After the events of the past twelve months, employees’ emotional well-being should be right at the top of the agenda for all businesses. So what can employers do to help, and how does the support they give sit right at the heart of their employer brand and values?
My guest this week is Dan Anastas, VP of Total Rewards and HR Operations at UI Path. UI Path has made their employees’ emotional health a business imperative and uses several different tools and approaches to help them.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ How the pandemic has affected employee experience
▪ Emotional health as a crucial part of well being
▪ How UI Path is supporting its employees
▪ Thinking about the whole person
▪ The role of digital tools
▪ The importance of feedback mechanisms
▪ Reducing the load
▪ Emotional health and Employer brand
▪ The future of work and what is next for UI path
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Globally, 43% of candidates drop out of.
Matt Alder [00:00:03]:
An interview process due to scheduling frustrations.
Matt Alder [00:00:08]:
Interview scheduling is one of the biggest pain points in recruiting, with all that.
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Back and forth creating the potential for a very poor candidate experience. This episode of the Recruiting Future podcast.
Matt Alder [00:00:20]:
Is sponsored by Chronofy, the scheduling platform for business, HR and recruiting professionals. The Chronofi Scheduler makes scheduling interviews easy. It saves you time, allowing you to.
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Stay in complete control of your schedule.
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Matt Alder [00:01:11]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 346 of the Recruiting Future podcast. After the events of the last 12 months, employees emotional well being should be right at the top of the agenda for all businesses. So what can employers do to help? And how does the support they give sit right at the heart of their employer brand and their values? My guest this week is Dana Nastas, VP of Total Rewards and HR Operations at UiPath. UiPath has made their employees emotional health a business imperative and uses several different tools and approaches to help them.
Matt Alder [00:01:55]:
Hi Dan and welcome to the podcast.
Dan Anastas [00:01:57]:
Matt, great to be here.
Matt Alder [00:01:58]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Dan Anastas [00:02:04]:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dan Anastas [00:02:05]:
My name is Dan Anastas. I work for UiPath. We are an enterprise automation software company and I lead Total Rewards, which encompasses our compensation, benefits and and other components of our hr strategy at UiPath.
Matt Alder [00:02:20]:
Fantastic stuff. Now, before we kind of get into some of the things that you’ve sort of been doing specifically, I just wondered if you could give everyone a quick insight into UiPath, the story and what the company does. The the reason I ask is the UiPath has come up several times in other interviews in terms of your kind of market leading position and the the innovation that you have. So it would be great if you could tell everyone a little bit more about UiPath and what it does.
Dan Anastas [00:02:49]:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dan Anastas [00:02:51]:
So our mission at the end of the day is to unlock human creativity and ingenuity by enabling the fully automated enterprise and empowering workers through automation. Automation can take on endless repetitive work that we don’t enjoy and it can liberate us to focus on the qualities that only we as humans have abstract Thinking, creativity, innovation, passion, community, engagement. All of this translates into a greater employee engagement and greater business value. So our mission and vision are pretty simple. We want to eliminate the day to day drudgery. We want to allow employees to engage and immerse themselves in the work that is truly fulfilling to them. And we also recognize that we’re not perfect and we don’t have all the answers. But what I’m here to share Today is how UiPath invests in employees and individuals so that we can really get.
Dan Anastas [00:03:43]:
People to the next level.
Matt Alder [00:03:44]:
Fantastic stuff. So we’re obviously still going through the global pandemic that’s turned everyone’s lives upside down and has really sort of changed our relationship with work and, and how we work and the whole kind of work experience. So what are you sort of seeing at UiPath in terms of your employee experience? What’s been happening? How’s it affected the company? What, what have, what have you been, what have you been doing?
Dan Anastas [00:04:12]:
Yeah, we’ve seen a pretty dynamic sh in the last year or so due to the whole COVID pandemic, as many, many other companies are experiencing as well. Being a technology company, we were already.
Dan Anastas [00:04:24]:
Enabled with many of the tools to.
Dan Anastas [00:04:26]:
Work remotely, but we had a very.
Dan Anastas [00:04:29]:
Deep seated, and we still have a.
Dan Anastas [00:04:30]:
Very deep seated in person culture. And part of that is around our offices. We made our offices, you know, from our founders in Bucharest to our New.
Dan Anastas [00:04:41]:
York headquarters, we made our offices a destination for our employees.
Dan Anastas [00:04:45]:
People came together to collabor great. They came together and they really enjoyed.
Dan Anastas [00:04:50]:
Working in person and with one another. And so over the course of the last year, we had to kind of.
