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Melissa Jones, Chief Human Resources Officer at CSAA Insurance Group, has built a holistic benefits package that tackles all areas of wellbeing, including mental, physical, financial, and social.
From addressing issues of loneliness and climate anxiety to the power of ERGs and volunteering, the HR leader reveals her insights and best practices on the latest episode of the HR Grapevine podcast.
Coupled with a culture of flexibility, the approach has helped CSAA to improve retention and engagement.
Host: Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Grapevine US podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Brumfield, Head of content for HR grapevine, and I'm joined today by Melissa Jones, chief human resources officer at CSAA insurance Group. Melissa leads the company's efforts in people programs including corporate culture, talent acquisition and management, leadership development, total rewards, employee communications and strategic events, enterprise change management, charitable programs, inclusion and belonging, external affairs, agents and agency, communications and sustainability. And under her leadership, the company has achieved a perfect score in the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index for LGBTQ Workplace Equality, and she co-founded the company's Women's Professional Network, which was created to empower women to take risk, use their voice, and make an impact in the workplace and in the community. She's also the executive sponsor of the Black Employees Association. And today, Melissa joins us to discuss CSAA's holistic approach to benefits designed to support physical, mental, social and financial health, demonstrating a commitment to employees overall well-being. And we'll be touching on a significant number of themes, I'm sure, over the conversation, including social well-being, a Go Green benefits program, and much, much more. So, Melissa, a very warm welcome to the HR grapevine podcast. It's a pleasure to be chatting with you today.
Guest: It's a pleasure to be talking with you as well. Thank you.
Host: Wonderful. Well, perhaps then we can, we can start with the topic of wellbeing is one of those areas that I addressed in that introduction. And it'd be great to get your perspective, Melissa, on why it's really important for employers to tackle these topics like wellbeing, social wellbeing, the mental health crisis head on as employers.
Guest: Yeah, it's supporting employees isn't just the right thing to do. It's essential especially for property and casualty insurer. And so big portion of our employees every day are on the phone with our policyholders who are going through something terrible, right? You don't call your insurance company unless something bad happens. So making sure that they're mentally well to be able to take those calls on a, you know, on an everyday basis is a incredibly important focus for us. We really focus on social well-being at work and how people can show up for our members. And we feel like we have a responsibility to respond with empathy, both with our colleagues internally and with our with our policyholders. We see well-being as foundational for good performance, good engagement from employees, and retention. So we've built a holistic approach that supports mental, physical, financial, and social well-being. That last one we added as a fourth pillar during the pandemic, when we sent everyone home and, you know, really focusing on ensuring that, you know, while you're not physically together, we can still focus on social well-being. So again, we feel like it's not just the right thing to do, but really essential for driving culture of engagement and a culture where people can show up and give their best to our to our members.
Host: Absolutely. And I'm sure across all of those different areas of wellbeing, there's obviously there's plenty of different ways that you invest there, whether it's day to day culture, whether it's, you know, towards looking at some of those work processes and relationships that people have with their colleagues and their managers. But one of the key areas of focus that we're going to be covering today is the benefits package, that holistic approach that you mentioned. So perhaps you could outline some of the key components of your benefits package that you've seen, have really moved the needle when it comes to wellbeing. And just offer that comprehensive support to your employees.
Guest: Yeah, We have emotional wellness programs, family planning benefits, which include adoption assistance, paid bonding leave. And we look at those types of benefits and really evolve with the evolving needs of our employees. So for next year, we're going to be offering a surrogacy support, which we haven't had before. And we're actually expanding our fertility program as well. So really thinking about how do we evolve those financial well-being, including a very generous four hundred one match. We have a profit sharing program. So when the company does well, the employees do well as well. And then we also offer our student loan repayment assistance. We have a fairly young workforce. And, you know, the debt of having the burden of having debt, like student loan is one area that we added, um, several years back when we asked our employees what needs they have. So we really wanted to listen and evolve those offerings. We also, unlike other employers who are calling back people to the office and issuing, you know, returned office mandates, ninety five percent of our employees work remotely full time before the pandemic. That was a very small percentage, um, through the pandemic, we led with Employee Safety First and then employee choice. And so we while others, other employers have, you know, pulled back some of those offerings, we doubled down. And now ninety five percent of our employees work remotely. And, um, we have talent now across forty four states, which is expanded immensely since, uh, since 2019.
