When the coronavirus pandemic started shutting down offices in mid-March, Chicago-based Top Five firm RSM US was quick to transition to remote working — while also planning other ways to more broadly support its people through the pandemic.
The firm began rolling out employee benefits in a range of areas, explained Katie Lamkin, RSM’s chief human resources officer. “We summarize it as caring for colleagues in a changing world,” she said. “The benefits focus on several categories. We looked at it through the lens of the employee life cycle — things to do in the short term because of COVID, quick decisions; and long term — keeping people safe and giving them the best possible experience, helping them continue to focus on the future.”
About two weeks after RSM closed its 87 offices, the firm committed to distributing $50 per week to all employees over a period of eight weeks to help cover meals and groceries, while also helping local restaurants, bars and other businesses.
“It helped people to make investments in their local communities,” Lamkin explained. “Any dollars they didn’t use were donated to local food banks. The theme is not just caring for ourselves but our communities.”
On a larger scale, RSM awarded promotions during the usual compensation schedule on Aug. 1 and also paid out annual bonuses and pay increases. The firm also maintained retirement plan matching contributions and waived health care premiums in November and December. And out-of-pocket costs for COVID-19 testing and telehealth visits were waived through Dec. 31, 2021.
“We launched many of these things right away, in April and May,” Lamkin shared. “We added to them and decided to continue to expand as the pandemic continues. We don’t know when the end is coming, so we keep investing in these things.”
RSM conducted four surveys to take employees’ temperature about workplace flexibility and returning to the office, Lamkin said. The end of the summer represented one crucial touch point, as RSM sought to support its parent employees. “There was no end in sight from a macro-level view of COVID,” she said. “We started to feel more anxiety from people trying to figure out what to do with school, and how do we do this now. We tried to really come forward with conversations — our Family First enterprise network group [for working families], part of our [culture, diversity and inclusion] platform, is great about opening conversations with families and employees: What are you doing? What resources are out there? Sharing information about tutoring. That’s what I was most pleased about — them helping each other. It’s not all the firm. There was a groundswell of help for one another.”
In addition to waiving health care premiums in November and December, RSM expanded its telehealth benefits, on-demand text-based primary care app 98point6, to all employees through the end of the year, whether or not they are on the firm’s health plan. RSM also provided a mobile platform called Modern Health to all employees and their families, which provides free mental health, coaching and counseling resources.
“We continue to focus our efforts on wellness, not just individuals but families,” Lamkin shared. “Other programs are backup childcare, to the extent people can use it — as-needed backup childcare, and expanded days for that, and additional services through Bright Horizons — virtual learning, tutoring, college care services, coaching. As more families go back to school or are at home, we are trying to meet the needs wherever their individual circumstances took them.”
New support systems
While work-life flexibility has become the default in a COVID-19 world, effectively balancing the two requires new skills and resources. With this in mind, RSM established a flexibility coaching line that people can call to seek advice from an HR professional who will walk them through their available options and how to schedule for those and set expectations for output with their engagement leader.
Then, “They have a conversation with the manager managing their engagement, on what they are working on, client work, depending on their practice area, and working out a schedule, the set of expectations for clients, and on an individual and a team level,” Lamkin explained.
“The coaching lines were implemented as another place for people to go — not everyone is willing or ready to have that conversation,” she said. “Individuals who wanted to do a good job, have a lot of expectations — high-performance individuals — asking for flexibility, they may need a little help with that. The coaching line is designed to be just that.”
Being on call for these questions is just one of many ways RSM’s HR professionals are pivoting to meet new employee needs, according to Lamkin, validating the importance of their work.
“The role of human resources teams in general is, we’ve been talking about the importance of the employee experience as the single most important thing to pay attention to from a retention standpoint, and this moment in time solidified that that experience is what’s going to make or break whether people decide to stay with you,” Lamkin explained. “How you show up in a crisis like this is how people feel about you when times get better.”
New ways to work
The crisis has also opened up other “huge opportunities,” according to Lamkin, for the future of virtual conferences, e-learning, and generally “for the way we work in the future.”
“HR teams and talent organizations have the opportunity to capitalize on it, to get it right as we roll through the pandemic; those organizations are going to have a competitive edge. All the opportunities from here, we have to figure it out. We reinvented everything — people, processes — we reinvented it all, and we will reinvent it again once circumstances change.”
Lamkin and her team were already evaluating the coming fiscal year as 2020 came to a close, with a focus ranging from “the short term to help people, to thinking of the long haul, how we are going to continue to meet the needs of a changing workforce. There’s more to come.”
While RSM’s employee programs and benefits will continue to evolve amid the pandemic’s ongoing uncertainty, the siloed view of personal and professional has all but vanished.
“Going into the new year, there are more things to think about,” Lamkin shared, “helping people continue to manage work and life — they’re inextricably linked now.”
