Managing wellness—before, during, and after the pandemic

Jen Fisher is the Chief Well-being Officer at Deloitte and the host of the popular WorkWell Podcast. She is responsible for driving strategy and innovation around work-life, health, and wellness for her firm. In 2015, Jen launched the Empowered Well-being program to ensure that Deloitte’s people are both informed and empowered to be well in all aspects of their lives. 

As Jen’s creative partner in this endeavor, Tremendousness collaborated with her and her team to develop a unique brand and visual identity for the program launch. And we’ve been working together ever since.

Today, the Empowered Well-Being program helps to educate, advocate and enable Deloitte staff to really take care of themselves, to not skip the important things that often get skipped when you’re heads-down working (especially when embedded in a different company’s culture), and to better understand the many things that can affect our wellness.

Above: the "Managing Energy" infographic handout, formatted for print distribution. At right: the "Managing Your Relationship with Stress" infographic formatted for blogging. Below: the suite of comms tools displayed at a Deloitte Executive Meeting.

Visual storytelling in the service of wellness is a core component of the Empowered Well-being program. Working with Sammy Loh, Deloitte’s design lead, we co-created an engaging and useful new delivery model for this important content. The approach takes serious topics and makes them not just informative, but also fun to learn from—and designed with retention in mind.

“Empowered Well-being is Deloitte’s holistic approach that gives our people the support and flexibility to make daily choices that can enable them to be energized, confident, and aware. It provides the opportunity for our people to personalize their experiences in the ways that matter most to them in body, mind, and purpose.”

Through a multitude of infographics, animations, and other artifacts, ideas and insights are shared in a way that's fun, clear, relevant, helpful, and unlike any typical health initiative at any typical company. In the illustrations, we use color in ways that show diversity without being literal. When appropriate, we inject a bit of levity into our storytelling without undermining the accurate, science-based knowledge being shared. Simple repeating rectangular and circular shapes give consistency and form to stories populated by a variety of expressive characters.

Of course, some topics are more serious, so we designed a more restrained and minimal realistic style to use for those pieces. Still, everything works together as a system and the content is always edited into perfectly digestible and memorable chunks. Here’s a taste:

• How can you best fuel, move, and rest your body?
  Pages 2-4 of the “Managing Energy” piece tells you.
• What is the typical stress recovery cycle?
  Page 3 of “Managing Your Relationship with Stress” has that information.
• Why do we sleep and how can we sleep better?
  The “Why We Sleep” animation explains everything.
• How can you find meaning both at home and at work?
  Page 2 of the “Defining Your Purpose” infographic has the answer.
• What is the difference between grief and loss, and how can you support a colleague who’s going through tough times?
  Pages 3 and 4 of “Understanding Grief & Loss” will let you know.
• What can you do to be more present throughout the day?
  The “Mindful Moments” animation has that information.
• How do you develop emotional agility so you can better respond to stressful stimuli?
  Page 4 of “Managing Emotions” can help.
• What steps can you take to be more mindful with your smartphone?
  Page 2 of “Taming Technology” spells it all out.

Wellness is always important, but now, as all of us find ourselves in an unfamiliar, frightening, and dangerous pandemic, having a rich set of resources full of tips and guidance for empowering our well-being is more vital than ever. It’s great that Deloitte is now publicly sharing many of the useful tools it initially produced for its employees.

The fact is that it’s on us to take care of ourselves. So every little bit helps. Deloitte’s Empowered Well-being program offers lots of little bits in engaging, organized, empowering bites.

Follow Jen Fisher’s feed on LinkedIn to see what else Deloitte is doing (and what you can do as well) to understand and improve wellness, especially in these difficult times.

Scott Goldstein contributed to this post. All infographics by Tremendousness. Photo courtesy Sammy Loh.