Payal Sahni Becher, Executive Vice President and Chief People Experience Officer, Pfizer
Ty Breland, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, Marriott International
Moderator: Arianna Huffington, Thrive


Brainstorm Health 2022 - Burned Out: Tackling Well-Being And Mental Resilience In The Workplace

Conferences

Payal Sahni Becher, Pfizer
Ty Breland, Marriott International


Burned Out: Tackling Mental Resilience In The Workplace


Payal Sahni Becher, Executive Vice President and Chief People Experience Officer, Pfizer
Ty Breland, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, Marriott International


Brainstorm Health 2022 - Burned Out: Tackling Well-Being And Mental Resilience In The Workplace


Good morning, It's great to be together again. And I'm so thrilled To be with two amazing people leaders. And we know of course that Fighter is a health care company, but we are discovering that now every company is a health care company And the Marriott with 620,000 employees around the world is both a hospitality company and healthcare company. So we want to explore that also. I want you all to know that this Ritz Carlton is part of the Marriott hotel chains. If you have any complaints, please talk. Thank you. Um so Payal Fighter obviously developed the vaccine in record time. It was actually called Project Lightspeed and we are very grateful for that. And now you have the challenge of maintaining And the mental resilience and well being of your almost 90,000 colleagues as you call them and for whatever comes next, how are you doing that? You know, I think you you all must have heard from Albert yesterday and just talking about um you know, the sacrifices, the personal sacrifices a lot of our colleagues made, they just stepped away because we didn't have a vaccine yet. We knew that this variant was really contagious and it was making people very sick and and we were seeing a lot of people die and they gave up, you know, seeing their families and just isolated themselves to be able to work on bringing a cure and bring something that was going to be preventative. Um, while our manufacturing colleagues of which we have, you know over 30,000 globally went to work every single day. And so that pressure, it was driven and I think the motivation that they got from it was seeing what was happening and also by the purpose that we have, which is very clear, right? So we all know that you need to be really clear on your goals and the purpose advisor is, you know, breakthroughs that change patients lives and so that kept them and kept all of us looking at that North star and just prioritizing. So you know, they brought everything that they could to work. Um, but what we were seeing is as soon as we got that vaccine, you know, went right to it sort of encouraged people to say, well what about, you know, people that are still going to get it and maybe that don't take it. So we need to come up with another therapy which of course marked, you know, the oral pill that we were able to come up with. But it also left a lot of people like exhausted and you could see that the strain that they were carrying, the fears that they had also for their own self, their own families, probably the losses that they had prior to the vaccine coming around. Um, we, we sort of had to force people to take a breath. And so, you know, partnership with dr Global was really critical for us and our colleagues just loved it. They said thanks for actually focusing on us in a way that was much more proactive. You know, we've always had services at uh you know, we all do in companies to offer, but when you're at a point where mentally you're exhausted your stress, you don't even know where to go and you need to have people come to you. And so that's what we ended up doing. Um and that was a huge plus in addition to other ideas and other things that we tried to bring to them. Um and you know, you mentioned lightspeed, we have this um philosophy now we're trying to put in place are lightspeed principles which is move at the speed of science but with urgency obviously um cutting out bureaucracy, we call it cutting our red tape and trusting one another so that we can actually just focus on the things that matter. And we are constantly saying, you know, let's take the learnings of what we how we were able to deliver on the vaccine where we challenged, you know, without putting at risk anything, you know, for our the integrity, the safety, the efficacy that never got touched, but everything around, we reinvented and said let's get it done faster. And so that is the type of work that we're doing now in partnership with things, we respect you enough to not want you to spend time on the things that don't matter, but the things that bring you happiness and also productivity. So partnering with you all and also just in addition to transforming and continuing to evolve the culture is the path that we're on, you know, it's amazing, you talked about trust and in the green room Ty and now we're talking about how important it is to build trust as you are building teams and trusting to delegate so that people don't burn out in the process and why you had to go from having to shutter hotels during the pandemic To going to 100% occupancy from nothing, you called it from tumbleweeds to 100 people returning to work and yet the world being different and you having to offer them a different way of working. So tell us about this journey, you know, for for us at Marriott uh you know like this hotel, many hotels never closed. Uh So from the time we open the hotel, we we never locked the front doors um there's always guests checking in and guests checking out And so you know, March of 2020 when everything sort of broke loose, we saw some things happening uh you know in china um and as that, that as that continued to push through europe and into the U. S. We quickly had to act And occupancy fell 90 um overnight, so that's not something we do a lot of war games, we try to think through different scenarios that In my 18 years we've never planned that scenario and so with dropping occupancy, we had to make a lot of tough decisions. Uh, and for the first time in the history of the company, we're getting ready to celebrate 95 years next week. So on May 20 will turn 95. But across this 95 