Death of co-founder put mental health in spotlight at professional services firm, says HR Lead Sydney de la Torre
Sydney de la Torre came to HR through psychology, not policy or management. While studying human behaviour, she became fascinated by workplaces and “the workplace other people want and how to create that,” she says.
Today, as HR Lead at Sklar Wilton and Associates, a professional services firm, de la Torre helps turn that question into a business strategy that’s built on the wellbeing of everyone in the organization.
“I actually started my HR journey during my education when I was studying psychology,” she says. “Somewhere along that line, I started taking some classes with organizational behavior as well.”
Those courses shifted her focus from clinical paths to organizations and how people experience work. At first, de la Torre imagined a career in organizational-industrial psychology, focused on how to “motivate, excite, and energize people at work,” she says, but HR turned out to be a more immediate way to do that.
“I've just found that incredibly rewarding, and I really got to sink my teeth into all of those things of ‘How are people feeling, how do we want them to feel, and how can we get there?”
Her early roles in tech startups were a lesson in the gap between philosophy and practice, with some companies “more focused on what the organization wants to do for the people, rather than what the people are saying they need,” says de la Torre. “I learned that there’s an element of what the company wants to do, but there is also how they execute it — they want their people to be happy and healthy, but there's a lot of different ways that companies can approach that, so finding one that aligns with your HR values and philosophy, I find makes the job so much easier and more rewarding.”
People are the core business strategy
De la Torre found that alignment at Sklar Wilton. “What’s kind of fun about this organization is that supporting their people really is their core business strategy,” she says. When she joined and asked to see the strategic plan, it was “support and engage our people and the different pillars of how to do that,” she says.
That focus shows up in how long people stay and how they contribute. According to de la Torre, Sklar Wilton has “tenure and retention that you don’t really get to see in a lot of high turnover areas,” she says.
For de la Torre, this retention shows the ROI of that core business strategy. “A lot of organizations want to support and energize their people, but when you focus on it and make it your number one priority, people stay, they're happy, and they can deliver more of their best at work,” she says. “If you engage and support your people, they really can do their best, you’ve hired the best, so let them do that.”
That's a lesson she learned in her career: "It really is about hiring the best and making sure that they feel good,” adds de la Torre. “I hope a lot of HR leaders get that experience as well.”
Fully flexible benefit plan
The organization’s focus on overall wellbeing has crystallized in what de la Torre feels has been a successful rollout of a flex benefit plan in which employees receive an annual allowance that can be customized “down to the dollar” between a health spending account and a personal spending account each year.
“A lot of people have diverse family needs and diverse home lives, so as we get into the future of how to best support people, we're seeing that their health and benefits and family needs are important,” she says. “And so we've been able to work with [the benefits provider] on this very customized flex benefits plan for themselves. For employee feedback on whether health benefits meet the needs of their families, we saw scores go from 60 all the way up to 90 after that change, and we really got to see our people saying, ‘Hey, this finally meets my needs and this benefits plan is finally supporting me more than just a checkbox item.'”
De la Torre also points out the organization’s “whole person development program,” which has dedicated initiatives to improve employee wellbeing such as providing financial consultants at no charge to the employee.
Hard lesson reshapes culture
A big part of Sklar Wilton’s strategy of prioritizing employee wellbeing is attention to mental health — which has a special meaning for the organization. The firm was founded in 1986 by Luke Sklar and Charles Wilton, and colleagues saw Sklar’s struggle with depression up close, says de la Torre.
In 2018, Sklar died by suicide, which caused a significant shift within the organization on mental health, according to de la Torre.
“Mental health isn’t this buzzword, it really is something that people suffer from,” she says. “It was an unfortunate, personal shift that changed the company, but from that, [leadership] had this opportunity to double down on wellbeing, see the ROI and the importance of it for themselves, and since then they’ve been on this journey to inspire other organizations to do the same.”
De la Torre knows many HR leaders are facing economic uncertainty and constant change, which can cause people initiatives to slip down the list.
“In the last several years, the economy, the business industry, everything has been so in flux, and I think we see a lot of business leaders trying to refocus their priorities on what they think are the key business needs,” she says. “But of course, that's where we see that this is when people are also feeling the most uncertainty and stress themselves as well, and they need the most support.”
She cautions against cutting back on how much organizations are checking in on people and how much they’re investing on people programs or engagement surveys.
“You might feel there's a time push or other pressures where you want to deprioritize the people initiatives, but your people are a huge chunk of what you have, and if all of them could be feeling five, 10, 15 per cent better from a little bit of attention and focus that you put on them, it’s worth it,” says de la Torre. “Don't let them fall through the cracks because your people will help you get through whatever the challenges are and whatever's going on in the economy.”
She suggests that it doesn’t have to be something grand, it can start with something small, such as a “team booster on our resources and what supports that people have,” or “equipping your managers with a check-in question.”
Performance and mental health intertwined
For de la Torre, sustainable performance and Sklar Wilton’s focus on mental health care go hand in hand.
“It may not be for all organizations — if you're not focused on long tenure or fully engaged people who are going above and beyond, it's not really your program — but all the organizations I've been at so far have been really focused on hiring or recruiting,” she says. “You think about the investment that you're putting in, hiring and onboarding people, it just makes sense to think that their whole person wellbeing, how they're feeling at home and in their personal lives, obviously impacts their work.”
She goes on to emphasize that if employees aren’t feeling established in some of their core things at home — such as psychological safety, emotional wellbeing, and financial wellbeing — then “they certainly can’t come to work and be focused, motivated, and excited about the job that they’re doing.”
De la Torre believes that the key to employee loyalty and productive is realizing that the organization is hiring “a whole person, and if you want to keep them for a long time and have them do their best, you have to treat them like a whole person.”
