By Jensen Werley – Reporter, Denver Business Journal Oct 20, 2021, 9:53am EDT
In the midst of a labor shortage, one Denver nonprofit is in a position to help employers retain employees by offering an additional benefit, and to help employees address some of the reasons they might not be able to be in the workforce.
WorkLife Partnership was formed 12 years ago and now works with companies nationally. The organization provides resource navigators — a person assigned to a company that can provide support for struggling employees. The support is wide-ranging and specific to what any individual needs, such as finding stable housing, transportation, child care assistance, food insecurity or other needs. In Colorado, it also offers a small-dollar loan program.
As a nonprofit, WorkLife Partnership does charge the employers it partners with for its services, but it charges at cost.
“The navigators we hire are cut from a different cloth,” Founder and CEO Liddy Romero told Denver Business Journal. “Most of them have been case managers. Their job is to have no judgment. It’s like their fellow employee is experiencing a challenge. We don’t walk in front of them or behind them, we walk alongside them. It would be super easy for a navigator to say, ‘You’re housing insecure, let’s solve that first before child care.’ But what a navigator says is, ‘You want to solve child care, let’s solve child care.’”
While a lot of employers offer an employee assistance program, Romero says WorkLife Partnership goes beyond that, catering solutions to an employee’s specific needs. They don’t just provide a list of child care providers, they provide a list of child care providers that take into consideration a person’s schedule, their financial situation and other factors.
WorkLife will provide data insights to the company they’re working with so that the company can make improvements, but all the work between a navigator and an employee is kept confidential to maintain privacy and trust.
Companies like Starbucks, FirstBank, American Furniture Warehouse and SCL Health all work with the organization.
Tamie Anderson, benefits manager for SCL Health, said that she considers their navigator an extension of her team. Employees who have questions about their paycheck will call the navigator instead of human resources. But Anderson said that’s OK.
“They’re not scared to talk to her because she’s not HR. From that perspective, she’s safe,” Anderson said. “She advocates for them personally without getting into all the work minutiae that can make them scared to talk to HR.”
There is currently a significant labor shortage in the U.S. The country is also going through what many are calling “The Great Resignation”: a mass wave of employees leaving their jobs at historic rates.
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“I appreciate what’s unraveling now,” Romero said. “In addition to The Great Resignation, it’s the great unraveling of everything we know about what work is supposed to be. The balance of power has been tipped and employers are struggling to find workers to come to work. We fully believe it’s not because people don’t want to work, but it’s a mass pushback on the culture of work.”
WorkLIfe Partnership is positioned to help. For the employer, it’s a low-cost additional benefit that they can offer to employees. For employees, it’s a confidential third party offered by their employer that can help them address everyday challenges that can impact their upward mobility. Anderson said that while WorkLife Partnership isn’t a silver bullet, it can do a lot of employee retention and for providing peace of mind to employees.
“Getting behind or in debt because of health-related things creates a spiral effect everywhere else,” Romero said as an example. “We’re aware we’re a piece of the solution and that the balance of power is tipping. Workers are fighting for agency and a voice at work. Typical benefits, like pedometer or wellness programs, are not getting to the core of the issues. Employees are not thinking about step count, they’re thinking about if their kid is safe at home.”