Working Well: Rachel Yarcony Of myAir On How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental, Emotional, Social, Physical & Financial Wellness
An Interview with Karen Mangia
Accommodating remote and hybrid workers — The pandemic completely reshaped the way we work, and both remote and hybrid work is here to stay. Companies need to streamline their processes to better accommodate these workers and to keep the workplace unified when their employees are in different corners of 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 Rachel Yarcony.
Through 20+ years of executive management roles at companies including Nestle, Teva Pharmaceuticals, and other leading organizations, Rachel Yarcony experienced first-hand the impact of stress on business executives. She thus set out to create a company to help individuals build stress resilience with a combination of body and mind analytics and adaptogenic, plant-based foods as an alternative to prescription medication. Together with leading behavioral researchers, scientists, and nutrition experts, Yarcony created myAir, a scientific solution to measure, manage, and relieve stress through data-driven, personalized insights and plant-based functional food recommendations.
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.
Thank you for having me. I spent 20 years working in food and pharma marketing, and as rewarding as my career was, stress became a massive burden in my life. As many business executives know all too well, juggling the responsibilities of managing a team, staying ahead of competitive business trends, caring for my children and my elderly parents, and balancing the many demands of life became extremely difficult. The stress built, and I found myself unable to sleep at night.
Despite working for a pharmaceutical company, I didn’t want to treat my stress with medication. Rather, I wanted to find a natural solution, one that would help me manage my stress, take control of my life, and empower me to show up for the people I care about. I tried meditation and mindfulness but these exercises seemed like just another thing I had to build into my routine. They never became habit, and the stress continued to build.
That’s when I met a clinical brain researcher studying the power of adaptogens — active ingredients in certain plants and mushrooms that impact how the body reacts to stress and anxiety. This was my “aha moment,” and I decided to leave my corporate career behind to found a company to address stress through functional, plant-based nutrition and a personalization platform informed by big data.
Today, myAir helps people measure, manage, and relieve stress through data-driven insights and nutrition. Inspired by my own experience with stress in the workplace, we’ve launched a Corporate Wellness Program to provide business leaders with the tools to help their employees manage their own stress and to create a healthier, more productive workforce.
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?
While every company must measure and track key performance indicators on productivity and profitability, when companies only focus on those metrics and not enough on the employees behind them, their workers can suffer the effects of overworking and burnout. And the organization can experience turnover and stifled progress.
I believe that any successful company, including mine, needs some stress and challenging KPIs to be successful. But chronic stress reduces productivity. Companies need to consider: Do employees feel supported by management? Are they given opportunities to grow in their careers? Does leadership prioritize the physical and mental health of their workforce? At myAir, wellness means giving our team the tools and resources they need to gain stress resilience so that they can show up for themselves, their families, their community, and their team.
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?
We believe that “if you can measure it, you can manage it.” Thus, we always conduct quantitative research on any activity we do.
While it’s a step in the right direction that businesses are offering more wellness programs to their employees, it’s difficult to know how impactful these programs are without being able to assess the data. For example, meditation apps are a great way for employees to take a step back from work, recharge, and come back ready to tackle their tasks. But it’s difficult to measure just how much this benefits the worker, especially when the practice is only used intermittently.
As with most things, data is the best way to quantify the impact of a well workforce on an organization’s productivity. Our corporate wellness program helps employers better understand the stress patterns within their organization through smartwatch-derived data. An employer dashboard aggregates blinded physiological and psychological data from program participants — in accordance with privacy regulations — enabling HR and company management to see what times of the day or what days of the week their employees are most stressed, whether stress levels are higher for employees working from home or remotely, and other trends. By examining these patterns, employers can make more informed decisions about policies and benefits to facilitate a healthier, less stressed, and more productive working environment.
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?
There is no better investment than in the health and wellbeing of your employees. The trick is finding the right program that will appeal to and engage employees for the long-term. Too often, wellness programs offered by management are left untouched by employees. Gym memberships, counseling sessions, and mindfulness apps are all well and good if they are actually utilized. In so many cases, though, work and life get in the way — and this is when organizations see their money wasted.
Psychology tells us that sticking to healthy practices is much easier when combined with a habit already ingrained in our daily life. My advice to leaders hoping to see an ROI on their wellness programs is to make their offerings as easy as possible to adopt and seamlessly incorporate into a daily routine. Secondly, make sure you have a way of measuring the success of the program through data.
myAir’s corporate wellness program does both. It gives participants adaptogen-powered nutrition bars to help relieve their stress through snacking (a habit they’re already used to) and a smartwatch to track their stress level responses in real time. Management then gets a high-level look at the data, helping them to inform policies that benefit their employees.
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?
When we recruit, all of our candidates are passionate about our vision to empower millions to manage their stress through data-driven nutrition and insights. We all have personal experience struggling with stress and relieving it through our own platform.
