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Hello, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Nine to Five Wellness Podcast. Today we’ll be talking about winning the talent war for organizations. This week we have this theme running about employee retention, DEI, and just health and well-being of employees. And what helps organizations retain good, talented employees? So I have a quick question before we even start this podcast. Think about the last job you left, or you were probably like almost about to leave. Was it because of the paycheck? Like, was the paycheck too small? Or was it something quieter than that? Maybe it was a boss who never checked in, a flexible work policy that turned out to be flexible probably for everyone on your team except you. And if that is you, keep listening to this podcast episode because that’s what we’re getting into today. And this episode is about why some organizations win the talent war, and most don’t even realize they’re losing it. We’re going to talk about things that are uncomfortable, companies that talk about a great wellness game, and then they don’t back it up. First off, I’d like to address the values versus reality gap. Every company says the same things now. It’s in the mission statement, it’s in the job postings, and most probably it’s even hanging in the break room, the lobby. It’s probably framed on a wall in your boss’s office. But here’s the thing: employees don’t actually learn what a culture of the organization is like from the careers page. They learn about it by living inside it. And this goes out for you guys too, the 95ers. I’m sure you have had an experience by now where you realized, oh, on paper or on the job application, there was something written. But once you started working within the organization is when you started to get the real feel of the culture inside it. Let me back it up with some examples. Like, what happens when they ask for a day off? Or if they push back on a project deadline? Or maybe if the company is having a bad quarter. These are the kind of things that actually show an organization’s preferences and also an organization’s culture. The organizations that are actually good at keeping talented people, it’s almost never about one big flashy move. It’s dozens of small, boring, consistent decisions that either back up the mission statement or quietly contradict it. Think of it like tending a garden. No one waters a plant once and takes a picture of it and then expects it to thrive for years. That’s not how it works. We all know that. Healthy gardens are built through small, repetitive actions that aren’t particularly exciting. Watering, pulling weeds, checking the soil, making adjustments as the seasons change. Miss those routine tasks long enough, and the garden suffers no matter how beautiful the landscaping looked on day one. Workplace culture is no different. It works the same way. An annual wellness initiative or a polished company value statement might grab attention. But employees stay because of the everyday experiences, the manager who regularly checks in, the leader who respects boundaries, the teammate who feels appreciated, and the flexibility that’s consistently honored when life happens. Those small moments are the daily watering that keeps a culture healthy. And no, I’m talking about a big problem. There’s an assumption that winning the talent game means announcing something huge. Unlimited PTO, maybe a splashy parental leave policy, a wellness stipend that looks great in a benefits comparison chart. But when you actually talk to leaders, and I mean across healthcare, tech, finance, HR, pharma, government, all of it, the patterns that show up, they aren’t glamorous. Because it’s things like workloads that should be realistic, managers who’ve been trained to support their people, not just manage output, communication that doesn’t leave people guessing where they stand. Another thing that I’ve noticed in my experience is that a lot of organizations, and it would be including me, like we’re so worried about getting copied, maintaining our culture and maintaining our individuality, all good things to strive for, honestly. Yes. But here’s the part that matters most. Any single perk can be copied by a competitor in a week. But a genuinely healthy day-to-day culture, that’s almost impossible to copy. Which is exactly why it becomes a real advantage instead of just a talking point in the onboarding forms and booklets. And let’s talk about the elephant in the room. When wellness is just a slide deck, yes, and a lot of times it is. I’m gonna start with naming the pattern here, because I think it’s more useful than talking about this in the abstract. Let’s walk through a few composite scenarios. These are blends of things reported across different companies and industries, not callouts of one specific brand, but I bet you’ve seen at least one of these up close in your experience at one of the organizations that you’ve worked at. The first one I want to talk about is the unlimited PTO. A fast-growing tech company rolls out unlimited vacation time with a big internal announcement. Sounds incredible on paper. Six months later, internal survey data shows employees are actually taking less time off because they’re under the old fixed-day policy. Why? Because without a clear number, nobody wants to be the person who takes too much or too many days off. And managers never model taking time off themselves. So then the team members are like, we can’t be taking time off if our manager isn’t doing that. The policy becomes a recruiting headline, not a real benefit. The second one is my fave, the wellness app instead of workload fix. A large retail chain recently rolled out a free meditation and mental health app for every