Working Well: Gabriella Rosen Of Energizing Habits On How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental, Emotional, Social, Physical & Financial Wellness
An Interview with Karen Mangia
How connected does your workforce feel to the company’s positive impact on the world?
The pandemic pause brought us to a moment of collective reckoning about what it means to live well and to work well. As a result, employees are sending employers an urgent signal that they are no longer willing to choose one — life or work — at the cost of the other. Working from home brought life literally into our work. And as the world now goes hybrid, employees are drawing firmer boundaries about how much of their work comes into their life. Where does this leave employers? And which perspectives and programs contribute most to progress? In our newest interview series, Working Well: How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental, Emotional, Social, Physical & Financial Wellness, we are talking to successful executives, entrepreneurs, managers, leaders, and thought leaders across all industries to share ideas about how to shift company cultures in light of this new expectation. We’re discovering strategies and steps employers and employees can take together to live well and to work well.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Gabriella Rosen.
Gabriella Rosen is the founder of Energizing Habits, a wellness company that energizes people in their work and personal lives.
She knows how hard it is to keep good energy throughout the day, as she struggles with a chemical imbalance that causes energy depletion.
Her challenges led her to discover energizing habits, which fueled her to become the youngest eight-figure seller globally at Spotify.
She has since branched off to pursue her passion to bring Energizing Habits to all. Her clients now include Pinterest, OfferUp, NBCU, and individuals seeking personalized coaching.
Thank you for making time to visit with us about the topic of our time. Our readers would like to get to know you better. Tell us about a formative experience that prompted you to change your relationship with work and how work shows up in your life.
When I started my career at Spotify, I was working 80-hour weeks and spending my weekends in the office. After 2-years of working this way I found myself burnt out and sick of leaving my days feeling completely drained and depleted.
There had to be a better way to energize than coffee and my daily pep talk.
I started finding unique, quick, and sustainable ways to energize myself throughout the day.
I didn’t have time to leave my desk during the day so they needed to be things I could do sitting at my desk and they needed to produce an effect quickly — and effectively. And it worked — not only did these Energizing Habits give me extra energy, they boosted my mood and made me more productive.
It also started catching on for others. This is when the seed of wellness started taking root and spreading beyond me.
Integrating wellness amplified work and employees were demanding help with it.
Harvard Business Review predicts that wellness will become the newest metric employers will use to analyze and to assess their employees’ mental, physical and financial health. How does your organization define wellness, and how does your organization measure wellness?
We measure wellness through regular 1:1 calls with our individual coaching clients as well as through surveys for our corporate clients.
Based on your experience or research, how do you correlate and quantify the impact of a well workforce on your organization’s productivity and profitability?
The average employee is only productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes a day, according to inc.
We are seeing up to a 25% increase in productivity through Energizing Habits, which means an extra 45 minutes of productivity per day. This productivity can be tied directly to the bottom line.
Even though most leaders have good intentions when it comes to employee wellness, programs that require funding are beholden to business cases like any other initiative. The World Health Organization estimates for every $1 invested into treatment for common mental health disorders, there is a return of $4 in improved health and productivity. That sounds like a great ROI. And, yet many employers struggle to fund wellness programs that seem to come “at the cost of the business.” What advice do you have to offer to other organizations and leaders who feel stuck between intention and impact?
I feel that creating sustainable change takes time, so it’s important to invest in programs with both short-term and long-term impacts and to be prepared to play the long game with mental health because it’s only increasing in importance. Also, prioritizing mental health is a talent magnet that attracts more talent to your company. As a Gen Z myself, who speaks on the topic, I can say it’s extremely important to this generation and can be a make or break factor when deciding where to work.
Speaking of money matters, a recent Gallup study reveals employees of all generations rank wellbeing as one of their top three employer search criteria. How are you incorporating wellness programs into your talent recruitment and hiring processes?
As a startup, I don’t have a full recruitment process yet, but I do work with corporate partners on helping them attract and understand Gen Z. One simple yet powerful tip is changing the term, “health benefits”, to” “mental health benefits”, so you can signal to talent that you prioritize mental wellness.
We’ve all heard of the four-day work week, unlimited PTO, mental health days, and on demand mental health services. What innovative new programs and pilots are you launching to address employee wellness? And, what are you discovering? We would benefit from an example in each of these areas.
Employees often leave personal development programs feeling great but without the tools to implement what they learned. One of the things I’ve been working on with employers is tackling the six weakest points of an employee’s day where engagement typically falls off. As a solution, I’ve helped implement energizing habits to keep energy and productivity high throughout the day.
The weakest six points are:
- Start of the day
- Pre-meeting
- Lunch-time
- 2–3 pm slump
- Wrapping up the day
- Flooded moment
We found the best results come from this idea of “creating effortless energy”, which means we focus on quick 60-second actions that employees can do while sitting down.
The key is having clear guidance so people can energize themselves with little effort on their part.
Can you please tell us more about a couple of specific ways workplaces would benefit from investing in your ideas above to improve employee wellness?
Yes — I love sharing this incredible study I read about in the book When, by Daniel Pink. Veterans Health Administration implemented “vigilance breaks”, which are essentially about taking quick breaks to review what’s important, and it reduced surgical mortality rates by an incredible 18%! Better performance, which in the study was about saving lives (!), comes from — and leads to — better employee wellness.
How are you reskilling leaders in your organization to support a “Work Well” culture?
I help employers understand that there are small hacks that employees can implement throughout the day to increase their wellness — and productivity. I’ve found that it takes only an hour a month to teach employees these tools, which is such a small amount of time to invest to move the needle in support of a “Work Well” culture.
Ideas take time to implement. What is one small step every individual, team or organization can take to get started on these ideas — to get well?
Adding an element of nature into your morning meetings, even if it’s just a YouTube video of a bear catching salmon in Alaska. Just simply viewing nature is known to decrease stress and improve circulation, which leads to better wellness.
What are your “Top 5 Trends To Track In the Future of Workplace Wellness?”
- How energized are your teams?
- How much multi-generational synergy do you have?
- How much are you helping employees with their desired upskilling?
- How much psychological safety do you have? (based on Google’s multi-year study on “psychological safety” being the key factor in high-performing teams)
- How connected does your workforce feel to the company’s positive impact on the world?
What is your greatest source of optimism about the future of workplace wellness?
It is only just starting! Because of this, employees will feel much better at work in the future. As the workplace evolves and more companies see the return on investment from incorporating wellness into their workplace there will be many models that fit different people. The more wellness programs there are the more optimized everything will become over time, and the future of work will be better for everyone!
Our readers often like to continue the conversation with our featured interviewees. How can they best connect with you and stay current on what you’re discovering?
I’d love to hear from readers!
Email: gabriella@gabriellaom.com
Website: energizinghabits.com
Thank you for sharing your insights and predictions. We appreciate the gift of your time and wish you continued success and wellness.
About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success from Anywhere and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Working Well: Gabriella Rosen Of Energizing Habits On How Companies Are Creating Cultures That… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.