The world's largest companies are increasingly focused on employee wellbeing and mental health. Lisa Furst of Vibrant Emotional Health and CBRE's Lacey Willard join Spencer to discuss how proactively promoting employee wellness can yield profound benefits for a company's culture.
Got My Mind Set on You: How Employee Wellbeing and Experience Impact Compan...
October 11, 2021 35 Minute Listen
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Spencer Levy
I'm Spencer Levy, and this is The Weekly Take. How are you today? Seriously. How are you doing? That's actually a big question. We're about to discuss it with two leaders who think about it every day. On this episode: the important and emerging idea of wellness at work.
Lacey Willard
Mental health is when an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, is able to contribute to their community and, really interestingly, can work productively.
Spencer Levy
That's Lacey Willard, a CBRE senior director who leads the Global Center of Excellence for Workplace Safety and Wellbeing, joining us from Indianapolis. Lacey works to promote and integrate health, safety and environmental standards in the company and its culture.
Lisa Furst
Wellness focus has to start from the top. And it has to go sideways. It has to go all the way to every level in the organization. There has to be a real commitment there. And that's really key.
Spencer Levy
And that's Lisa Furst, the chief program officer, of Vibrant Emotional Health calling in from New Jersey. This is a thought leader, educator and author of more than two decades of experience in mental health policy and advocacy. Vibrant has been at the forefront of wellness for more than 50 years since it was founded as the Mental Health Association of New York City. Today, its stated mission is to promote emotional well-being with dignity and respect for all people. We'll talk about creating a healthy and safe workplace that's also productive and purposeful. Ideas like balance and belonging, empathy, role models and how newfound attention to all this stuff might be a silver lining of the pandemic. We'll also get some advice from our experts -- ews that leaders can use to promote wellness, including one example that I just learned about our discussion a moving mid-day routine called “runch”. Coming up: workplace wellness. That's right now on The Weekly Take. Welcome to The Weekly Take. And this week we are covering a topic that's so important during the COVID crisis, wellness, with two of the leading experts in the field. We always talk about the workplace in a physical sense, but now we're going to talk about it in the emotional sense. Let's start with a word, just one word wellness. It's a big word. It can mean a lot of things, but I'd like to know how you folks define it. So, Lisa, why don't you give us your definition of wellness?
Lisa Furst
So the first thing I'd love to say is that wellness is not a destination that we achieve and have forever. It's a process. It's something that we're actively striving for. It is multidimensional. It is how we are doing in our physical realm, our emotional realm, mentally, spiritually, socially, intellectually, it's are we feeling the way we want to feel? Are we doing what we want to do and are we feeling good about it? There's always room for growth and improvement in the wellness realm, and there's no such thing as perfection.
Spencer Levy
Alrighty. So Lacey, I'd love to hear how you define wellness.
Lacey Willard
Sure. I think about it in terms of two whos. The first is, who are the stakeholders that are impacted? First, it is a company making a decision to make a commitment to their people. Second, it is the people who are impacted by the focus on initiatives to thrive. And then third, which is really important, it is the communities and the families that are in turn impacted by those employees who are thriving. And when Lisa and I chat with folks about wellness and mental health, we are doing so under the definition of the World Health Organization. What they say is that mental health is when an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, is able to contribute to their community, and really interestingly can work productively.
Spencer Levy
Got it, so there's a lot of ways to to unpack that. And I think the way that I would put it is being a complete person emotionally and mentally. And if you do that, you can then achieve more professionally and personally. Am I summarizing it in a fair way?
Lacey Willard
It does. Sounds great.
Spencer Levy
All right. So let's now take that definition of wellness to two great definitions that Lisa and Lacy gave in my interpretation of that, and let's apply it. So we're here in a big company at CBRE. We're also in real estate. So let's start with you, Lisa. Just give us how wellness works in the context of a big company.
Lisa Furst
There are so many levels to that Spencer. I would say that a wellness focus has to start from the top. And it has to go sideways. It has to go all the way to every level in the organization. There has to be a real commitment there. And that's really key. Individuals, of course, can promote their own well-being. Managers and internal leaders can promote the well-being of the teams that they work with, but it's really a movement that comes from executive leadership and rolls from there.
Spencer Levy
Isn't there also a bottom up component to this as well, Lisa?
Lisa Furst
Absolutely there is. So all of the best messaging from the top doesn't work if it's not the messaging that people need. And so certainly that interaction from the bottom up and from side to side will matter in terms of helping leadership understand: What does well being mean to the employees in their company? And what does that look like for them? And how can that be achieved in the corporate community?
Spencer Levy
Great. So, Lacey, let's turn to you now. How do we make wellness work in a big company like CBRE, but anything specific to the real estate industry, the commercial real estate industry in which we sit.
Lacey Willard
It is really that shared definition of wellbeing with leadership as well as employees. Interestingly, there are some commonalities to the way the companies look and define in a shared way what well-being is. So physical well-being is pretty consistently used. So it's how we support good health awareness and vitality. Think how well we sleep, how we eat, exercise. There's another type of well-being which is occupational. And if I'm looking for a one word substitute is purpose. Sometimes companies call it spirituality or emotional engagement, but it’s that purpose piece. And a lot of companies have that another way that companies define well-being as intellectual. Perhaps think growth mindset. So it's how we learn new concepts, improve new skill sets. There's two more elements of wellbeing, though, that we see in particular in the commercial real estate industry. The first would be social well-being. It's how we connect with our colleagues and establish those positive relationships. And naturally we’re connecting in places of commercial real estate. Maybe it's in retail and connecting with families or buying products and maybe in an office space. So that connection piece is incredibly important. And the fifth and final element of well-being that we see most readily in commercial real estate is environmental. How do we create a safe, productive and comfortable workplace there, we're talking about things like materiality types of materials that are around us. Mindfulness, the variety that we need to get the things that we need to get done in the places that we are. How we prepare health, safety, environmental elements. IAQ nourishment, positive defaults. And of course how we're designing for behavioral, meaning, perhaps ergonomics.
Spencer Levy
I like the word you use a lot of the words you use there Lacey. But the one I want to focus on is purpose. Purposeful. It’s one of my favorite things. Everything we do should be purposeful. Or why do it? But one of the things I've heard about millennials, but in particular Gen Zers, as distinct from earlier generations, is that they have a much higher desire to have a purposeful job than perhaps people in prior generations. I'll tell you a quick story. So when I was a young lawyer in New York City in the mid-1990s, I would typically get to the office at seven a.m. and leave at 10:00 p.m., typically five days a week, sometimes seven, when there was a big deal. But here's the thing about that I was actually happy. And the reason I was happy was because it was all I knew. It's what my dad did. It's what everybody around me was doing, so my happiness didn't take into consideration purposefulness. It didn't take into consideration a more complete life of skiing or going to the beach or riding a bike. So let's start with you, Lisa. That was 30 years ago. What's changed in the last 30 years that made young me less happy today?