employee. And I was connected to them for offering some wellness programs. So I know this on the inside, and I know that the app rollout was genuinely well-intentioned. I love apps that help. But here’s the issue with this app rollout. If you have frontline staff that are still working under staffed shifts with unpredictable scheduling, then the app subscription is just a placeholder for solving the upcoming burnout without ever touching the scheduling practices which are actually causing it. So we are not addressing the root cause. Employees notice the disconnect almost immediately, and it becomes an inside joke. At least it did with the company that I was working at. Now, when companies call team members family, it’s all well and good. But then it’s time to lay off employees. And when the layoff happens, the family language during a layoff also gets laid off. A mid-sized firm spends years talking about being one big family. It’s in cultural messaging. Then a round of layoff happens over video call with almost no notice and minimal severance right after leadership publicly praised the team’s resilience in the same quarter. So what’s happening over here is that the language really doesn’t match the action. And as a result of that, trust doesn’t come back quickly after that kind of gap. So for organizations who have this kind of language, I think I would suggest maybe changing it to team members. That’s a better way to approach it. And I think the CEO and founder of Netflix, he likes to call everyone who is working for him as one of the team members. Because if you think about it, people who are on your team, they’re there to make sure that you’re winning the game, right? So they have to show certain kind of productivity, but they’re not family because you wouldn’t let go of family with such short notice. So just something to be mindful of. If you are using that language, then it has to be backed up by action. Now, the fourth example that I have is an interesting one because it’s about wellness week. And I’m all about wellness week and wellness promotion. However, if a financial firm hosts an annual wellness week, yoga sessions, a nutritionist guest speaker, a step count competition, all music to my ears, but this is not something that can be done in just a week. The expectation of being reachable nights and weekends, that’s still there. And then these wellness initiatives are gonna be gone at day on day seven. And these wellness initiatives, they’re gonna be gone by the end of the week. And our wellness, it stays with us. Employee wellness is important 365 days of the year. So employees clock the irony and inconsistency instantly. None of it addresses the actual source of stress. Now, if you notice the common thread in all four, none of these are villains twirling a mustache. They’re organizations that genuinely believe they’re doing something good, but they’re solving the visible, easy-to-announce version of the problem instead of the real one underneath it. But they’re solving the visible, easy-to-announce version of the problem instead of the real one underneath it. A free app doesn’t fix a scheduling problem. A slogan doesn’t fix a layoff handled badly, and employees can tell the difference almost immediately, even if leadership can’t. So if it’s not one big program and it’s not a slogan, what is going to work? You might be thinking that if you’re an HR manager, benefits manager, or you are responsible for the well-being programs at the organization. Let’s dive into it. The organizations with the strongest retention numbers treat wellness as infrastructure, not decoration. I’m talking about leadership coaching, flexible work practices that are actually flexible and they are for everyone on your team. Recognition that’s genuine, recognition for your team members and employees who are doing well, and for everyone, which is genuine and specific, not performative. Offering longevity and preventive health programs at your work for all of the team members is important. Nutrition and fitness education and programs on a weekly basis done year-round. Stress management training offered year-round. Ongoing wellness education, yes, podcasts like this one included, please, and giving access to your employees year-round. The difference is embedding it into how the company actually runs day-to-day, instead of pulling it out once a year during open enrollment season and then never mentioning it again, and or just celebrating one week of wellness or a wellness week initiative and then calling it a day. Another thing that I want to address over here is leadership. I’m gonna call out the leaders here, leaders of all organizations. You have to lead by example. Leadership sets the real policy. Because I think here’s an uncomfortable truth that nobody kind of like is willing to understand. Nobody reads the handbook as closely as they watch their leadership. So even if the employee handbook says one thing and then the leadership is doing something else or setting an example which is not in congruence with the employee handbook, what’s gonna happen? Employees are gonna feel it. They’re gonna notice it. If the company says it values balance and it values time off, but the CEO is firing off emails at midnight and expecting a reply by 7 a.m., that gap gets noticed fast. And it quietly undermines everything else the company is trying to build, no matter how good the intentions behind the original policy were. And just to remind you guys, and I want to be very clear here, this isn’t just a tech industry hustle culture problem either. I’m talking about healthcare leaders dealing with clinician burnout, financial firms under constant client pressure, government agencies trying to compete for talent without the private sector paychecks. All of this