Host: Fantastic. Well, a huge amount to be proud of there. And I think, as you said, it's the importance of that holistic approach. Right. It's all those different parts of sort of that life experience that that someone has the employer coming in to deliver that support, as well as some of those fundamental pieces around ways of working. And that's what I wanted to touch on as well. Obviously, you have in place those basic measures like employee assistance programs and making sure that fundamental support is there, but it also sort of keen to dive into really some of those root causes of burnout and stress that can arise within organizations. How do you sort of go about trying to uncover and target them and making sure that they're eliminated as much as possible so that, you know, you're taking some of those proactive steps to address these wellbeing issues as well as, obviously, some of the more reactive ones that employees might need when, when, when they are in those difficult situations.
Guest: Yeah. And we recognize burnout isn't just about workload, it's how you experience work. And so we've thought about, you know, before the before we had people in the office, it really was focused on an office culture. So even meetings, people who were, you know, not in the physical location might be challenged because it really was a in-office sort of culture. And now we've switched that completely around, and we built a remote first culture that prioritizes flexibility. We also have implemented things that we call cultural norms so well. We have a weekly, what we call time to focus, where it's block of time in the morning, where there are no meetings scheduled for an interrupted works, and we call it time to focus. We also implemented something around meeting etiquette. So half hour meetings and five minutes earlier. So twenty five minutes an hour meetings are now fifty minutes. So it gives people transition time as well. We have evolved things like our holiday program to be more inclusive. So not everyone celebrates or observes the same holiday. So thinking about giving some flexibility so that people can use their holiday for things for time that they want to observe. We offer what we call enrichment time. It's forty hours that is paid annually and you can focus on things like development, well-being or volunteerism. And so we really tried to think about how do we meet the needs of. And it's you know, when you have four thousand employees, it's really hard to think about how do we meet the needs of all of them. But we also, you know, regularly listen. And as I mentioned before, evolve our offerings to try and meet the broadest, broadest sense of needs for the for our employee base.
Host: Wonderful. So yeah, it'd be great just to chat a little bit on that theme of social well-being that you picked out earlier on in the podcast, especially as we talk about things like the loneliness epidemic in America, some of these broader societal challenges for social well-being to think about the role that employers can play within their organizations. So what is the power that you can see in investment, in social well-being can have in the workplace? And how have you driven that through things like ERGs, volunteerism, and more?
Guest: Yes, we recognize early through the pandemic that, you know, the office environment where people were social with each other was no longer obviously available to us. And you know, you can read stats. Things like loneliness being worse for you than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, right? So we recognized we had to do something around that when we didn't have that option anymore. As that Foundation for Social Wellbeing research has also shown that strong social well-being can have a positive impact on overall wellbeing. Sort of the opposite of how bad it is to for you to be lonely. How great it is for you to be social and well. So we've addressed this by things like, you know, we use teams as our digital platform. We have another norm we have is cameras on. So you can actually see and interact with people in a way that you can't without the cameras on. We help employees connect and interact. We have things like our weekly watercooler posts. We have Wellbeing Wednesdays where you can focus on, you know, different parts of wellbeing. We have listening sessions just to offer employees a safe space to have conversation on anything that might be of concern for them as well. Our volunteer program, you asked that about that. It is a huge, vital component of our commitment to social well-being. In 2024, our volunteer program fifty five percent participation rate, which was ten points higher than the year before. And most of our employees again work remotely so that we feel very proud of being able to drive that. And we're not we're not done. We're continuing to really focus on that as well. We supported initiatives through that volunteer program on things that, you know, help not only our well-being by being able to volunteer, but the community to be served and well-being. So things like food insecurity, education, environmental sustainability. And we have what we call community impact champions who help drive our volunteerism events and help drive our goals there. So really engaging a community through not just my team who manages the programs, but a broader team of people who are passionate about this work.