Lisa Furst
Well, glad to hear you were happy then. I think we're doing the thing that demonstrates the difference. We're talking about it. I don't know that you would have had this conversation at that time. So there's increased awareness of, there's increased language around, there's increased dialog about the idea of wellness, and that wellness isn't something that is hedonistic we achieved outside of work, but that work and wellness are in fact interrelated in a meaningful way.
Spencer Levy
Lacey, same question to you. Not only based upon how we're having the conversation to use Lisa's words, but also where we're having the conversation, because in addition to these crazy work hours I was doing, I was also in Midtown Manhattan. But now we're seeing the hottest market being places like Denver, Salt Lake City, Miami -- places where you can have a legitimate live-work-play lifestyle. So Lacey, how do you address that change, not just from having the conversation, but also geographic issues?
Lacey Willard
Live-work-play well, they are integrated. They are experiences that are integrated. We've referenced them as a coupling. And that means just like Lisa said, you're bringing your whole person to everything that you're doing. And so that work-life -- some folks call it work-life-play -- it is integrated, and that's been a huge change about that acceptance and the awareness around that in our workplaces.
Spencer Levy
You know, there's a term that a lot of people used for years and years and years and years, which was work-life balance. And that thing has fallen out of favor because people say it's impossible. The term I use is harmony. What term do you use for that, Lacey?
Lacey Willard
I use integration, actually, it's this permission to bring my whole self, my whole authentic self in and what I'm doing. So I remember teaching my youngest letters when I'm typing. I was a receiver in the state of Florida for CBRE. And she was learning her alphabet with me as a bit of an example of work life integration. One of my early business meetings we brought the whole family along was. In a great district of culinary food down in Miami. And those are just examples of that work-life integration. That's a term that I like to run to.
Lisa Furst
I'm going to be the old timer here and say, I actually like the word balance. And the reason that I like the word balance is that it's something active that we do. And I was in a conversation with someone, actually at CBRE, and I have not forgotten this. We talked about the idea that in order to be balanced, you actually have to make an enormous number of adjustments along the way. Subtle adjustments, major adjustments. And so balance is a state of striving. And you might be emphasizing different things at different times. But as a whole you're feeling productive and satisfied and at peace with where you are overall, even if you have to focus more or balance more in a certain area at times.
Spencer Levy
Well, let me tell you another story because I think this goes to what Lacey was talking about a moment ago, and you as well, Lisa -- about being a complete person and being comfortable with yourself. My big break professionally -- we all need a break every once in a while, right -- really happened about seven years ago. There was something called the America Summit here at CBRE, where I gave this big speech in front of 3000 people. And at that moment, I said, You know what? I'm going to do this my way. I'm going to do this the way that I'm most comfortable, the way that I think is going to go over well with the audience and kind of put aside what might have been other expectations. And it was a huge moment because I think it was the first moment of my career. I really became me. I really wasn't afraid to be me. And it worked out. But very often people in the corporate context are afraid to express their individuality. So Lisa, how would you address that issue of people being afraid in the corporate context of being me -- not me? Spencer, but themselves bringing their actual individuality to the office?
Lisa Furst
Yeah. So you're talking about the question of authenticity, and you know, many of us were brought up in the work world to think that it wasn't about bringing your whole self to your role. You had a professional you and you had a personal you and ideally those didn't ever come together. And I think we're seeing a real useful breakdown of that where increasingly people want to be able to bring their whole self, bring their authentic self, to all of the roles that they occupy in their life, including in the workplace. So I think we're seeing a real shift there.
Lacey Willard
The best examples that I'm seeing right now are when leaders are doing that themselves. So we have a really great culture here and we see leaders starting meetings with well-being moments or DE and I moments. And each one has a personal story behind it. Our global head of people just did one herself. She had a great photo of a jog in the woods, and that's how she finds well-being for herself and wanted to share that story with her teams who chatted about it afterwards. We were chatting earlier about purpose. We see people take time, lunches or “runches” where they're jogging and chatting about it afterwards. So it’s really these examples that we're seeing set among colleagues within the workplace.
Spencer Levy
I just had a very strange image when you mentioned “runches” where, I mean, are they actually eating while running or are they running then stopping to eat?
Lacey Willard
They are taking their lunch time and dedicating it to physical well-being because they're all interested in that together.
Spencer Levy
Got it. Got it. Go, that would be making for a very messy lunch, but it might be emotionally fulfilling. I don't know. But let's go to a much tougher topic, folks. We're still in the midst of the pandemic, and I don't have to tell you just how scary this last 18 months has been, continues to be scary, and just the emotional rollercoaster that so many of us went through. So my question first to you, Lisa, is how did you handle the pandemic and the advice that you gave to your clients? And which of that advice do you think might be long lasting past the pandemic?
Lisa Furst
So the pandemic for most of us in the world was a new experience, and this question came up: How do I hope? How do I deal with this incredible stress, this fear? And while most of us have not ever lived through a pandemic before, we've all been through really tough times in one way or another, and we all have our inherent set of coping skills and our resilience that we can tap into. So often what I would say to people is what’s worked for you before when you've had a really difficult time that you've needed to get through? What works? Is it music? Is it connecting with a particular person? Is it time by yourself to just reflect? Whatever it is that you do to get through something tough, is that working for you now? It's something that can work for you now. And that reminds people that their own strategies, their own ideas, their own capacities still have worth, even in a new situation that is very stressful and can be very frightening.
Spencer Levy
I'm glad you mentioned music because that's where I found my happy place. I love music, and the song that gets me where I need to be is by Olivia Newton-John. It's called “Have You Ever Been Mellow”? And I think it's because I remember that song when I was on the radio, when I was a kid, and I'm in the back of my dad's car and I'm listening to this. So it was like the happiest moment of my life and I hear this great song. And so, well, that's how we got there. So Lacey, what’s some of the advice that you were giving to our colleagues during the pandemic, and how do you think you might change your advice to our colleagues going forward because of the pandemic?
Lacey Willard
There's a lot of awareness that we have to have of what was going on during the pandemic. Sixty percent of countries globally reported an interruption to mental health services. Our EAP programs, employee assistance programs, had a marked change in the type of calls they were receiving. Pre-pandemic we were talking about anxiety, stress, perhaps substance abuse. During the pandemic, that has changed a bit: more on anger management and more in relationship management. So that awareness piece of what exactly are those stressors become really important. So I think post-pandemic, a lot of the same coping mechanisms that we saw available pre-pandemic and sporadically during the pandemic will be available to us in the future. What we always talk about in our workshops is principles and getting down to what Lisa mentioned as those root0-cause analysis or what can bring me that stability or resilience, however, we wanted to define it. And it could be something within physical wellbeing or it sleep. Sleep comes up a lot when we're talking stress management. It could be something in finding that fun thing to do. Maybe it's just for the five minutes, five minutes a day. Those incremental steps. And so that that is really getting those ready-made coping mechanisms that do work and making sure those are at the ready.
