Prioritizing employee well-being helped this CPO improve retention

What’s a good strategy for improving employee well-being?

At corporate wellness company Exos, the four-day workweek is key.

Since May 2023, the company has observed “You Do You Fridays,” during which the roughly 400 corporate employees based at its Phoenix, Arizona, headquarters can spend the day however they please, as long as they’re not engaging with their colleagues. The rest of the 2,600-person workforce, scattered across 300 global facilities, can choose any day of the workweek to do the same.

“What that means for us is we still value flow time, recovery, and autonomy,” Greg Hill, Exos’s chief people officer, told HR Brew. “We’ve really figured out how to leverage Fridays as an important day to advance the organization where we can.”

But, a four-day workweek is only one “shiny and important” component of Exos’s company culture, Hill said.

The secret sauce. Since Exos works with many Fortune 500 companies on wellness strategies, Hill said he’s able to use those insights within his own workforce.

“We continue to ask our employees the same questions we’re asking Fortune 10 and Fortune 50 employees around them as a human,” he said. “How are they showing up in and out of work?...Do they get flow state? Are they sleeping?”

In the seven years Hill has spent leading Exos’s people function, he said he’s learned that company culture is built among peers and colleagues rather than dictated from executives.

“Culture is bred and grown upward versus dictated downward,” he said. “People have to look left and right to make sure we don’t lose some of the way we work today based on peer accountability.”

Exos encourages its employees to designate and communicate their preferred working hours to colleagues, he said, and to use tools like the schedule-send feature for emails and messages to match their teammates working hours.

“It sounds like a small thing, but going back to the idea of well-being being an outcome. Not waking up to it, or going to bed to it, or you’re sitting down with your family or friends at 10 o’clock at night and getting your pings,” he said. “All those little things matter to us.”

Exos also prioritizes asynchronous work for executives and leaders, Hill said, meaning they review documents and slides prior to meetings so they can spend those times collaborating and making decisions. This helps cut back on meeting overload, he added.

Hill said these culture strategies have had a positive impact on retention. The voluntary turnover rate for corporate and customer support employees is 5%, down from 8% last year, while that for site and field staff is 18%, down from 32% last year, he said.

“What it tells us is our employees feel like we’re trying. We’re transparent when it works [and] when it doesn’t,” he said.