Dan Anastas [00:04:55]:
Rethink the ways that we work and how it is that we interact with one another. We moved from a culture where there was a lot of travel to meet customers and a lot of travel to see one another, to being fully remote. Adapting to that environment has created challenges. Not every person at our company and any other company is necessarily set up for, for successful working in their home. There are kids, there are spouses, there are parents, there are dogs. You’ll probably hear mind barking at some point throughout this interview. People have a lot going on in their personal lives. And so that disconnect from going to an office where you had dedicated space to think and work got flipped upside down because work was home and home was work.
Dan Anastas [00:05:41]:
And so people really needed ways to.
Dan Anastas [00:05:44]:
Think about how they navigate through that, how do they draw their lines? And that’s where a lot of our.
Dan Anastas [00:05:50]:
Wellness strategy kind of came into play.
Dan Anastas [00:05:52]:
We Started to think about how do we highlight emotional health as a secondary.
Dan Anastas [00:05:59]:
Piece to well being strategy.
Dan Anastas [00:06:01]:
Thinking about that in the context of 78% of people in an American Psychological association survey of about 3,500 people said that the pandemic was a significant source of stress. How do we remove some of that from what’s existing in the workplace, which can also be a stressful environment?
Dan Anastas [00:06:20]:
So we really had to rethink how.
Dan Anastas [00:06:22]:
We were doing things.
Matt Alder [00:06:23]:
I mean that’s a really interesting situation. You’ve got, you know, offices that people enjoy coming to. Your, you’re a kind of a fast, a fast growing company and then all of a sudden everyone’s working from, from home. So when you sort of looked into this as a, as a strategy, what was it you did to really kind of support your employees? I suppose, both in the, in the short term and in the, in the longer term.
Dan Anastas [00:06:47]:
Yeah.
Dan Anastas [00:06:47]:
So we really had to kind of take a look at what we thought we were doing from a well being strategy to focus, you know, as I.
Dan Anastas [00:06:55]:
Mentioned, shift away from physical wellness, but.
Dan Anastas [00:06:58]:
Also thinking about emotional well being and the whole person. So how do we maintain the health and wellness and performance of our workers and employees? And we needed to rethink that. And so this was really the first time that we started to receive managers.
Dan Anastas [00:07:16]:
Reaching out to us and saying, hey.
Dan Anastas [00:07:17]:
I’m worried about my people. This is different. We don’t know how to navigate through this. How do we innovate and reinvent the.
Dan Anastas [00:07:26]:
Work for our own employees the same.
Dan Anastas [00:07:28]:
Way that we do for our customers? UiPath is all about transforming work for our customers. And we had to take that and internalize that and make ourselves transform.
Dan Anastas [00:07:38]:
And so the first thing we did.
Dan Anastas [00:07:40]:
Was we really looked to our values at UiPath. Our values are be humble, be bold, be immersed, be fast. And so we really internalize these values to think about as a company, as a company that is people first above all else.
Dan Anastas [00:07:56]:
How do we make sure that we.
Dan Anastas [00:07:58]:
Offer them all the support that they need? And so what we did is we really, the first thing we did was we went out and listened. We what, what do people have to say? What are their pressure points? And we heard all the same things that were showing up in the data that it was emotional well being, it wasn’t just physical, but that was a component of it. And so what we did is we.
Dan Anastas [00:08:19]:
Went out and kind of customized and.
Dan Anastas [00:08:21]:
Thought about how do we support them in a virtual society. We have people in 40 plus countries. And so we wanted to make sure that we found solutions that were truly global, that could be transferred from one country to another and that would really resonate with people. And so we went out and our first kind of process was to think.
Dan Anastas [00:08:40]:
About what physical tools.
Dan Anastas [00:08:42]:
And so we went out and we got some tools that exist in app form, right? Everybody has their phone on them all the time. And so we got a couple of apps. We had some apps for mental health, mental health, and we had some physical health apps. And we went out and got those and we launched those to employees and we had a pretty good adoption rate. The company through all of this was really supportive and gave us about 1% of employee salaries to dedicate just to this well being initiative. And so we were able to go out and get a lot of bang for our buck for employees globally. So we ended up using Headspace, which is a really popular meditation and mindfulness app. It is founded by a former Buddhist.
Dan Anastas [00:09:24]:
Monk who left the monastery and returned.
Dan Anastas [00:09:26]:
To the UK with a goal of.
Dan Anastas [00:09:27]:
Teaching meditation and mindfulness.