Spencer Levy
Is it fair to say that -- hard to have a silver lining out of the COVID crisis -- but maybe there is a few. And maybe one of the silver linings is that people aren't afraid to talk about mental well-being. People aren't afraid to talk about stress because, let's be very direct here, for many years, it was considered a topic that many people were very uncomfortable to talk about in the workplace. Do you think that's changed permanently, Lacey?
Lacey Willard
It is a new way to dialog and a new way to have content to talk about with our colleagues. So absolutely, we think it's a change. And it's not only an infrastructure change in the coping mechanisms available, such as telemed, or ways that people will join, you know, support groups. But it's also an infrastructure change in the way that we emotionally and intellectually engage in these types of conversations in the workplace, in communities and with our families.
Lisa Furst
Absolutely. It’s that old idea that in crisis there is opportunity. And if ever there was an opportunity to increase dialog and raise awareness about mental and emotional health, this is it. And I am hoping that this will mark a permanent shift in our culture at large and certainly our culture at work.
Spencer Levy
One of the permanent shifts that we did see -- maybe not permanent, but certainly a big shift that a lot of it's going to be durable -- is remote work. We don't know how much hybrid work is going to be here in the future, but there's going to be a lot more of it. That may be good because people have more freedom to, particularly folks with kids and long commutes, and there's more freedom, more free time to do whatever it is they want to do. But there's another factor in. It comes out of a study that I read by Stanford University in 2015 and its loneliness. People working home alone have different emotional challenges than perhaps people being in the office itself. And maybe some of that counterbalances some of the benefits of being at home. What do you think, Lisa?
Lisa Furst
I think it's still an open question. I think a study done pre-pandemic might yield different results done post-pandemic. I think different generations with different experiences using technology might have very different feelings about it, might feel very comfortable or not. I think the only way to know if the impact of remote work is increasing loneliness for a group of employees is to actually ask them about it, rather than assuming there's going to be a group of people that does feel increasingly lonely to the point where it interferes with their personal or work satisfaction. So I think we need to continue to investigate this,
Spencer Levy
Lacey, back to you. Obviously, we're in the real estate business and the question of hybrid work impacts our day-to-day jobs. Are we going to lease office space or are people going to work from home? But going back to this wellness of the employees in the office versus those at home, have we thought about that, how we treat them the same or differently?
Lacey Willard
Yes. And let's go first to the definition of loneliness, because when we do ask the question, when we do ask, we do find that young people have a disproportionate impact of feelings of loneliness, which is defined as the gap between their social well-being I think I'm going to get and that social well-being I'm actually getting. And so the cure to that, of course, is social interactions, a sense of connection. But sometimes a sense of connection with others and sometimes a sense of connection with yourself through meditation understanding is that a reasonable gap. But we absolutely have seen a disproportionate impact of the loneliness feeling on young people. And the way that we deal with that is absolutely through addressing hybrid meetings in an effective way to make sure that we know that there are some people who are live, but respecting those who are virtually participating: advanced invites, setting the meeting agendas, real simple things, which a lot of what we talk about in mental health and wellbeing comes down to those basics so many times. But it's also maybe assuring participation from those virtual participants in our hybrid meeting scenarios and whenever possible, scheduling the maximum time that we can have face-to-face and making sure that this part of the larger plan.
Spencer Levy
Well, isn't it true, Lacey, that we formed a I think we call it the internal wellness task force during the pandemic. Did they play a role in this trying to define how we work with our employees that are in the office and those that are not?
Lacey Willard
Absolutely. And this group was responsible for creating our point of view for tracking metrics, for ensuring that the 23,000 comments that came in for our engagement survey were processed through natural language processing and that we understand the results and we have programs in place to address those. Our employees will have seen changes to our benefits program that are material based upon the feedback and analytics. Things like also having proactive communications and training our managers to have those really important conversations. Because, as always, not new to the pandemic, but always that very close relationship between managers and employees is really the key to understanding wellbeing.
Spencer Levy
Let's stay on this remote work hybrid work thing for just another moment because I want to bring in a concept that is so important now. Maybe the number one thing in commercial real estate, certainly from some of our European investors, which is DEI or ESG, plus R -- diversity, equity and inclusion, environmental, social governance and resilience. People are really trying to examine the treatment of people in the office and those not, where you do treat people better in the office than remotely, consciously or subconsciously. But that had been the way of the world for so long. So how do you address the DEI question as it relates to remote work to try to treat people the same?
Lisa Furst
I think it comes down to whether or not companies are truly centering equity. And if they are thinking about it and truly centering it, they will make those inquiries. They'll start to look at what is the balance of our folks working in a hybrid situation or a remote situation or fully an office? Who are those employees? How do they identify? What is it that we are doing to ensure equal access to resources, equal access to whatever face time is needed with leadership, access to work opportunities, regardless of location of work? It requires that centering of equity. It requires really examining who your workforce is, what is it they're doing and what the barriers they're identifying to that access to those opportunities. I think it's really important to, again, not just top down, but bottom up as well.
Spencer Levy
I think it's fair to say that the single most challenging issue that employers have today is attracting and retaining the best talent. Do wellness policies, procedures help attract and retain talent? And what are some of those policies and procedures you'd recommend to be able to maintain that for your organization, Lisa?
Lisa Furst
There's been a lot of studies about organizational wellness, corporate wellness that pre-date the pandemic. And all of them point to this idea that taking care of the whole person and allowing avenues for folks to take care of their whole selves doesn't just lead to more satisfaction in the moment, but people feel happier and more satisfied with where they are in the company that they're working for. So attention to wellness does pay off in terms of attracting and retaining talent.
Spencer Levy
And Lacey, let's get even more granular, let's talk about what CBRE did. We could talk a little bit more if you don't mind about CBRE’s focus on attracting and retaining the best talent, using the task force and other tools.
Lacey Willard
One of the first things that we did is participate in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation partnership with the Global Reporting Initiative to define 16 health determinants that are under the realm of well-being, three of which I'll let you know about here. One was financial literacy: being sure that we are educating our employees about what it means to be financially responsible. Pay and leave policies. Incredibly important. And it's another one of the determinants. And then we also have health literacy: what benefits to utilize for what types of needs for the individual and those in their household. So all of those we've seen actually and measurable outcomes come back to the company through investments. It’s kind of like a return on wellness. Things like increased productivity, talent management, brand management, which is so important to recruitment, our financial performance and economic societal engagement.
Spencer Levy
Let me introduce a word to this conversation, which I actually think is the most important word, not only in the workplace, but in society at large. And that word is empathy -- truly understanding the thoughts and feelings of somebody that's different than yourself. And maybe I'll start with you, Lacey is how important is empathy in the way that we get to a mental wellness or other forms of wellness in the workplace? And do you agree with my definition of it?
