Airlines, and Morningstar, each expound on a topic, key idea, or issue from within the chapter, helping to reinforce the book's unique global perspective.

Designed to help readers understand the context for caring — why now is the time to take a fresh look at the employer/employee relationship — and appreciate leadership's role in not only culture change but in improving the life and work experiences of employees, It's Personal: The Business Case for Caring is at once inspirational, practical, and timely. The book will be appreciated by even the most time-crunched and under-resourced readers who want to "do the right thing" for their employees.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098363765

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PREFACE: MY STORY

Thank you for caring enough to pick up this book. To me, health and wellbeing in all its forms—and truly caring about my employees as whole people with complex lives outside of work—is deeply personal. But it is also the key to success in business today no matter how you feel about it. While the rest of It’s Personal: The Business Case for Caring will detail why caring is key, explain how to create a caring culture, and deliver on the title by showing why it is in the best interests of your business, let’s start in this introduction by seeing how I came to that conclusion over the course of my first twenty-six years in business. You will see how I learned that genuinely caring about your employees is the single most important thing you can do to create a positive culture that will attract and retain top talent in competitive employment markets as well as get people to deliver above and beyond during downturns in your business when you need every ounce of productivity you can muster. What’s more, I also learned that caring for your employees is the most important thing you can do to deliver results.

My health-and-wellness journey started six months after I gave birth to my first child, when my husband and I moved from Chicago to Toronto. I’d been hired by one of the top law firms in Canada to work on large corporate bankruptcy and insolvency matters. It was one of those firms that still had private offices with large mahogany doors that could actually shut. I had a 2,100 minimum billable hour requirement. This meant that I had to bill for 40 hours of working time each and every week, which required more like eight to ten hours per day if I wanted to take any vacation.

To bill this number of hours, one needed to actually put in at least twelve to fourteen hours per day, because not every minute was billable, especially as a younger attorney. After all, while senior partners could charge for thinking time, no one was going to pay for my twenty-six-year old thoughts. Other than on the weekend, the firm also didn’t allow attorneys to work from home, and they emphasized face time as a measure of who was working the hardest. To be with my six-month-old during the work week, I had to choose between spending time with her before I left for the office in the morning and working late, or waking at 5:00 a.m. to leave for the office and then heading out early at 7:00 p.m. to get home by 7:30 p.m. and see her before her bedtime. I much preferred spending time with my daughter in the evening because I loved reading to her and putting her to bed, so I’d try to sneak out of the office at 7:00 p.m. as often as I could.

Since some of the senior partners were well known for swinging by a junior’s office after 8:00 p.m. just to see whether the associate was still at work, sneaking out would involve placing my suit blazer over the back of my desk chair, along with a cup of hot coffee on my desk, and leaving the desk lamp on over an open file with an uncapped highlighter to make it appear to those passing by that I was merely in the restroom or in the library. I began keeping an extra blazer in my office on the hook behind my door along with an extra shirt in a clear plastic dry-cleaning bag so I would always have it handy, which had the extra benefit of giving senior partners the impression that I pulled all-nighters so frequently that I needed a change of clothes in my office at all times. When I asked some of the other more senior attorneys with children how they managed to stay on top of their billable hours and maintain a home life, they told me that I had to learn to live with less sleep and to plan focused family time for Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings, and that way I could sleep in a little on Saturday and catch up on my work on Sunday afternoon.

Clearly, the firm did not maintain a caring culture. In fact, it all seemed frankly crazy to me. I was well paid, but the expectation of me to sacrifice my family life in order to bill outrageous hours in search of an eventual partnership felt off balance. I did not discuss this with my superiors or any partners because I did not want to be fired or considered uncommitted to the firm. Instead, I started quietly looking for another job that would excite me intellectually and allow me to work a ten-hour day and restore sanity to my life. (This approach of the under the radar job search is happening more than ever. I call it the silent revolution—younger employees voting with their feet without warning—which we will explore more deeply in chapter 1.) For me, it worked. I found a new job within three months at Hewlett Packard.

On my very first day of work at HP, a bell rang at 10:00 a.m. throughout the building, sounding vaguely like something from my old high school. Everyone began to slowly file downstairs to the cafeteria, where free bananas, hard-boiled eggs, warm beverages, and other healthy snacks were on display for all to enjoy. I chose a banana and followed the crowd, who were bantering and exchanging pleasantries about their weekends, past the unmanned checkout line and toward a table where three men were seated enjoying coffee. They invited me to sit with them, introduced themselves, and made me feel welcome. After fifteen minutes of chatting, with me mostly listening to their conversation and laughing along, we all got up and returned to our cubicles.

