Webinar replay & recap: Culture Check: Getting a pulse on your culture

On Wednesday, December 7, Missie Dillon, Director of Strategic Development, Mary Marzec, PhD, Senior Scientist of Virgin Pulse’s Science Advisory Board, and Virgin Pulse client, Karen Personett, Manager Wellness & Health Promotion, DTE Energy, came together to discuss our validated workplace assessment solution, Culture Check. 

Culture Check focuses on fostering a health and wellbeing culture as a whole and demonstrates that a strong workplace culture is associated with lower employee stress, depression, and higher work engagement—independent of individuals’ health status, gender, and job class. Backed by scientific research with validated tools, Culture Check delivers confidence in two ways:  

• Validation: Confidence that your culture is aligned with your business goals 
• Prioritization: Confidence in the changes required to align culture with your business goals 

During the webinar, attendees heard from Virgin Pulse Culture Check experts and client, DTE Energy. Check out some of the top takeaways and a replay of the session below.

• How do you get leadership buy-in on implementing Culture Check? 
  • Dr. Marzec remarked how Virgin Pulse’s client team is amazing at supporting this effort. Additionally, she shared a tip on “talking and thinking about how you want to work your wellbeing strategy, where you want to go with it, then painting Culture Check as part of it. Like Karen spoke about it too, the value of actually having a leading metric around your culture and wellbeing program is super valuable.” 
  • Additionally, Karen shared that a great way to look at it is to discuss “what’s important to your organization, what’s the most important thing to your organization. Then attach how wanting your employees to be healthy and well can do to it. How does health and wellbeing contribute to your overall business goals? Find your ‘in.’ For me, it was safety and engagement—and safety had a roadmap that I basically [latched onto] to leverage it. ‘We’ve done this before, I know we can create a culture of something [insert your goal or desired state]. So, that gave us the confidence.”  
• When is a good time to implement Culture Check? Are there certain red flags?  
  • Dr. Marzec shared that “there are never any misgivings about timing. So, find a cadence that works for your organization.” In response to not wanting Culture Check to interfere with other active initiatives, she noted “that’s an organization’s decision, but it’s a short enough assessment that it doesn’t really interfere (20 questions, no more than 3 minutes).” Since it’s in through the portal, it’s a separate from other initiatives and promotions they may have go out through their general email because the members will see it come up as a Card or Banner” in the app, so it won’t get lost in the shuffle. Furthermore, Karen shared a tip “to be strategic, implement it at a time to give you enough time to incorporate it into your annual strategy and plan.”  
• Has a client ever discovered something they can’t do at the moment and how do you address that? 
  • “There are always things that comes up that you can’t address that right away. However, the earlier you know about a dynamic, then you can at least be sensitive in your messaging, your communications, and you can put it on your long-term roadmap. Maybe it isn’t something you can fix in the next three months, but there’s nothing wrong with putting it on the roadmap and communicating that out to people that at least they’ve been heard,” said Dr. Marzec.
  • Additionally, Missie noted, “Dr. Marzec really helped to identify action items that are more immediate, things that can be done pretty quickly within a month, two months, three months. Then, there are some items that are going to be a little more strategic, a little more ‘out in the future’ and take a little more planning. That way your able to attack a little more of the ‘lower hanging fruit’ or those immediate action items and then start planning and working towards those more long-term or strategic items that Dr. Marzec identifies for you.”
  • Additionally, Dr. Marzec shared “that there are things that I think are further out, but when I service them for the organization, they actually become a higher priority when the stakeholders see the results of the reports or the suggestions. I’ve been amazed that clients have actually moved faster than I initially anticipated because I might have been too humble in what I assumed their appetite for change is, but you’d be amazed as the power of a lower score in a location.” 
• Karen shares DTE Energy's experience with Culture Check
  • DTE Energy Culture Check goal  
    • To achieve a best-in-class culture of health and wellbeing and to be the healthiest and most wellbeing-supportive organization. To accomplish this goal, DTE focused on leveraging best practices and next practices. 
  • Challenges 
    • “Leadership support and management alignment are a best practice, the #1 best practice, to become a sustainable culture of health and wellbeing. For DTE’s transformation to be possible, it was crucial to align all leaders to this goal and priority, from the C-Suite level and throughout the entire organization outside of headquarters to our 60+ locations.” 
  • How we approach this work 
    • “We’re a metric-driven organization and we approach this work by making sure we’re leveraging externally validated, evidence-based assessments—which is key to driving change—so we can measure our progress, create a plan, annual targets, and defined path to best-in-class.” 
  • Solutions 
    • “Identify a metric that would both align the organization to our goal and commitment, and it needed to be a leading indicator metric about culture. We wanted to avoid any lagging metric, like the health of employees since it’s personal, and we wanted to avoid any unintended consequences.” 
  • Results & Impact 
    • “Since running Culture Check, we’ve made improvements every year, we’ve hit or exceeded our annual goals every year, and we’re almost to the 80 Culture Check score—which would put us in the green on the heat map in all our locations. The majority of our locations are making tremendous progress, so I’m really excited, pleased, and proud of the work we’ve done.” 

Watch the webinar replay

Power-up your approach with an actionable health strategy  

Learn how you can move from best practices to next practices with Culture Check. Want to see it in action? Contact your Account Management Team for more details or request a demo.