Host: Absolutely. Well, whether it is the volunteering program or some of those other areas you've spoken about today, I think one thing that's coming through is the reception you've been getting from employees. So that's an area I'd love to speak about and perhaps how some of some of these measures, some of the policies you've introduced, the benefits you have in place, how you've seen them impact employee wellbeing among CSAA's workforce. So any sort of results that you've seen or pieces of feedback that that you can share?
Guest: Yeah. So we've implemented a new wellbeing platform in 2022 on that platform we have an enrollment rate of seventy six percent, and that's much higher than the vendor's benchmark of fifty percent. And our average engagement in that platform is nearly fifty percent on a monthly basis. Relationships at work are really, really important. We asked about that. We have in our employee experience survey questions around well-being, including I have trusting relationships at work, and eighty seven percent of our employees have responded favorably to that question on our employee experience survey. So we, you know, not only do we just offer it for the sake of offering it, but we really look at how we measure the effectiveness of it. And then again, as I mentioned before, we look at those results to continue to evolve our programs.
Host: Brilliant. Perhaps one area of the well-being conversation we haven't touched on yet, and we've already covered a lot, is just the, I suppose, to perhaps the climate anxiety equation and sort of those environmental concerns that are now finding their way into the well-being of employees and perhaps that stress that they can experience. And I'm sure that's something that that your Go Greens benefits program has helped to, to tackle within the workplace. I wondered if you could talk a bit more about what the Go Green Benefits program is, how you created it, and maybe how it's perhaps tackling some of those wellbeing issues as they relate to climate concerns and so on.
Guest: Yeah, climate anxiety is absolutely real. It's growing. We have financial incentives to purchase green electricity for Deeper Home Office's support for solar energy and things like encouraging climate friendly commuting. When we do go in the office, we have because of our mostly remote environment. Now, as how we work, we reduce travel and we look at things like how do we educate? So monthly Green Go Green webinars to share best practices and really thinking about how do we do business as well with partners who have some of the same goals that we do in really focusing on reducing social or climate anxiety. So we look at it holistically, again, not only good for our employees to help them and where they're concerned about, but again, as a it's great for our business. As you know, climate change is impacting things like wildfire and other weather, weather related events that impact, again, not only our employees but our policyholders?
Host: Absolutely. Well, perhaps just as a final question, obviously, you mentioned it's an ongoing journey. You're constantly measuring the impact of some of these benefits and programs, taking that feedback on board, improving them moving forward. I mean, we've obviously got a huge amount of measures that are in place that for employees, I can imagine at the company is really valuable for them. So it's a bit of an interesting question, but what are some of the areas that you're looking to improve moving forward? Where are some of those areas that you're looking to expand and increase that support for, for staff? What's on your agenda or to do list for the next year?
Guest: Yeah. And I mentioned again, we continually look at our benefits programs to evolve to the evolving needs. So we're enhancing some of those programs for next year. We're offering a new medical plan, for example, that allows a little more flexibility. And it's in response to the feedback that we've gotten for employees. And we feel like we've done a great job at trying to evolve our offerings to them we need. And I think the flexibility of our workplace and then supporting the whole, whole self and whole being of our employees and their and their families as well. We've seen results such as the highest retention rates we've had, at least in the history that I've been with the company, and also some of our highest engagement rates that I've seen as well. So it takes a lot to look at this and look at this holistically, and we feel like the results are paying off for us.
Host: Absolutely. Well, it certainly sounds that way. And like I said, such a comprehensive approach to tackling some of these issues around wellbeing and engagement and through the benefits program you have in place, I appreciate you talking to us, sharing more about all of those initiatives in such detail. So, Melissa, thank you so much for joining us on the HR grapevine podcast, and wishing you the very best of luck for the months and years to come.
Guest: Thank you Benjamin. Appreciate your time.