We know that our corporate clients offer their candidates the myAir stress resilience platform as part of their company wellness benefits package, and they have told us it always creates excitement and positive feedback.
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.
- Mental Wellness:
- Emotional Wellness:
- Social Wellness:
- Physical Wellness:
- Financial Wellness:
We recently launched our Corporate Wellness Program, the first personalized, data-driven, functional food-powered stress solution designed to develop and maintain a healthier, more resilient, and more productive workforce. The program begins with a cognitive stress assessment to give employees a better understanding of the impact of stress on their body. Depending on their own individual stress effects, this could mean difficulty focusing, trouble falling asleep, fatigue, irritability, muscle tension, or other symptoms. Based on these insights, myAir tailors a plan for each user that includes customized plant-based nutrition bars proven to reduce stress, personalized insights, and 1:1 coaching from stress management coaches to help employees manage the demands of work life and improve their stress resilience.
Our “stressless routine” platform is the only one to use personalized mind and body analytics to create stress resilience. Instead of receiving generalized best practices for stress management, employees discover their own personalized best practices. Instead of general advice on how to sleep, they will discover how THEY need to sleep. Instead of general advice on what to eat, they will discover what THEY should eat.
Research has proven that the best way to change behavior is to attach a new habit to a current habit we already love to do. That’s the reason we use healthy, functional nutrition as the first step in creating a stress management routine.
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?
Companies who have adopted our Corporate Wellness Program have seen massive success in reducing employee stress levels. At Moovit, a navigation company and Intel subsidiary, 80% of employees who used the myAir solution experienced stress reduction. In addition, 75% of Moovit employees favored the myAir stressless routine over other health benefits. Less (and better controlled) stress means healthier employees, which can have a measurable impact on morale, retention, and productivity. (Consider that businesses lose up to $300 billion each year because of work-related stress.)
The other beneficial part of our platform is that it gives employers blinded physiological and psychological data from program participants. By examining the blinded data (stripped of any identifiable information, of course, to comply with privacy regulations) and stress patterns of their workforce, employers have the ability to track how policy changes (for instance, shortening the work week, or letting employees work remotely) contribute to or alleviate employee stress.
How are you reskilling leaders in your organization to support a “Work Well” culture?
Every myAir team member learns and uses our platform. We wouldn’t be able to support others in their journey if we didn’t believe in our stress resilience tools ourselves.
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?
Instead of overhauling your entire life to hit a wellness goal — then getting overwhelmed and giving up — the trick is to retool your existing habits–at home or in the office–in order to experience more wellness in the long run. Healthy habits have a higher success rate when they are coupled with action items already in your routine. Connecting your daily habits with wellness practices will lead to more success in the long run.
What are your “Top 5 Trends To Track In the Future of Workplace Wellness?”
- Stress resilience — Stress is considered the health epidemic of the 21st century, but historically, employers rarely carved out resources to help their employees directly manage their stress levels. That’s finally changing as the stigma around mental health (particularly in the workplace) evaporates and employees demand more tools and opportunities to improve and maintain their wellness. myAir’s mission is to help people measure, manage, and relieve their stress, and we work with corporations to help them empower their employees to do the same. I may be biased, but I see stress resilience as a major trend in the future of workplace wellness.
- Personalized Wellness — Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all approaches to wellness. Everyone experiences stress, sleep, physical health, and mental wellness in different ways, and employees should be offered personalized solutions. Whether that means data-driven personalized insights or individual physical assessments, the personalization factor of workplace wellness will continue to grow.
- Accommodating remote and hybrid workers — The pandemic completely reshaped the way we work, and both remote and hybrid work is here to stay. Companies need to streamline their processes to better accommodate these workers and to keep the workplace unified when their employees are in different corners of the world.
- Mental health benefits — Beyond addressing stress, more HR departments are offering counseling services to their employees as part of a broader mental health benefits package, making it more accessible to get the help they need to feel their best.
- Nutrition coaching — Talking to a nutritionist or dietician can help people make healthier choices and improve overall health. Too often, employees aren’t sure where to start in their wellness journey and can feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of diet and nutrition advice out there. By meeting with an expert who can create a personalized plan, they are given the tools they need to fuel their body in the right way and live healthier lives.
What is your greatest source of optimism about the future of workplace wellness?
After climbing the corporate ladder for most of my career and figuring out wellness on my own, it has been refreshing to see the increased emphasis being placed on workplace wellness. Around 83% of U.S. workers suffer from work-related stress, and 60% complain that their company doesn’t provide them tools to cope with it. This is a major population in need of help. The more that companies invest in their workforce, the better off their employees, organizations, and their greater communities will be.
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?
Readers can visit myair.ai for more information on our Stressless Routine, or to take a self-assessment to better understand their own stress effects. They can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn and can also connect with me personally on LinkedIn.
Thank you for sharing your insights and predictions. We appreciate the gift of your time and wish you continued success and wellness.
Thank you for having me!
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: Rachel Yarcony Of myAir On How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.