Lacey Willard
I agree with your definition. I think there is in the workplace an incredible importance around empathy. Ninety-seven percent of employees would recommend their manager report feeling understood as a person by them. And so that is the core definition of empathy. That means we feel understood. It's not maybe that we are understood. It’s that experience of feeling understood, and that we have a strong sense of belonging that results from that. We feel listened to and our needs are acted upon. There's just a compilation of what empathy means in the workplace that is really important to well-being.
Spencer Levy
There's a lot of social change in the country, some social unrest, and some have suggested that maybe we can't get to a point where we can understand each other that empathy isn't possible. What's your point of view, Lisa?
Lisa Furst
I would tend to think that empathy actually is possible. It is the place to start. Love the definition that you gave and how Lacey built upon it. But what I would say is that we can move to a concept of empathy and action. So my ability to be empathic, if that also is not matched by my own impetus for making change, empathy alone isn't going to cut it. It's nice to be understood. It's critical and key to be understood and to make that effort to understand to others. But if empathy isn't helping me to identify where there are barriers or points of struggle or opportunities for improvement and allow me to act on it, then empathy by itself may not be as transformative as we would like it to be.
Spencer Levy
Would you agree with that, Lacey?
Lacey Willard
I would and that we could never fully understand each other in reality should not be a blocker or an obstacle to trying that journey piece is so important and it's really that pursuit of the empathy and a purposeful and meaningful way that matters.
Spencer Levy
So when I teach public speaking, I ask my students to find a role model somebody you want to speak like, because by seeing their actions in the way they do things, you, too, can do it like that. So I have a role model. My role model happens to be Robin Williams. A lot of stand up comedians are great. They could be an actor, could be a politician. President Obama comes up all the time. All great, right? But I have a different role model when it comes to wellness. And my role model when it comes to wellness, actually is Mr. Rogers. I saw the two most recent movies on Mister Rogers. I felt hope in a way that I hadn't felt, maybe since I was a kid. So my first question to you, Lisa, is do you have a role model you try to follow and who do you recommend? And am I on the right path with Mr. Rogers?
Lisa Furst
I mean, who could argue with using Mr. Rogers as an example? I mean, what a paragon of kindness and empathy and all of the things that we were talking about. I think my role models change, and I add to the list of role models. I think right now who I've been really inspired by are some of our most well-known elite athletes actually. People like Simone Biles, people like Naomi Osaka, who are really demonstrating that the achievement of excellence is not to the exclusion of mental health and well-being, that they are in fact interrelated. And perfection may be impossible, but excellence is possible. But you've got to have good mental health in order to get there and to stay there.
Lacey Willard
Spencer, I love that you reference role models. Because much like in wellbeing, we don't put well-being on the shoulders of just the individual. We have a lot of different models that we can call upon ourselves when we're looking for certain virtues or certain activities. And when I was thinking about this -- and not everybody has this -- I guess this example is my little grandma. My little grandma comes to mind. And one of her sayings -- she had a lot of them -- was inch by inch. Life is a cinch yard by yard. Life is hard, and it really underscores this incremental value and the fact that you can have your say on something, on the prize, on winning the card game that grandma never let me win. Right. Whatever that is. But is that inch by inch and you see that and you know that that's going to be progressing. And it's so much for me exemplifies the journey of well-being that we talk about so often
Spencer Levy
So let's go now to final thoughts here. We covered a big topic here and what I would love from each of you, and you could take this any direction you like, but just giving me some practical advice for different types of people. Lacey, we'll start with you. What is the advice you'd give to people that are senior leaders to junior employees?
Lacey Willard
The advice that I typically give is you can be, well, you can have it all. You just define your own all. It's not something that's influenced by others. It's something you take a little bit of time to understand what elements of well-being really matter to me at this life stage? And how am I finding that balanced or harmonized or integrated or whatever makes sense to me personally? How am I finding the journey and how am I finding my way on that? So it’s was really defining your all is the advice I give
Spencer Levy
Great. Lisa, Same question to you. What advice do you give? You run into an elevator with a senior corporate leader or a more junior employee. What is the practical advice you can give them that can help them?
Lisa Furst
If I'm talking to a leader, I would certainly say be a model yourself. It's good to say the right things and have the right words and the right messaging, but be that model that takes time out for your own well-being so that other people can emulate you and feel comfortable mentoring others in that way, too.
Spencer Levy
And for the junior person.
Lisa Furst
Don't be afraid to reach out. Reach out for help. Reach out for information. Reach out for what you need to be the best self that you can be.
Spencer Levy
Mm-Hmm. So I'm sorry to keep going back to Mr. Rogers, but I'm reading the lyrics right now to a beautiful day in a neighborhood. There's a line in here. So let's make the most of this beautiful day since we're together, we might as well say, Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won't you be my neighbor? I think those are pretty powerful words from a children's song. I almost wanted to have a sing along now, but maybe that's going a little bit too far. But on behalf of The Weekly Take. I want to thank our two wonderful guests today. I want to thank first Lisa Furst, the chief program officer of Vibrant Emotional Health, for joining us on the show today. Lisa, thank you very much.
Lisa Furst
Thank you for having me.
Spencer Levy
And then my good friend and colleague Lacey Willard, senior director of Workplace Safety and Wellbeing at CBRE. Lacey, thank you so much for coming.
Lacey Willard
Spence, always good to chat with you,
Spencer Levy
For more on workplace wellness and mental health, please visit our web site CBRE.com slash The Weekly Take. You'll also find more on our show and ways to share it with anyone in your life, at work or at home, who might benefit from our discussion of this important subject. In the weeks to come, we'll move from wellness of the mind and body to healthy buildings, with public health experts and authors Joe Allen and John McCormack. And we'll log into CBRE’s recently published Data Center Operation Index with a conversation about that thriving sector. And more. For now, please remember to subscribe rate and review us wherever you listen. Until next time, I'm Spencer Levy. Be smart. Be safe. Be well.
Spencer Levy
I'm Spencer Levy, and this is The Weekly Take. How are you today? Seriously. How are you doing? That's actually a big question. We're about to discuss it with two leaders who think about it every day. On this episode: the important and emerging idea of wellness at work.
Lacey Willard
Mental health is when an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, is able to contribute to their community and, really interestingly, can work productively.
Spencer Levy
That's Lacey Willard, a CBRE senior director who leads the Global Center of Excellence for Workplace Safety and Wellbeing, joining us from Indianapolis. Lacey works to promote and integrate health, safety and environmental standards in the company and its culture.
Lisa Furst
Wellness focus has to start from the top. And it has to go sideways. It has to go all the way to every level in the organization. There has to be a real commitment there. And that's really key.