That same day, my boss stopped by my cubicle just before lunchtime and asked if I wanted to join her for a workout at the company gym. I was stunned. My boss, a very senior executive at the company, was inviting me to take an actual lunch break, even though I’d clearly had a midmorning snack break, and do something good for my health and wellbeing with her. She valued her health and mine and wanted to give me permission to take care of myself out in the open. I was elated and felt enormous gratitude for the opportunity to work at a company that cared about me. Not surprisingly, HP had very low voluntary employee turnover, and employees were tremendously proud to work at the company.

I am deeply grateful for my formative years at HP, where I was taught that trust and respect for the individual was paramount, and that open and honest communication was required if I was to succeed. Almost forty years after the company went public, the people-centric objectives established by founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in 1957 in The HP Way,¹ were equally valuable to the pursuit of profit. It made me confident to ask for what I wanted and to speak up when I did not understand or when I disagreed. I believe it made me a better person, a better employee, and ultimately a better leader. Without my belief that voicing my thoughts would inure to my personal benefit at HP, I never would have asked to be seconded to work on a large Software and Services outsourcing project that changed the trajectory of my career. And without my belief that being heard was safe and critical to my success, I would never have reported being sexually harassed by one of the most senior executives at my division and had it handled with exactly the kind of dignity and respect for all concerned that should be the norm everywhere.

The five core values of the HP Way.

I also had the benefit of working for two of the fastest-growing and most iconic tech companies during the formative years of the internet. At eBay I learned the critical importance of community and how, in order for any marketplace to thrive, there must be a careful balance of power shared between the supply and demand forces. The seminal prerequisite to establishing the conditions in which a marketplace can exist and blossom is identifying the motivations of each side. As the first general manager of eBay Canada, I learned that to attract buyers to a new platform, I first needed to attract sellers, and to attract sellers, I needed to first earn their trust by understanding their fears as well as their needs, and then paint a compelling vision of an inspiring future where a nascent platform that began with the trading of Beanie Babies would enable the democratization of retail for all and connect small merchants directly with global buyers who would never step foot into their mom-and-pop brick-and-mortar locations.

A few years later, when entrusted to create a mass retail and specialty channel of new goods to expand eBay’s US market beyond vintage and used merchandise as vice president of eBay’s Apparel, Jewelry, Toys, Home, and Health & Beauty Division, I once again applied this motivations-and-vision construct to discover that addressing a corporate CFO’s need to reduce the costs of excess inventory (in order to satisfy Wall Street analysts) was even more powerful in sparking action than speaking to a CEO’s desire to grow revenue. Employers and employees are the parties in the workforce marketplace, and to attract top talent and retain them, we first need to understand them—both their motivations and their struggles—so that we can paint a compelling vision where they can thrive as whole people. A fair paycheck is simply not enough to satisfy today’s employee; those days are over. For your business to succeed, you now need to make your individual employees feel authentically cared for. Because if you don’t, they will leave you at the drop of a hat for someone who does.

At Yahoo! I got my first taste of the wonder that is subscription revenue while running the global online dating business Yahoo! Personals. I also had my first experience of reporting to a boss who made me feel great every time I saw him. This was back in 2004, when online dating still had a very big stigma attached to it, and everyone expected to meet their significant others IRL. The challenge was that people were struggling to find their soul mates, and the promise was that apps would remove the randomness of meeting someone by chance and put the relationship seeker in charge with proactive digital dating tools and the all-important digital photo. This too was a marketplace, but instead of Beanie Babies, people were hunting for love, companionship, and a happily ever after.

What I learned from the outset at Yahoo! was that people mattered, work colleagues were friends, and teamwork was rewarded while sharp elbows were not. At Yahoo!, if you were loyal and drank the cultural Kool-Aid like I did, you were said to bleed purple, the color of our famous logo. That was me. I could not have anticipated how much the unconditional positive regard for and from my boss and coworkers motivated me. My second month on the job, I was sitting at my desk at 6:00 p.m. reviewing some financials when my desk phone began to ring. It was my boss, COO Dan Rosensweig. I was filled with an instant and ominous sense that I must have done something wrong. I answered the phone expecting the worst, and instead of presenting me with a problem or criticism, he told me what a great job I was doing and how impressed he was by my first few weeks at the company. I was relieved—elated, in fact—and grateful for his specific examples of things I had done well. He even asked me how my kids were doing and remembered their names and ages. This may seem like a small detail to you, but in that moment, he earned my loyalty, and I worked as hard as I ever have to deliver results for him.

