Bright Horizons, Culture Impact Brief

Bolstering Resilience Through Well-Being

Bright Horizons' New Model for Employee Engagement

How an already great workplace, with a strong commitment to listening and a drive for continuous improvement, leveraged their high-trust culture to revolutionize their approach to employee engagement and employee well-being.

Bright Horizons Family Solutions, an international provider of high-quality employer-sponsored child care, back-up care for children and adults, and education programs for employees and their children—and a long time Best Company to Work For—is exploring a revolutionary new approach to employee engagement, one that combines employee health and wellness, financial stability, and workplace flexibility under one umbrella: Employee Well-Being.

The Flaws With Traditional Employee Engagement Models

The flaw with traditional notions of employee engagement, as Danroy “Dan” Henry, CHRO of Bright Horizons, sees it, is that employee engagement only focuses on a single dimension of an employee’s life—their life inside the workplace. However, people are multi-faceted beings, and their identity as employee often sits behind other important markers of identity such as that of family member, community member, and friend. If most engagement surveys and engagement initiatives focus solely on a person’s experience in the workplace, reasoned Henry, then those initiatives are fundamentally flawed since oftentimes the stressors that diminish productivity lay outside the reach of programmed responses designed for the workplace.

Leslie Caccamese