Spencer Levy
And that's Lisa Furst, the chief program officer, of Vibrant Emotional Health calling in from New Jersey. This is a thought leader, educator and author of more than two decades of experience in mental health policy and advocacy. Vibrant has been at the forefront of wellness for more than 50 years since it was founded as the Mental Health Association of New York City. Today, its stated mission is to promote emotional well-being with dignity and respect for all people. We'll talk about creating a healthy and safe workplace that's also productive and purposeful. Ideas like balance and belonging, empathy, role models and how newfound attention to all this stuff might be a silver lining of the pandemic. We'll also get some advice from our experts -- ews that leaders can use to promote wellness, including one example that I just learned about our discussion a moving mid-day routine called “runch”. Coming up: workplace wellness. That's right now on The Weekly Take. Welcome to The Weekly Take. And this week we are covering a topic that's so important during the COVID crisis, wellness, with two of the leading experts in the field. We always talk about the workplace in a physical sense, but now we're going to talk about it in the emotional sense. Let's start with a word, just one word wellness. It's a big word. It can mean a lot of things, but I'd like to know how you folks define it. So, Lisa, why don't you give us your definition of wellness?
Lisa Furst
So the first thing I'd love to say is that wellness is not a destination that we achieve and have forever. It's a process. It's something that we're actively striving for. It is multidimensional. It is how we are doing in our physical realm, our emotional realm, mentally, spiritually, socially, intellectually, it's are we feeling the way we want to feel? Are we doing what we want to do and are we feeling good about it? There's always room for growth and improvement in the wellness realm, and there's no such thing as perfection.
Spencer Levy
Alrighty. So Lacey, I'd love to hear how you define wellness.
Lacey Willard
Sure. I think about it in terms of two whos. The first is, who are the stakeholders that are impacted? First, it is a company making a decision to make a commitment to their people. Second, it is the people who are impacted by the focus on initiatives to thrive. And then third, which is really important, it is the communities and the families that are in turn impacted by those employees who are thriving. And when Lisa and I chat with folks about wellness and mental health, we are doing so under the definition of the World Health Organization. What they say is that mental health is when an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, is able to contribute to their community, and really interestingly can work productively.
Spencer Levy
Got it, so there's a lot of ways to to unpack that. And I think the way that I would put it is being a complete person emotionally and mentally. And if you do that, you can then achieve more professionally and personally. Am I summarizing it in a fair way?
Lacey Willard
It does. Sounds great.
Spencer Levy
All right. So let's now take that definition of wellness to two great definitions that Lisa and Lacy gave in my interpretation of that, and let's apply it. So we're here in a big company at CBRE. We're also in real estate. So let's start with you, Lisa. Just give us how wellness works in the context of a big company.
Lisa Furst
There are so many levels to that Spencer. I would say that a wellness focus has to start from the top. And it has to go sideways. It has to go all the way to every level in the organization. There has to be a real commitment there. And that's really key. Individuals, of course, can promote their own well-being. Managers and internal leaders can promote the well-being of the teams that they work with, but it's really a movement that comes from executive leadership and rolls from there.
Spencer Levy
Isn't there also a bottom up component to this as well, Lisa?
Lisa Furst
Absolutely there is. So all of the best messaging from the top doesn't work if it's not the messaging that people need. And so certainly that interaction from the bottom up and from side to side will matter in terms of helping leadership understand: What does well being mean to the employees in their company? And what does that look like for them? And how can that be achieved in the corporate community?
Spencer Levy
Great. So, Lacey, let's turn to you now. How do we make wellness work in a big company like CBRE, but anything specific to the real estate industry, the commercial real estate industry in which we sit.
Lacey Willard
It is really that shared definition of wellbeing with leadership as well as employees. Interestingly, there are some commonalities to the way the companies look and define in a shared way what well-being is. So physical well-being is pretty consistently used. So it's how we support good health awareness and vitality. Think how well we sleep, how we eat, exercise. There's another type of well-being which is occupational. And if I'm looking for a one word substitute is purpose. Sometimes companies call it spirituality or emotional engagement, but it’s that purpose piece. And a lot of companies have that another way that companies define well-being as intellectual. Perhaps think growth mindset. So it's how we learn new concepts, improve new skill sets. There's two more elements of wellbeing, though, that we see in particular in the commercial real estate industry. The first would be social well-being. It's how we connect with our colleagues and establish those positive relationships. And naturally we’re connecting in places of commercial real estate. Maybe it's in retail and connecting with families or buying products and maybe in an office space. So that connection piece is incredibly important. And the fifth and final element of well-being that we see most readily in commercial real estate is environmental. How do we create a safe, productive and comfortable workplace there, we're talking about things like materiality types of materials that are around us. Mindfulness, the variety that we need to get the things that we need to get done in the places that we are. How we prepare health, safety, environmental elements. IAQ nourishment, positive defaults. And of course how we're designing for behavioral, meaning, perhaps ergonomics.
Spencer Levy
I like the word you use a lot of the words you use there Lacey. But the one I want to focus on is purpose. Purposeful. It’s one of my favorite things. Everything we do should be purposeful. Or why do it? But one of the things I've heard about millennials, but in particular Gen Zers, as distinct from earlier generations, is that they have a much higher desire to have a purposeful job than perhaps people in prior generations. I'll tell you a quick story. So when I was a young lawyer in New York City in the mid-1990s, I would typically get to the office at seven a.m. and leave at 10:00 p.m., typically five days a week, sometimes seven, when there was a big deal. But here's the thing about that I was actually happy. And the reason I was happy was because it was all I knew. It's what my dad did. It's what everybody around me was doing, so my happiness didn't take into consideration purposefulness. It didn't take into consideration a more complete life of skiing or going to the beach or riding a bike. So let's start with you, Lisa. That was 30 years ago. What's changed in the last 30 years that made young me less happy today?
Lisa Furst
Well, glad to hear you were happy then. I think we're doing the thing that demonstrates the difference. We're talking about it. I don't know that you would have had this conversation at that time. So there's increased awareness of, there's increased language around, there's increased dialog about the idea of wellness, and that wellness isn't something that is hedonistic we achieved outside of work, but that work and wellness are in fact interrelated in a meaningful way.
Spencer Levy
Lacey, same question to you. Not only based upon how we're having the conversation to use Lisa's words, but also where we're having the conversation, because in addition to these crazy work hours I was doing, I was also in Midtown Manhattan. But now we're seeing the hottest market being places like Denver, Salt Lake City, Miami -- places where you can have a legitimate live-work-play lifestyle. So Lacey, how do you address that change, not just from having the conversation, but also geographic issues?
Lacey Willard
Live-work-play well, they are integrated. They are experiences that are integrated. We've referenced them as a coupling. And that means just like Lisa said, you're bringing your whole person to everything that you're doing. And so that work-life -- some folks call it work-life-play -- it is integrated, and that's been a huge change about that acceptance and the awareness around that in our workplaces.
Spencer Levy
You know, there's a term that a lot of people used for years and years and years and years, which was work-life balance. And that thing has fallen out of favor because people say it's impossible. The term I use is harmony. What term do you use for that, Lacey?
Lacey Willard
I use integration, actually, it's this permission to bring my whole self, my whole authentic self in and what I'm doing. So I remember teaching my youngest letters when I'm typing. I was a receiver in the state of Florida for CBRE. And she was learning her alphabet with me as a bit of an example of work life integration. One of my early business meetings we brought the whole family along was. In a great district of culinary food down in Miami. And those are just examples of that work-life integration. That's a term that I like to run to.
