A few weeks ago, we blogged about our Guiding Principles — those intended to help us get to a decision about our new Global Wellness Initiative — and our progress thus far.  At the time, we believed we were on a path to a program that would honor these principles and satisfy the needs of the group (and the greater population by proxy).

And while we still believe that, we realized during our first round of feedback that our process was not going to allow us to move as quickly as we needed to.  For something as personal and emotionally charged as wellness, the channel for communication needed to move from an etherpad (which is inherently impersonal) to something more dynamic and human.

The second round of program iteration (where we also revisited the Guiding Principles) was a series of in-person, small group (10 people in each) discussions that took place over four days this past week. The group focused on our main objective — to create a program that, for the same cost, delivers MORE value to MORE people. This focus led us to a healthy, generative discussion and an agreement that “more value to more people”  was our new “guiding principle”.  At this point, we believe we have what we need to create something that will evolve into a successful program that works well for the majority of employees.

What will happen next is this. The People team is putting together a summary document to review with the working group to ensure a shared understanding of the outcome of our meetings. We are simultaneously creating the proposal, based this work, that we will eventually take to the Steering Committee who will approve (or request more information). Our goal is to have something to communicate broadly by early April even if the details / back-end infrastructure is not ready. The program would be retroactively effective April 1st.

More to come shortly.