In the months and years that ensued, when new entrants were attacking us from all fronts, and we needed to constantly innovate in order to survive, I gave it my all. This was easier to do within the confines of my Personals P&L than elsewhere in the company because I had direct control of all of the resources that I needed to shape the user experience, direct product and engineering, and market and advertise the service. But what I learned was that because my manager was someone whom I felt very connected to on a personal level, I did not want to let him down. Even when faced with corporate headwinds that necessitated across-the-board headcount freezes and budget cuts, I was prepared to give it my all and fight for Yahoo!.

The second lesson I learned at Yahoo! wasn’t until after I took on the role of vice president of marketing and product marketing for the massive Search & Marketplace business. In Search, Google was the eight-hundred-pound gorilla with statistically proven algorithmic search superiority and ad relevance. When I first met Qi Lu, the head of Engineering for Yahoo! Search, a brilliant man who managed to get to work by 4:00 a.m. daily and never seemed tired, he explained to me that contrary to popular belief, Yahoo!’s search results were in fact equal to or better than Google’s. I did not doubt his claims, but my team’s marketing research showed that consumer perception of Yahoo! Search placed it as a clearly inferior experience to Google search. So how could both these assertions be true? If the quality is the same, how could the consumer perception be so skewed against Yahoo!? After more primary research, I was able to ascertain that while the natural search results (these are the bulk of search results that are shown down the middle of search results pages) of Yahoo! were at parity with Google’s, the paid ads that appeared along the right rail on Google’s search results pages and along the very top and the right rail of Yahoo! Search results pages were ranked by relevance on Google but ranked by highest bidding advertiser on Yahoo!.

In other words, the Yahoo! paid search results were far less relevant to the consumer’s search query than Google’s paid search results, and consumers did not distinguish between the paid and the natural search results. Therefore, to a consumer, Google search was perceived as much more relevant based on total page relevance. The brilliant Yahoo! Search engineering team had spent months improving the search algorithms to ensure that the quality of search results was as good or better than Google. Unfortunately, without understanding the perception of reality by the consumer, the as-good or better Yahoo! Search results were viewed as an inferior product to Google.

The lesson I took from Yahoo! Search was that the facts are overrated; only the user experience and user perception matters. If your employees don’t feel that you care about them or don’t feel that you offer sufficient opportunity for career advancement, then it doesn’t matter what facts you point to, or how hard you try to explain that the personal development plans you’ve instituted are evidence of your serious interest in career development. In order to convince them that you care and are committed to development, you need the cultural equivalent of total page relevance. You can’t argue your way into being an employer of choice. Instead you need to earn it and make sure you are in touch with how your employees are feeling about you. After all, we all know who won the search wars.

After Yahoo!, I accepted a role as president of what was at the time the largest publicly traded online real estate company, Move Inc. My experience being a Section 16 officer at Move Inc. taught me a lot about corporate governance, managing investor relations, setting expectations with the Street during a turnaround, Sarbanes Oxley compliance, dealing with activist shareholders, and the critical importance of the safe harbor clause when making forward-looking statements. But most importantly of all, the experience led me to a life-affirming pre-midlife crisis that resulted in my resigning and ultimately founding my own holistic wellbeing company. The company was going through the painful aftermath of the failure of the mortgage-backed securities market and the ensuing economic havoc of the housing market crash in 2008. I was plugging away at work but feeling burned out, uninspired, and trapped. A girlfriend asked me over coffee if I ever considered resigning. I laughed out loud at the question. Quitting? I had never quit at anything in my entire life. I’m the daughter of immigrants who taught me the value of hard work and perseverance, and the all-important value of the financial security that comes from achievement. Yes, I was unhappy, and, yes, I was going to work with a pit in my stomach as I helped the board of directors find a new CEO and replace many of the executive leaders that were resisting the turnaround. But the thought of quitting had literally never crossed my mind.

Then my girlfriend asked me the question that changed my life: So, what are you afraid of? Initially I scoffed at that, reflexively saying I wasn’t afraid of anything but that I owed a duty to my employees and shareholders and board. But as I reflected upon the question more thoughtfully, I began to realize that indeed I was afraid of something, something so embarrassing that I am still a little ashamed to admit it today: I was afraid of what people would think. After all the professional and financial success I had objectively earned, I was afraid that if I left my job and had no title, no status, no RSUs, no invitation to the Fortune Most Powerful Women’s Conference, that I would no longer be worthy. Fundamentally—and this took years of therapy to excavate—I was afraid that I was not loveable or worthy without achievement to prove it. This realization is what led me to resign and to very intentionally do so without a bunch of board of directorships lined up and without an EIR gig or new CEO role in the wings. I needed to purge my soul of the need to be someone and instead focus on just being me and seeing if that was enough. So, I changed my LinkedIn profile to chief family travel officer and told all the VCs and executive recruiters that I was taking a year off and not to call me or email me until that time was over. I honestly didn’t trust myself to resist their calls and outreach and figured this was the surest way to give myself the time to free myself of the need to be someone and prove to myself that I had intrinsic value just because I am me. I traded in competitive half-ironman distance triathlons for yoga, I spent months learning how to be still, and I took my kids out of school for one to three months at a time and traveled around the world making up for lost time. In the end, I took off almost three years and transformed my fear of not being intrinsically worthy into the knowledge that while I’m not for everyone, the people I love love me for who I am and not for what I am or what I can do for them.