Lisa Furst
I'm going to be the old timer here and say, I actually like the word balance. And the reason that I like the word balance is that it's something active that we do. And I was in a conversation with someone, actually at CBRE, and I have not forgotten this. We talked about the idea that in order to be balanced, you actually have to make an enormous number of adjustments along the way. Subtle adjustments, major adjustments. And so balance is a state of striving. And you might be emphasizing different things at different times. But as a whole you're feeling productive and satisfied and at peace with where you are overall, even if you have to focus more or balance more in a certain area at times.
Spencer Levy
Well, let me tell you another story because I think this goes to what Lacey was talking about a moment ago, and you as well, Lisa -- about being a complete person and being comfortable with yourself. My big break professionally -- we all need a break every once in a while, right -- really happened about seven years ago. There was something called the America Summit here at CBRE, where I gave this big speech in front of 3000 people. And at that moment, I said, You know what? I'm going to do this my way. I'm going to do this the way that I'm most comfortable, the way that I think is going to go over well with the audience and kind of put aside what might have been other expectations. And it was a huge moment because I think it was the first moment of my career. I really became me. I really wasn't afraid to be me. And it worked out. But very often people in the corporate context are afraid to express their individuality. So Lisa, how would you address that issue of people being afraid in the corporate context of being me -- not me? Spencer, but themselves bringing their actual individuality to the office?
Lisa Furst
Yeah. So you're talking about the question of authenticity, and you know, many of us were brought up in the work world to think that it wasn't about bringing your whole self to your role. You had a professional you and you had a personal you and ideally those didn't ever come together. And I think we're seeing a real useful breakdown of that where increasingly people want to be able to bring their whole self, bring their authentic self, to all of the roles that they occupy in their life, including in the workplace. So I think we're seeing a real shift there.
Lacey Willard
The best examples that I'm seeing right now are when leaders are doing that themselves. So we have a really great culture here and we see leaders starting meetings with well-being moments or DE and I moments. And each one has a personal story behind it. Our global head of people just did one herself. She had a great photo of a jog in the woods, and that's how she finds well-being for herself and wanted to share that story with her teams who chatted about it afterwards. We were chatting earlier about purpose. We see people take time, lunches or “runches” where they're jogging and chatting about it afterwards. So it’s really these examples that we're seeing set among colleagues within the workplace.
Spencer Levy
I just had a very strange image when you mentioned “runches” where, I mean, are they actually eating while running or are they running then stopping to eat?
Lacey Willard
They are taking their lunch time and dedicating it to physical well-being because they're all interested in that together.
Spencer Levy
Got it. Got it. Go, that would be making for a very messy lunch, but it might be emotionally fulfilling. I don't know. But let's go to a much tougher topic, folks. We're still in the midst of the pandemic, and I don't have to tell you just how scary this last 18 months has been, continues to be scary, and just the emotional rollercoaster that so many of us went through. So my question first to you, Lisa, is how did you handle the pandemic and the advice that you gave to your clients? And which of that advice do you think might be long lasting past the pandemic?
Lisa Furst
So the pandemic for most of us in the world was a new experience, and this question came up: How do I hope? How do I deal with this incredible stress, this fear? And while most of us have not ever lived through a pandemic before, we've all been through really tough times in one way or another, and we all have our inherent set of coping skills and our resilience that we can tap into. So often what I would say to people is what’s worked for you before when you've had a really difficult time that you've needed to get through? What works? Is it music? Is it connecting with a particular person? Is it time by yourself to just reflect? Whatever it is that you do to get through something tough, is that working for you now? It's something that can work for you now. And that reminds people that their own strategies, their own ideas, their own capacities still have worth, even in a new situation that is very stressful and can be very frightening.
Spencer Levy
I'm glad you mentioned music because that's where I found my happy place. I love music, and the song that gets me where I need to be is by Olivia Newton-John. It's called “Have You Ever Been Mellow”? And I think it's because I remember that song when I was on the radio, when I was a kid, and I'm in the back of my dad's car and I'm listening to this. So it was like the happiest moment of my life and I hear this great song. And so, well, that's how we got there. So Lacey, what’s some of the advice that you were giving to our colleagues during the pandemic, and how do you think you might change your advice to our colleagues going forward because of the pandemic?
Lacey Willard
There's a lot of awareness that we have to have of what was going on during the pandemic. Sixty percent of countries globally reported an interruption to mental health services. Our EAP programs, employee assistance programs, had a marked change in the type of calls they were receiving. Pre-pandemic we were talking about anxiety, stress, perhaps substance abuse. During the pandemic, that has changed a bit: more on anger management and more in relationship management. So that awareness piece of what exactly are those stressors become really important. So I think post-pandemic, a lot of the same coping mechanisms that we saw available pre-pandemic and sporadically during the pandemic will be available to us in the future. What we always talk about in our workshops is principles and getting down to what Lisa mentioned as those root0-cause analysis or what can bring me that stability or resilience, however, we wanted to define it. And it could be something within physical wellbeing or it sleep. Sleep comes up a lot when we're talking stress management. It could be something in finding that fun thing to do. Maybe it's just for the five minutes, five minutes a day. Those incremental steps. And so that that is really getting those ready-made coping mechanisms that do work and making sure those are at the ready.
Spencer Levy
Is it fair to say that -- hard to have a silver lining out of the COVID crisis -- but maybe there is a few. And maybe one of the silver linings is that people aren't afraid to talk about mental well-being. People aren't afraid to talk about stress because, let's be very direct here, for many years, it was considered a topic that many people were very uncomfortable to talk about in the workplace. Do you think that's changed permanently, Lacey?
Lacey Willard
It is a new way to dialog and a new way to have content to talk about with our colleagues. So absolutely, we think it's a change. And it's not only an infrastructure change in the coping mechanisms available, such as telemed, or ways that people will join, you know, support groups. But it's also an infrastructure change in the way that we emotionally and intellectually engage in these types of conversations in the workplace, in communities and with our families.
Lisa Furst
Absolutely. It’s that old idea that in crisis there is opportunity. And if ever there was an opportunity to increase dialog and raise awareness about mental and emotional health, this is it. And I am hoping that this will mark a permanent shift in our culture at large and certainly our culture at work.
Spencer Levy
One of the permanent shifts that we did see -- maybe not permanent, but certainly a big shift that a lot of it's going to be durable -- is remote work. We don't know how much hybrid work is going to be here in the future, but there's going to be a lot more of it. That may be good because people have more freedom to, particularly folks with kids and long commutes, and there's more freedom, more free time to do whatever it is they want to do. But there's another factor in. It comes out of a study that I read by Stanford University in 2015 and its loneliness. People working home alone have different emotional challenges than perhaps people being in the office itself. And maybe some of that counterbalances some of the benefits of being at home. What do you think, Lisa?
