Mastering Community by Christine Porath

Author:Christine Porath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2022-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

Wellness

Over the years it gradually dawned on Tom Gardner that, due to the sedentary nature of their work, his employees were gaining weight. According to Samantha Whiteside, the person who currently has the chief wellness officer title, it was called the Foolish 15, because that’s how many pounds on average the Fools were gaining after being hired.32 So over time Gardner began investing in wellness efforts. One of the first steps he took was to remove all the soda and candy vending machines. He also convinced one of his employees, who had been planning to leave and become a fitness trainer, to stay on the job and dedicate part of his day to personal training and group fitness classes for the other Fools.

When Whiteside was hired to become the company’s full-time chief wellness officer, she created what is now known as the FoolFocus program, which encompasses four categories: exercise, nutrition, health promotion and disease prevention, and brain health.33 FoolFocus offers all employees Foolish Fitness classes (boot camp–style classes), yoga classes, Zumba classes, and twice-weekly open gym where Fools enjoy basketball, floor hockey, soccer, and volleyball together. Fools also have access to personal training sessions and highly subsidized twice-a-week massage sessions. Eighty-nine percent of the employees participated in the classes offered through FoolFocus in the first two years, and that percentage has grown since then. Whiteside also devises one-month challenges like the Fool-wide Push-Up Wellness Challenge the company held one year, which had a collective goal of one hundred thousand push-ups for the month, and, dipping into one of the other “buckets” of its wellness program, a philanthropy challenge where Fools tracked hours of volunteer work and charitable donations.

To encourage Fools to utilize stress management resources, which Whiteside considers to be crucial to brain health, she brings in employee assistance program counselors at least twice a year to answer questions, and each Fool gets six free counseling sessions a year to address a specific issue. Other programs, like an active book club and speaker series with world-renowned entrepreneurs and businesspeople such as John Mackey, and the Bookie Monster, which gives employees free books, are part of the company’s emphasis on keeping its employees mentally active, engaged, and healthy.

Because the Motley Fool recognizes the dangers of employee burnout, it offers four-to-eight-week sabbaticals for employees serving ten years or more. Workers who have been there at least a year also get a shot at a leave through the Fool’s Errand—a program that David Gardner came up with. Each month there is a Fool’s Errand drawing whose winner will receive $1,000 to spend on anything they want—on the condition that they leave the office and disconnect completely from work for two consecutive weeks out of the following four. This not only gives the employee an unexpected break but also encourages employees to make sure that if they need to be out for a much less pleasant but equally unexpected reason—illness or a family emergency—their team members will know how to fill the gap in their absence so that the workflow will not be interrupted.

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