is included in this big pie. Different industries, same core issue, people notice the gap between what’s said and what’s lived faster than leadership usually expects. The leaders who get this right actually take their vacation. They set realistic expectations around response time. And when something isn’t working, they say so out loud instead of pretending everything’s fine while quietly hoping nobody asks too many questions. Now, a lot of companies think they’ve got this handled because they run an annual engagement survey once a year, check the box, move on, forget about it for 11 months. But the leaders actually ahead of the curve are tracking something closer to real time. Turnover in specific roles or teams, the themes that keep showing up in exit interviews, engagement signals that shift before people actually walk out the door. It means someone actually has to own the data and act on it, not just present it in a slide once a year. But it means you’re catching a problem as it’s forming, not reading about it three months after your best people already left for a competitor. Another important thing to consider over here is that the best insights rarely come from inside your own industry bubble. A retention strategy that worked inside a pharmaceutical company managing a specialized workforce might translate almost perfectly to a tech company facing a completely different kind of retention problem. So don’t underestimate the value. Another thing that I keep coming back to is that the best insights rarely come from inside your own industry bubble. And a lot of times we think, oh, okay, if we are working in healthcare, we just need to focus on other competitors in healthcare or other companies that complement us in healthcare. And I think that’s a mistake. A retention strategy that worked inside a pharmaceutical company managing a specialized workforce might translate almost perfectly to a tech company facing a little different kind of retention problem. A hard lesson learned in government HR might save a fast-scaling finance company from making the same exact mistake. If anyone’s actually paying attention outside their own sector, they would see how they can actually translate those initiatives to their own company. That’s the whole point of this podcast. Hearing directly from people who have lived it, what changed inside the organization, what pushback they got internally when they tried something new, what actually happened afterwards, good or bad, not another recycled list of top 10 wellness tips that could have been written by anyone. Sometimes you’ll see the wellness tips as well, but those are all aligned with organization’s well-being and the well-being of the employees who are contributing to that company. And they’re not for anyone and about any company at any time. They are for companies who care for their employees. Not another recycled list of top 10 wellness tips that could have been written by anyone about any company at any time. I know that from time to time on this podcast, I have presented some wellness tips, but those wellness tips are meant to be for organizations who take their employees seriously, who are serious about their employees’ well-being, and for those busy professionals within the company and leaders who want to prioritize their health and well-being. So those are not for anyone and for any organization. Those are just for organizations who are really serious about their team’s well-being. Now, before we wrap it up, the difference between companies that talk about investing in their people and companies that actually follow through usually comes down to one thing. Is this built to last or built for a headline? Because of big wellness rollout that gets announced with fanfare, remember our unlimited PTO example from earlier, and then it quietly disappears or gets ignored six months or a year later, does more damage to trust than never announcing anything at all. Employees remember being sold something that turned out to be hollow. The programs that actually stick have a realistic budget, clear ownership, someone whose actual job is to keep it alive so they have a department or a team member overseeing the operations and a willingness to adjust based on what’s working instead of assuming the first version got it perfect and just walk away. Because that’s not gonna happen. You will have to keep on adjusting, making changes, everything within the organization and the organization itself and the team members, everything evolves with time and it needs to evolve with time because based on the feedback and the input you’re gonna get from your team members, you’ll have to adjust it. So staying flexible, you’ll have to adjust it. So staying flexible is gonna be key. So to wrap up this episode, I have just a small simple takeaway for you guys. The real competitive edge for organizations is a quiet one. That edge is not dramatic. It’s not going to trend on LinkedIn, and it’s definitely not gonna fit on a recruiting poster. It’s the unglamorous, consistent work of actually listening to your people, noticing the gap between what you’re saying and what you’re doing, and treating your workforce like the investment it actually is, not a line item to manage around. And if you’re listening to this podcast from inside one of those organizations and you’re in a role where you can actually work on your team’s well-being and you have a say in their well-being and wellness, I hope that this episode helps you to understand what the real issues are for your team members and how to solve them. That’s it for this episode of the 9 to 5 wellness podcast. If this episode hit home, share it with someone in HR or leadership who needs to hear it. I am Aisha Dahir, host of this podcast, and I hope to catch you next week.