Lisa Furst
I think it's still an open question. I think a study done pre-pandemic might yield different results done post-pandemic. I think different generations with different experiences using technology might have very different feelings about it, might feel very comfortable or not. I think the only way to know if the impact of remote work is increasing loneliness for a group of employees is to actually ask them about it, rather than assuming there's going to be a group of people that does feel increasingly lonely to the point where it interferes with their personal or work satisfaction. So I think we need to continue to investigate this,
Spencer Levy
Lacey, back to you. Obviously, we're in the real estate business and the question of hybrid work impacts our day-to-day jobs. Are we going to lease office space or are people going to work from home? But going back to this wellness of the employees in the office versus those at home, have we thought about that, how we treat them the same or differently?
Lacey Willard
Yes. And let's go first to the definition of loneliness, because when we do ask the question, when we do ask, we do find that young people have a disproportionate impact of feelings of loneliness, which is defined as the gap between their social well-being I think I'm going to get and that social well-being I'm actually getting. And so the cure to that, of course, is social interactions, a sense of connection. But sometimes a sense of connection with others and sometimes a sense of connection with yourself through meditation understanding is that a reasonable gap. But we absolutely have seen a disproportionate impact of the loneliness feeling on young people. And the way that we deal with that is absolutely through addressing hybrid meetings in an effective way to make sure that we know that there are some people who are live, but respecting those who are virtually participating: advanced invites, setting the meeting agendas, real simple things, which a lot of what we talk about in mental health and wellbeing comes down to those basics so many times. But it's also maybe assuring participation from those virtual participants in our hybrid meeting scenarios and whenever possible, scheduling the maximum time that we can have face-to-face and making sure that this part of the larger plan.
Spencer Levy
Well, isn't it true, Lacey, that we formed a I think we call it the internal wellness task force during the pandemic. Did they play a role in this trying to define how we work with our employees that are in the office and those that are not?
Lacey Willard
Absolutely. And this group was responsible for creating our point of view for tracking metrics, for ensuring that the 23,000 comments that came in for our engagement survey were processed through natural language processing and that we understand the results and we have programs in place to address those. Our employees will have seen changes to our benefits program that are material based upon the feedback and analytics. Things like also having proactive communications and training our managers to have those really important conversations. Because, as always, not new to the pandemic, but always that very close relationship between managers and employees is really the key to understanding wellbeing.
Spencer Levy
Let's stay on this remote work hybrid work thing for just another moment because I want to bring in a concept that is so important now. Maybe the number one thing in commercial real estate, certainly from some of our European investors, which is DEI or ESG, plus R -- diversity, equity and inclusion, environmental, social governance and resilience. People are really trying to examine the treatment of people in the office and those not, where you do treat people better in the office than remotely, consciously or subconsciously. But that had been the way of the world for so long. So how do you address the DEI question as it relates to remote work to try to treat people the same?
Lisa Furst
I think it comes down to whether or not companies are truly centering equity. And if they are thinking about it and truly centering it, they will make those inquiries. They'll start to look at what is the balance of our folks working in a hybrid situation or a remote situation or fully an office? Who are those employees? How do they identify? What is it that we are doing to ensure equal access to resources, equal access to whatever face time is needed with leadership, access to work opportunities, regardless of location of work? It requires that centering of equity. It requires really examining who your workforce is, what is it they're doing and what the barriers they're identifying to that access to those opportunities. I think it's really important to, again, not just top down, but bottom up as well.
Spencer Levy
I think it's fair to say that the single most challenging issue that employers have today is attracting and retaining the best talent. Do wellness policies, procedures help attract and retain talent? And what are some of those policies and procedures you'd recommend to be able to maintain that for your organization, Lisa?
Lisa Furst
There's been a lot of studies about organizational wellness, corporate wellness that pre-date the pandemic. And all of them point to this idea that taking care of the whole person and allowing avenues for folks to take care of their whole selves doesn't just lead to more satisfaction in the moment, but people feel happier and more satisfied with where they are in the company that they're working for. So attention to wellness does pay off in terms of attracting and retaining talent.
Spencer Levy
And Lacey, let's get even more granular, let's talk about what CBRE did. We could talk a little bit more if you don't mind about CBRE’s focus on attracting and retaining the best talent, using the task force and other tools.
Lacey Willard
One of the first things that we did is participate in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation partnership with the Global Reporting Initiative to define 16 health determinants that are under the realm of well-being, three of which I'll let you know about here. One was financial literacy: being sure that we are educating our employees about what it means to be financially responsible. Pay and leave policies. Incredibly important. And it's another one of the determinants. And then we also have health literacy: what benefits to utilize for what types of needs for the individual and those in their household. So all of those we've seen actually and measurable outcomes come back to the company through investments. It’s kind of like a return on wellness. Things like increased productivity, talent management, brand management, which is so important to recruitment, our financial performance and economic societal engagement.
Spencer Levy
Let me introduce a word to this conversation, which I actually think is the most important word, not only in the workplace, but in society at large. And that word is empathy -- truly understanding the thoughts and feelings of somebody that's different than yourself. And maybe I'll start with you, Lacey is how important is empathy in the way that we get to a mental wellness or other forms of wellness in the workplace? And do you agree with my definition of it?
Lacey Willard
I agree with your definition. I think there is in the workplace an incredible importance around empathy. Ninety-seven percent of employees would recommend their manager report feeling understood as a person by them. And so that is the core definition of empathy. That means we feel understood. It's not maybe that we are understood. It’s that experience of feeling understood, and that we have a strong sense of belonging that results from that. We feel listened to and our needs are acted upon. There's just a compilation of what empathy means in the workplace that is really important to well-being.
Spencer Levy
There's a lot of social change in the country, some social unrest, and some have suggested that maybe we can't get to a point where we can understand each other that empathy isn't possible. What's your point of view, Lisa?
Lisa Furst
I would tend to think that empathy actually is possible. It is the place to start. Love the definition that you gave and how Lacey built upon it. But what I would say is that we can move to a concept of empathy and action. So my ability to be empathic, if that also is not matched by my own impetus for making change, empathy alone isn't going to cut it. It's nice to be understood. It's critical and key to be understood and to make that effort to understand to others. But if empathy isn't helping me to identify where there are barriers or points of struggle or opportunities for improvement and allow me to act on it, then empathy by itself may not be as transformative as we would like it to be.
Spencer Levy
Would you agree with that, Lacey?
Lacey Willard
I would and that we could never fully understand each other in reality should not be a blocker or an obstacle to trying that journey piece is so important and it's really that pursuit of the empathy and a purposeful and meaningful way that matters.
Spencer Levy
So when I teach public speaking, I ask my students to find a role model somebody you want to speak like, because by seeing their actions in the way they do things, you, too, can do it like that. So I have a role model. My role model happens to be Robin Williams. A lot of stand up comedians are great. They could be an actor, could be a politician. President Obama comes up all the time. All great, right? But I have a different role model when it comes to wellness. And my role model when it comes to wellness, actually is Mr. Rogers. I saw the two most recent movies on Mister Rogers. I felt hope in a way that I hadn't felt, maybe since I was a kid. So my first question to you, Lisa, is do you have a role model you try to follow and who do you recommend? And am I on the right path with Mr. Rogers?
