These three components are key to Accenture’s employee well-being strategy

The acronym “RRR” most commonly stands for “reduce, reuse, recycle.” But for HR pros, it can also mean “recognition, recovery, renewal.”

Those three words are the basis for the employee well-being strategy at Accenture, Tamarah Duperval-Brownlee, the company’s chief health officer, said at the Workhuman Live conference on April 17.

Duperval-Brownlee, a former doctor, developed the strategy after joining Accenture in July 2021, nearly a year and a half after the Covid-19 pandemic had upended life as many knew it. She said she knew the health crisis would have lasting effects on people’s mental, physical, and financial well-being. This helped inform her well-being strategy and led her to focus on recognition, recovery, and renewal.

“A lot of things happened. We need to acknowledge that they happened. How they showed up needs to be accounted for,” she said.

Recognition. In addition to recognizing the collective trauma of the pandemic, Duperval-Brownlee said it was important to acknowledge that each employee is one person, with a maximum capacity of 100% to give.

“If you’re going to prioritize, 30% is your family and kids, this percentage is what you’re going to give for work, this is the percentage that you’re going to give for care for yourself. That is it. So you’re going to manage work, for example, within the 25% that you have,” she said.

Recovery. In a fast-paced work environment, Duperval-Brownlee said there’s not usually space to reset between tasks or projects.

Employees, she thought, should have space to take a moment and recover, “time to just shut down, unplug, restart your own brain before you go into the next thing, and I still feel like we’re still catching up on that recovery.”

Renewal. Major world events such as the pandemic, wars, and “the socioeconomic landscape” can change people, she said, physically and neurochemically.

HR pros should not only recognize these changes, but they should ask themselves, “Are we recovering, and are we renewing to a new aspiration of what can be, and not resting in the pain of what happened?”