When we traveled, I didn’t bring a nanny or have babysitters. Instead, I immersed myself in being with them. I even homeschooled my youngest daughter while traveling through southern China and loved every moment. What I did not love, was the reality that struck me while caring for my kids on the road. You see, back when I was working, I had childcare on demand, so I could go to the gym at 5:15 a.m. and be back for breakfast or go train with my triathlon team after work and come home to a prepared dinner and bathed kids. But you know what you don’t have time for when you are taking care of kids in a hands-on way with no one to help? You don’t have time to take care of yourself. I couldn’t go to the gym or for a run or even make time to meditate or find healthy recipes to cook.

For the first time in my adult life, I felt like I had no time to care for my physical or emotional health, and I needed to do something about it. So, I took out my first-generation iPad and began searching for long-form video content to help me take care of myself. This was back in 2011, and there was very little premium video online. All I was finding were cats on skateboards, poor-quality videos of some woman in her living room trying to show me how to do a squat, and a few niche sites that had a very limited amount of HD fitness video classes. I was so frustrated. I wanted expert-led, premium video in a wide variety of topics to help me eat better, sleep better, move more, and stay flexible and centered, and I wanted to not feel so isolated and alone. I wanted community at the core and to feel inspired and uplifted. What I wanted did not exist. So, I did what any reasonable person would do: I went for a walk on the beach and yelled at my husband about how YouTube was broken and needed to begin producing long-form, premium wellbeing video content as a subscription to help people like me stay happy and fit.

While David agreed this seemed like a big opportunity, he didn’t think it was something that would interest YouTube. Turned out he was right, so I came out of retirement and started Grokker in 2012 because of my personal need for expert-led on-demand video with community at its core to help me be a better me. But before founding the company, I decided upon two nonnegotiables if I were to do it: 1) I had to feel so strongly about the need for the business that I couldn’t not do it, and that I would do it even if the business never turned a profit, even if it failed commercially. Simply put, I had to feel that creating it was something I just had to do, and that success would be in the journey rather than the destination. 2) I would only do it if I could create a culture in which I could bring my whole self to work, and where those around me felt the same. I had to create a uniquely human workplace that felt and was personal: where we emphasized fun and freedom, where we cared for one another as whole people, and where we shared our real-life struggles and supported one another because we cared about each other. I thought creating this culture would be the most difficult part of the business plan. But to my surprise and delight, more than eight years later, I work at a company that helps employers seamlessly integrate wellbeing into the lives of busy employees, and in a culture that welcomes the personal and makes every individual feel valued and connected while delivering stunning results.

I have learned that I cannot enjoy life nor live in integrity with myself if I am afraid of what others might think of me. And I have learned that creating a culture of caring, where people can show up as themselves and count on the support of others, is the single most important thing I can do as a CEO to secure the performance of my team and drive results at my company. And now, it seems that CEOs globally are awakening to the reality that caring for their employees is a business imperative. And that is why I am writing this book: because the time has come for us in the C-suite to have the courage and conviction to create a new kind of workplace and be secure in knowing that to deliver results we must care about the wellbeing of our employees, period. This book is the rallying cry to leaders who will be able to point to the book and the data in it to justify why creating a caring environment is corporate strategy and why culture matters most—not just because it is the right thing to do but because it is the smart thing to do.

I knew that I had satisfied the first criterion when I was moved to start Grokker with our mission to enable physical, social, and emotional wellbeing. In fact, the word grok literally means to soak in knowledge from another being so profoundly that you become one with them and changed by the interaction.² To be a Grokker is to be transformed by connection. I was less confident that I’d be able to achieve the second. Luckily, with a very clear vision of the cultural true north I wanted to work in and the careful selection of a founding team who shared this vision, I have had the unique pleasure of working in a high-performance environment that allows me and every other Grokker to be themselves and to take care of themselves. In 2020 Grokker was named a Fortune 100 Best Workplace. And now, the confluence of millennials and Gen Z entering the workforce, trends in health and wellbeing, and the increase in two-income families have generated a movement where employees are in the driver’s seat and are demanding much more than a fair paycheck to attract and retain them. For the first time, there is a corporate imperative to create humane places of work that support employees’ whole