Dan Anastas [00:09:29]:
And that really resonated with us. That was a lot of what people were worried about and complaining about. How do I stay focused? How do I keep myself in a good headspace so that I can perform at my best at home and at work? And then similarly, we went out and acquired Aptiv, which is one of the largest fitness apps out there. And it’s really something that people can kind of fit into anybody’s lifestyle. It can be used at the gym, it can be used outside, it can be used at home. So what we really wanted to do.
Dan Anastas [00:09:58]:
Is enable our employees with these tools.
Dan Anastas [00:10:00]:
That were flexible for them, could work in any country, and really were able to be as much or as little as they wanted. Some of these active and Headspace meditations or workouts can be as little as 5 minutes, 10 minutes, something you do in between a meeting, or it can be a full hour long workout that you’re more traditionally used to. So we really wanted it to be a lot for everyone.
Matt Alder [00:10:22]:
What kind of feedback have you got from that kind of approach?
Dan Anastas [00:10:25]:
Yeah, we’ve gotten a lot of really positive feedback. People really, really like these apps. People are using them. We’ve seen higher than industry average adoption rates we’ve gotten from our partners at Headspace and Aptiv. They share data with us that says that we’re well above what their average adoption rate is, well above what their usage rate is. So not just how many people have downloaded it, but how many people are actually using it. And then we also have feedback mechanisms internally, like pulse surveys, we have a channel in our Slack ecosystem where people can post feedback and tell us how they think things are going, and we’ve gotten overwhelmingly positive feedback on those. And then in addition to kind of the apps, which is just programming that we’re scheduling, we also kind of launched a Wellbeing Wednesday, which is essentially a Lunch and learn series that covers all kinds of topics, and it integrates some of the offerings of Aptiv and Headspace into those. And so we talk about things like, you know, what do you need for a healthy mind toolkit? How do you build a lasting habit? One that I personally could. Could use some help on, you know, giving people an understanding of what mindfulness is. There’s a lot of stigmas around some of these things, and getting people to understand what it is and what it isn’t is really helpful in kind of opening people’s eyes a bit.
Matt Alder [00:11:48]:
Absolutely. I suppose it’s interesting in terms of what you do as, as, as an organization, in terms of, you know, using automation to, to empower humans. I mean, where, where is that. That kind of mix between offering people what are effectively automated on demand solutions and offering them something that’s kind of more connected and more human?
Dan Anastas [00:12:11]:
Yeah, so I think that that’s really important to, to incorporate the human aspect of that.
Dan Anastas [00:12:16]:
So we have all these solutions, but.
Dan Anastas [00:12:18]:
Then how do we bring it all together? And so some of the things we do, like the lunches and lunch and learns, really do bring things together from a human element because there is interaction and people can kind of gather together around a common topic to have discussion. And then we also introduce kind of some of these challenges. Right. People love the competition aspect of that. And so we, we really wanted to introduce that as part of our kind of curriculum, if you will, around wellness, because people really like to compete. You know, there are groups of people that create these groups within Headspace or Aptiv, and they can see and hold each other accountable and say, hey, you’re not taking care of yourself today. Or, you know, hey, I beat you today. And they love that competition aspect of it. And so we felt that that was a really important aspect to kind of incorporate into that. The human element is totally critical to this, and it does bring a different level of connectivity versus, you know, a zoom chat or, you know, even a zoom happy hour. This kind of adds a different element to it, and it adds an element of competition that people really enjoy.
Matt Alder [00:13:20]:
Has there been anything that you’ve kind of evolved over the last year in terms of the, in terms of the way that you work and how there might be ways of improving people’s mental well being in terms of number of meetings they’ve got to go to, or the way that, the way that work works or the amount of video calls that there are. Those kind of things.
Speaker C [00:13:41]:
Yeah.
Dan Anastas [00:13:41]:
So we’re constantly thinking about how we work through that. We have done a lot of work.
Dan Anastas [00:13:47]:
In terms of listening to employees to.
Dan Anastas [00:13:48]:
Hear what their main complaints are. Over the summer, last summer, we kind of tried out the no meetings on Friday afternoon and that worked fairly well for a period of time. I think given the time zones and the global nature of business, it can be difficult to kind of break away. And so having that concerted effort to think about, okay, Friday afternoons are really me time. Let’s get some work done. Let’s have a few minutes to step.
Dan Anastas [00:14:13]:
Away from your desk perhaps and go for a walk.
Dan Anastas [00:14:15]:
And so really kind of incorporating that in at the company level was really important. We are thinking about bringing that back.
Dan Anastas [00:14:23]:
In the future again.