Lisa Furst
I mean, who could argue with using Mr. Rogers as an example? I mean, what a paragon of kindness and empathy and all of the things that we were talking about. I think my role models change, and I add to the list of role models. I think right now who I've been really inspired by are some of our most well-known elite athletes actually. People like Simone Biles, people like Naomi Osaka, who are really demonstrating that the achievement of excellence is not to the exclusion of mental health and well-being, that they are in fact interrelated. And perfection may be impossible, but excellence is possible. But you've got to have good mental health in order to get there and to stay there.
Lacey Willard
Spencer, I love that you reference role models. Because much like in wellbeing, we don't put well-being on the shoulders of just the individual. We have a lot of different models that we can call upon ourselves when we're looking for certain virtues or certain activities. And when I was thinking about this -- and not everybody has this -- I guess this example is my little grandma. My little grandma comes to mind. And one of her sayings -- she had a lot of them -- was inch by inch. Life is a cinch yard by yard. Life is hard, and it really underscores this incremental value and the fact that you can have your say on something, on the prize, on winning the card game that grandma never let me win. Right. Whatever that is. But is that inch by inch and you see that and you know that that's going to be progressing. And it's so much for me exemplifies the journey of well-being that we talk about so often
Spencer Levy
So let's go now to final thoughts here. We covered a big topic here and what I would love from each of you, and you could take this any direction you like, but just giving me some practical advice for different types of people. Lacey, we'll start with you. What is the advice you'd give to people that are senior leaders to junior employees?
Lacey Willard
The advice that I typically give is you can be, well, you can have it all. You just define your own all. It's not something that's influenced by others. It's something you take a little bit of time to understand what elements of well-being really matter to me at this life stage? And how am I finding that balanced or harmonized or integrated or whatever makes sense to me personally? How am I finding the journey and how am I finding my way on that? So it’s was really defining your all is the advice I give
Spencer Levy
Great. Lisa, Same question to you. What advice do you give? You run into an elevator with a senior corporate leader or a more junior employee. What is the practical advice you can give them that can help them?
Lisa Furst
If I'm talking to a leader, I would certainly say be a model yourself. It's good to say the right things and have the right words and the right messaging, but be that model that takes time out for your own well-being so that other people can emulate you and feel comfortable mentoring others in that way, too.
Spencer Levy
And for the junior person.
Lisa Furst
Don't be afraid to reach out. Reach out for help. Reach out for information. Reach out for what you need to be the best self that you can be.
Spencer Levy
Mm-Hmm. So I'm sorry to keep going back to Mr. Rogers, but I'm reading the lyrics right now to a beautiful day in a neighborhood. There's a line in here. So let's make the most of this beautiful day since we're together, we might as well say, Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won't you be my neighbor? I think those are pretty powerful words from a children's song. I almost wanted to have a sing along now, but maybe that's going a little bit too far. But on behalf of The Weekly Take. I want to thank our two wonderful guests today. I want to thank first Lisa Furst, the chief program officer of Vibrant Emotional Health, for joining us on the show today. Lisa, thank you very much.
Lisa Furst
Thank you for having me.
Spencer Levy
And then my good friend and colleague Lacey Willard, senior director of Workplace Safety and Wellbeing at CBRE. Lacey, thank you so much for coming.
Lacey Willard
Spence, always good to chat with you,
Spencer Levy
For more on workplace wellness and mental health, please visit our web site CBRE.com slash The Weekly Take. You'll also find more on our show and ways to share it with anyone in your life, at work or at home, who might benefit from our discussion of this important subject. In the weeks to come, we'll move from wellness of the mind and body to healthy buildings, with public health experts and authors Joe Allen and John McCormack. And we'll log into CBRE’s recently published Data Center Operation Index with a conversation about that thriving sector. And more. For now, please remember to subscribe rate and review us wherever you listen. Until next time, I'm Spencer Levy. Be smart. Be safe. Be well.
Guests
Lisa Furst
Chief Program Officer, Vibrant Emotional Health
Lisa Furst has more than 20 years of experience in the mental health service sector and is currently the Chief Program Officer for Vibrant Emotional Heath. Her expertise includes program development and implementation, training and technical assistance, quality improvement, fundraising and advocacy. She is an author of and contributor to several books on mental health, with particular expertise on older adult mental health. She also has published articles in Behavioral Health News, Geriatric Medicine, the Journal of Care Management, and other publications, as well as interviewed by national news outlets, such as The New York Times and CNN.
Lacey Willard
Vice President, Corporate Responsibility Office Operations & Global Workplace Safety & Wellbeing
Lacey Willard leads Global Workplace Safety & Wellbeing at CBRE, helping the company demonstrate its strong commitment to a safe and well work experience for all its people. In collaboration with global subject matter experts, Ms. Willard builds health, safety, environmental and wellbeing concerns into CBRE's business practices and culture. She provides executive oversight, leads pandemic health efforts and brings together global thought leaders to develop effective strategies, standards and messaging. Through her work in developing custom technology, CBRE is able to measure impact, risk and productivity across business lines, securing industry recognition. In addition to overseeing Workplace Safety & Wellbeing, Ms. Willard maintains progress across five Corporate Responsibility pillars contributing to ESG, DE&I, and Philanthropic outcomes, and is responsible for governance, reporting and metrics as VP of Operations. Ms. Willard brings more than twenty years of experience in the commercial real estate industry, with a law degree and academic focus in real property and corporate-related matters. Prior to her current role, Ms. Willard was part of CBRE’s Client Care group serving institutional and investor clients who own, develop and transact in commercial real estate. There, she was responsible for comprehensive performance across all lines of business, including real estate management, project management, brokerage and investment sales services for office, industrial and retail properties. Ms. Willard also led CBRE’s Recovery & Restructuring Services in Florida, where she was responsible for the receivership and distressed asset portfolio management program, business development and client relations efforts. There, she participated in more than 100 active receiverships and distressed asset assignments, and executed agreements, developments, leases, PSAs and deeds of sale on behalf of estates. Prior to joining CBRE, Ms. Willard managed a portfolio of government-owned and leased commercial real estate as a Senior Manager and Contracting Officer in the federal public sector with the General Services Administration. Key accomplishments included an International Building of the Year Award, published works and conscription to FEMA’s ESF7.
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Spencer Levy
Global Client Strategist & Senior Economic Advisor, CBRE
Spencer Levy is Global Client Strategist and Senior Economic Advisor for CBRE, the largest commercial real estate services firm in the world. In this role, he focuses on client engagement and public-facing activities, including thought leadership work performed in conjunction with CBRE Research. He also serves as Co-Chair of the Real Estate Roundtable’s Research Committee.
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