years we've never had to furlough at scale. We've never had to tell people we don't have work. Uh you know, hospitality is somewhat of a safe harbor industry where we're always sort of growing and we've grown for 95 years. So in doing that furlough and and having individuals, um, you know, have to go home. Um, as we kind of worked through the pandemic and waited for great companies like fighter to help us out with the vaccine, we quickly went to sort of our core as a company, which is putting people first. Um, and so we continue to provide health care and benefits to all of our associates. Uh, during this time, even though we didn't have work for them. Um, so now fast forward. Uh, things start to uh shift. We get our arms around testing the vaccine comes out overnight, our resort. So markets like this, markets like florida, anywhere that has a beach, Um, overnight went from 0% occupancy to 100% occupancy. And so trying to bring back in the workforce. Uh, every every company is struggling with, you know, attracting individuals to their industry. But hospitality was really bruised. Uh, So as we started to bring people back, a lot of our associates returned. Um but there's a lot that that went and either retired or went into other industries. And so we've had to really rethink how work gets done and really think about our jobs as more blended, uh more generalist as opposed to you do this job in a hotel, you now do multiple jobs. So instead of cleaning 12 rooms, 14 rooms, maybe you clean five rooms and you also work in banquets. So really giving a little bit more flexibility into duties. The other pieces pre pandemic. I went back and looked at our numbers. We were 95% full time. uh so we have, you know, pre pandemic. We're close to 800,000 people Um of which 90-plus% were full time. And so what we tried to do is model back in more part time uh and part time to allow and afford that flexibility that people are craving. So individuals that want to put their Children on the school bus and take them off the school bus, we want to capture that workforce as well. So we're trying to be a lot more flexible. Um But I think the more recent learning, we've had about this flexibility conversation. So everyone in the world talks about working from home and working in the office. Unfortunately, a lot of our associates don't have that luxury because the jobs are in the hotel, but there's still an opportunity to be flexible. But it's this other piece of giving choice. Uh so it's one thing that we offer more bite sized jobs that are blended that are part time full time etcetera, but also giving people choice. Um and so we're starting to work on individual sharing shifts uh leveraging technology and say that maybe you got your child into the pediatrician that you've been waiting on that appointment and you didn't know that yesterday but you don't know it this morning, you can throw your shift up. Someone else can grab it and it gives people more of that choice. Now we're early in this process and we're going to have to fuel it with technology. But that's how we're thinking about bringing people back is a lot more flexibility and a lot more choice for our associates. And that's fantastic. So basically changing the ways work is done and I know we hear a lot about up skilling the need for up skilling. But what I love in my conversations with both of you is that you include in up skilling equalities that are less tangible like empathy like connection like purpose. And I love the fact that one of the four Main fighter cultural values is joy together with excellence and equity and carriage. Did I get them right? And I think what I've seen in our work together is how you demonstrate that empathy. You're so in touch who even needs of your people when for example you and chinese that we work with in the day to day work, I discovered that your people were really suffering because the kids were suffering. You know, the mental health crisis that's affecting Children is really affecting employees. So no matter what you do for them, if it doesn't include their Children in some way it doesn't fully work. So tell us more about that. No, I mean, I think it was an excellent point and you know that joy it brings me joy that we have this value as well, but you can't have any one of those without the other. And so that I think is such a symbiotic way where you know, joy in addition to happiness that we equate it with, it's also psychological safety, so you can be who you are and you can bring your whole self to work. And We've been on this journey to transform you know, when I first joined fighter was 25 years ago and it was called personnel and then it quickly transformed to E. R. So I, you know, get in the elevator and I C E. R. And I'm thinking this is horrible, right, emergency room and then it went to HR and people felt really happy we brought the human in and now we've transformed it to people experience it's because it's the whole experience that people go through and I think we noticed, you know for those that are you know, we call our heroes who had to go in regardless and didn't have the luxury of working from home. But while you were at home, you also had a lot of challenges. And we saw that, you know, we saw that when we did our zoom calls and people were trying to homeschool their kids, I have an eight year old, so I was trying to figure out, you know, which link do I use for to set her up while I go on mine and it was really taxing and you saw the impact that it had on your entire family. And so people are bringing all of that to work and the expectation is for them to be their best, all the systems need to work. And so we saw that, you know, um Janis on my team as has really been driving a lot of our sessions that we do and you know, numbers tell a story. So all of a sudden, you know, we have normal town halls, not everybody shows up everybody, you know, does I have a conflict, I have this, we had this session and um we're thriving, you know, thriving kids And we had like 11,000 people show up and what it showed was that there was such a need and people were sharing ideas are colleagues themselves were sharing ideas on an open web to say, oh, you're suffering from this. So am I I have some ideas and you know, having that facilitated and giving them that