Overview

Espyr knows the importance of employee well-being. In fact, they're a leading provider in mental health solutions for businesses. Read on to discover how Espyr uses Glue to engage employees at scale.

The story

Espyr empowers organizations to go beyond traditional support and offer businesses comprehensive well-being solutions to increase engagement, boost productivity, and enhance workplace culture. Their mission is to help organizations and their people reach their potential by providing immediate, customizable mental and behavioral health solutions through counseling, health coaching, leadership programs, and more – available immediately, in person or virtually.

To enable clients to reach their full potential, Espyr starts by empowering employees within. The company is all in on creating a “one-team” approach to foster a rewarding work environment, linking back to their core values.

However, this approach got tricky at the onset of the pandemic. As Espyr transitioned to a remote-first company, they also grew their team. For the first time, the company hired outside of Atlanta. Today, more than 50% of the company works remotely across the US.

Without the office as a dedicated space to bring people together, Espyr knew they needed a long-term solution to keep employees engaged. In particular, Espyr wanted to focus their engagement initiatives on two key areas:

1. Preventing burnout
2. Breaking down silos between teams

Glue was the solution for both.

Preventing burnout with events people actually want to attend

Due to the nature of their work, professionals at Espyr deal with sensitive topics every day—and often for the majority of each day. Their work is rewarding, but also very draining.

Intake Department Supervisor, Jennifer Pinos explained that by using Glue experiences, Espyr provides a healthy break from work that allows employees an opportunity to unwind and interact outside of their normal work duties.

“Having this break in the day where you can have 30-minutes to an hour to interact on a non-work related basis has been fun. We’re always left with a sense of anticipation for what the next event will be.” - Jennifer P.

Burnout is a global hot topic with some studies estimating that as much as 58% of the workforce feels stressed daily at work. Those figures are usually higher for workers in high-stress fields.

By partnering with Glue, companies are able to see improved connections and employee happiness of up to 15x in just 2 months of consistently booked events.

Doubling connections across a distributed workforce

Remote work makes it more difficult to connect with individuals beyond an employees’ immediate team. Survey data from Gartner show that 47% of remote workers report a deterioration in collaboration with others outside of their teams.

Keeping their one-team approach in mind, Espyr knew they needed a way to be intentional about connecting team members across the organization. Glue experiences give Espyr an opportunity to do just that.

Over the past year, Jennifer joined the Activities Committee at Espyr, where she’s organized Glue events for employees across the organization with a focus on cross-team collaboration.

The result? Espyr is connecting individuals who have never met one another face to face—and doing so in a way that’s breaking down barriers for collaboration.

“There are people who have joined the company who I have never interacted with. Meeting a coworker through an event is a big icebreaker. Because we meet during the events, we have a better understanding of different teams and the personalities of the people on that team. Now you don’t have to be hesitant about reaching out to new faces because you have an existing connection with them.” Jennifer Pinos

For Espyr, the impact of regularly scheduled events is clear: connections doubled in the months following the heaviest event usage. For example, Espyr hosted several events in the month of October. From September to November, the average number of connections each Espyr employee had doubled.

Simplified booking makes frequent connection opportunities possible

When Espyr vetted Glue as a solution, easy event planning and logistics were a must.

After all, virtual event planning can often be a tedious process. Between finding the right event, coordinating a time everyone can join, and managing invites and RSVPs, most people leaders only have the bandwidth to organize an event once or twice per year. However, virtual events have a much greater impact on employee engagement when done on a regular cadence. With Glue's platform, Espyr have successfully executed 25 events with Glue in their first 10 months.

The features Espyr use most often include Instant Booking from a marketplace of hundreds of quality-vetted events and simple logistics with automated invitations, event reminders, and feedback collection.

To date, 88% of Espyr’s events were organized with Glue's Instant Booking feature.

“I would recommend anyone to use Glue if their goal is to encourage employee engagement and morale. Their platform is easy to utilize and minimizes the work you need to do for executing events. On top of that, Glue's team is always responsive to questions, and the event hosts are engaging, entertaining, and flexible to our needs.”