Dan Anastas [00:14:24]:
But I think that really enabling our employees. We also, the other thing we did to enable our employees was we offered them a one time allowance to kind of get their offices set up and help them kind of think about how they are working, working and where they’re.
Dan Anastas [00:14:39]:
Working in their space.
Dan Anastas [00:14:40]:
And so that was really another thing that kind of was well received and trying to push people to really find a way to make it work while we were all kind of trapped inside.
Matt Alder [00:14:50]:
So as we’re recording this, we’re still very much in the pandemic, but it would seem that there’s light at the end of the tunnel and companies are starting to talk about what happens next. Now it looks like this is going to be an ongoing discussion, an ongoing debate for the next few, few months, if not the next few years. But what happens next? Do people return to the office? Are you looking at kind of more hybrid working models? What kind of lessons have you learned from the last 12 months that are going to kind of inform how your company does work moving forward?
Dan Anastas [00:15:25]:
Yeah, I think the world is certainly different and I think that we’re never going to go back to the same rigid view and approach to office work as before. I also think that there is a social aspect that brings about better performance. I think we think about this a lot in our product engineering space. And while I’m no expert in product engineering, I can say that there is a certain benefit to having people working on the same thing or similar pieces of work and collaborating in person and spitballing ideas back and forth. And so I think that while the world has changed and there’s going to be more of an openness to, to remote work and certain positions that may never go back. I have a friend that works for a Fortune 100 company and he’s never going back to the office. They’ve already shared that with him. But I think by and large there will still remain some sort of an in person component to work in the long term.
Dan Anastas [00:16:23]:
I don’t think it’s going to be.
Dan Anastas [00:16:24]:
The same traditional nine to five as it’s always been, though.
Matt Alder [00:16:27]:
And when it comes to sort of talent acquisition and acquiring talent to businesses, do you think that wellness and the company’s attitude to wellness and how it supports and looks after its employees is going to be a big part, a big thing that people look for when they’re looking for new jobs in the future?
Dan Anastas [00:16:49]:
Absolutely.
Dan Anastas [00:16:50]:
I think especially in the tech space, where the pace is inherently much faster and where the demands are high and where the turnaround time for adapting to the change in the market is so short, I think that there has to be a continued acknowledgment of mental health and stress in the workplace and of the requirement for people to get some physical exercise during the day. I think that the whole dynamic has shifted a little bit from employers holding all of the control to employees really being more in control of what they say is important. More companies are listening now to what those employees need and want. And mental health has always been present, but it’s always been stigmatized. And we have some work to do as a culture in the United States and globally to talk more openly about mental health.
Dan Anastas [00:17:45]:
But we’re on that journey now. Whereas I think even two years ago.
Dan Anastas [00:17:49]:
It was less safe for people to talk openly about mental illness and mental health. And so incorporating things like this enables us to continue the conversation longer term.
Dan Anastas [00:18:01]:
And I think that employees are demanding.
Dan Anastas [00:18:04]:
That companies listen and they demand that.
Dan Anastas [00:18:06]:
HR teams and CEOs and leaders alike.
Dan Anastas [00:18:11]:
All listen to hear what the strain that’s put on people is in the workplace and the fact that you can’t.
Dan Anastas [00:18:18]:
Just leave your troubles from home at.
Dan Anastas [00:18:21]:
The door like was expected for so long. And so now people really need to think about, and companies really need to think, think about the whole person rather than come in, sit down and do.
Dan Anastas [00:18:30]:
Your job for eight hours.
Dan Anastas [00:18:32]:
It’s a very different dynamic. And I think that is here to stay.
Matt Alder [00:18:35]:
So final question. What’s next for UiPath? What are you sort of looking forward to over the next 18 months? Two years?
Dan Anastas [00:18:42]:
Yeah, I think we are on a really exciting automation journey. I think that we can incorporate a lot of that into what we’re doing from a wellness and from a benefits and an HR standpoint. And I think that over the next period of time, particularly around this well being and mental health initiative, we’ll continue to listen and continue to evaluate. This is not an end state. We haven’t reached our destination. We simply started on our journey and we have to hear what the people are saying and we have to hear what our employees are saying so that we can get better every day. We can listen more, we can provide the support that they need. So over the next 18 months, I hope that we we are able to do that and meet the needs of our employees and continue evolving these practices. Because the train has just left the station, we’re really excited to be on this journey.
Matt Alder [00:19:31]:
Dan, thank you very much for talking to me.
Dan Anastas [00:19:33]:
Pleasure to be here.
Matt Alder [00:19:34]:
My thanks to Dan and Astos. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruiting future.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