forum, It showed a need just by the numbers and the data that we saw. And it's important for us to make sure that all of those systems work because people are making choices with you know, different priorities these days and you have to adapt that. It's not work all the time, but it's it's work life integration rather than I'm going to do this today and I'm gonna do that tomorrow your whole day has to be flexible and your policies have to be as flexible as policy as possible. And I think those values allow us to do that, especially the one on equity which you know, for us equity does not mean doing the same for all it means doing more for those that need it the most. And you know that's the piece where I think we really needed to balance on our our values to be able to bring what we needed to bring for our colleagues to feel like they matter. They had what they needed to do, you know, at their fingertips and had all the resources for them to be able to beat them at their best selves. I love the fact that you're calling it work life integration tie calls it work life blending basically guys work life balance is out. We know it doesn't exist and it just makes people stressed out if they think they have to achieve it. So I would like to end by asking you personally, how do you make sure that even though Your responsibilities are endless, they are 24/7. They truly never, never end. How do you make sure that you put your own oxygen mask on first? Take care of yourself so that you can be there for your people die. Sure. So you know, I think first and foremost I think this word blends important and And the reason we choose the word blend. So if you think about balance, that means 5050. So almost every day you're probably going to miss it. Um You're either going to be too far this way or too far that way. And so as we think about this idea of blend, it's really knowing that you have to have and flow. Um and so there's certain times where I may have to be on the road and I'm traveling with work and I have to be all in on that. And I talked to my two young girls, they're 11 and eight and I talked to them about that. Um But I try to also just give myself a little bit of grace um and and I use that word because we can be really hard on ourselves. Um I can't be at every event Um for my Children but when I am there I'm 100% present, I do this little thing every day like if I'm in there, I travel probably 100 plus days a year, but when I am in town um I turned off my cell phone about a mile from my house and I turned off my cell phone so that when I pull into the garage, I'm never one of those parents that holds up the finger and says, give me one more minute to finish this call because my little girls are waiting there, you know, in the mud room ready to tackle me. Um I wanna pull in, I don't want to hit them. Um but I want to pull in and get out of the car quickly and give them a hug. And so it's something I do to try to, you know, show them that I want to be present when I'm around, I'm known for being in the back of a car uh somewhere in Sub Sahara africa, doing homework with one of my daughters on Facetime. Um So I do try to be there, but it's not a quantity piece. It's definitely a quality piece. Um and and that's, that's sort of one thing that I do. The other piece. I mean just to try to stay healthy. Um you know, I have access to all the best food and everything else in the world. I had to be very conscious about that. I also try to run as many days as I possibly can. Uh and when I run, I don't take my cell phone, you'll get a you'll get a trend here with me, I don't run with airpods, I just go by myself. Um and so it's something that allows me to process, it allows me to get, you know, just sort of clear uh it stresses out my team and my family a little bit because I'll come back with 100 different ideas um on things from that time, but I try to build that in as a bit of a habit. Uh so that it's easier for me to repeat each and every day. So I think I'm I'm also just a work in progress, but one of the things I love to do similar to thai I go for a walk, I don't run unless somebody's really chasing me. So I will walk and I will walk for hours if I can with my headphones on. But music, I love music, and what I find is when I'm out there walking my team is already on standby because I come back with a lot of ideas and it just helps me think creatively, which is my best space. Um I'd love to come up with new ideas. That's where I'm most creative when I come back from those walks and if I can't walk, I'll, you know, jump on the peloton for a little bit to get some space. I think the other piece that I'm really trying to work on is saying no. Um because, you know, someone wise said to me um like if you don't say no, then what does your yes look like? And it's something that I've been reflecting on a lot, because I do take on a lot. I don't have any siblings, I'm very close to my family, they live five minutes away. So you know, now that I'm working from home, I think they just forget that I'm working still on some days where, you know, I think going back to the office might be better for me, but it's, you know, really prioritizing and making it okay for me to say no, I just I can't do that to the best of my ability. If I say yes to everything, I have to really be thoughtful about what I'm saying yes to. Um and then when I'm with my daughter, I mean she sees that um you know, I've been not as good as high on on telling her, I do say, hang on a minute, let me finish this. But she gets it. And when I'm there with her, I haven't missed an event and I don't plan on it. So I, you know, I'm lucky enough to have the support of my leadership team, my own team that allows me to be where I need to be and not feel bad about missing anything and I know not everybody has the opportunity to do that, but I make it a priority unless it's absolutely critical. Um So, you know, work in progress. Well, we're all works in progress, but thank you so much for your truly inspiring leadership. And one takeaway from me is that we are most creative when we're separated from our phones, whether we are running walking or in the shower, you know, people say we get my best ideas in the shower. Well, you confirm that. So let's remind ourselves of that. Thank you so much.