Modern Health is a comprehensive global mental health solution offering employees access to one-on-one, group, and self-serve digital resources for their emotional, professional, social, financial, and physical well-being needs - all within a single platform. Whether someone wants to proactively manage stress or treat depression, Modern Health guides people to the right care at the right time.
Modern Health is backed by investors like Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, John Doerr, Y Combinator, and Battery Ventures and raised more than $170 million in less than two years. Modern Health is the fastest entirely female-founded company in the U.S. to reach Unicorn status.Chief People Officer Maureen Calabrese wants to ensure that ‘Champion Empathy,’ one of their four company values, scales with them.
Maureen began looking for cost-effective ways to reaffirm their culture and values as a remote-first company. “We needed a solution that was impactful but lightweight and easy to start. We didn’t have the bandwidth or appetite for a resource that took lots of time and effort to implement,” she explained.
Maureen recalled hearing about Spokn through her network of Chief People Officers. “I set up an account to ‘poke around’ and found it so easy that when Spokn reached out to set up an onboarding call, I didn’t really feel that I needed it. I’d already created our first two videos on my own.”
Here’s how Modern Health uses Spokn to meet multiple ‘People’ priorities.
The Covid-era tech boom, quickly followed by the tech downturn, created cultural whiplash for tech companies. At a time of such heightened stress, company leaders across the industry were struggling to help burned-out employees feel connected to their work and to each other.
The leadership team at Modern Health was particularly keen to highlight the strong sense of purpose across the organization. “It was really important to create a personal connection to the company’s values,” Maureen explained. “We needed a fresh way to recognize values champions, and Spokn was the ideal solution.”
Each month, the Modern Health People Team selected three ‘Mount Modern’ Values Award winners and asked teammates and managers to secretly record tribute videos explaining how the winners embodied the company’s values. Using Spokn, Modern Health quickly transformed the short clips into a beautifully branded video to play at the All Hands and share on Slack.
“The videos captured the attention of our employees right away, and they really breathed new life into the values ritual,” explained Maureen. “We found that more employees were aware of our values, and the recipients said that the recognition felt more meaningful because it was delivered in such an authentic way.”
It was important to Modern Health to enable their leaders both with specific tools focused on building skills as leaders but also in creating a cross-company community for managers to support each other and provide peer learning. “We’re a company that ‘walks the talk’ - we take the mental health of our own employees seriously,” said Maureen. “So from a People perspective, we knew we needed to provide more support and a sense of community for our leaders. We wanted to find a way to help managers connect with their peers − without adding to their packed calendars. Video storytelling on Spokn is something we really leaned into.”
Every month, the Modern Health People Team sends out a prompt to a handful of managers - ranging from the meaning of leadership to prioritization techniques to self-care ideas. The final video takes minutes to make and is circulated on the Managers’ Slack channel.
The managers love hearing from their peers around the world in a more private community. And because it all happens asynchronously, it doesn’t increase the scheduling pressure they’re already under. At the same time, “the video format feels warm and human,” said Maureen.
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With extensive experience in CPO roles at tech firms, Maureen knew that for candidates and new hires, a human touch could help the onboarding experience.
“Because Spokn makes video production so easy, I saw the potential for using video to help Modern Health close top candidates and more effectively onboard new hires,” she explained.
Given Modern Health’s ‘Champion Empathy’ value, “I wanted new hires to feel a personal connection to the team and to each other from Day One. But we hire throughout the US and increasingly globally. It wasn’t realistic to introduce new hires on live company calls. But I also wanted to avoid dull, impersonal written messages,” said Maureen.
“So for each onboarding cohort, new hires now create a short video introducing themselves. When the video is shared on Slack, existing Modern Health employees jump into the conversation with greetings messages. It creates a really warm welcome and helps the new hires establish connections outside of their immediate team.”
Spokn ended up being a valuable tool event before Day One, too: “To close a top candidate, for example, a hiring manager and potential future teammates created a personalized video congratulating the candidate and explaining why they were so excited to work together. The candidate explained that it was incredibly meaningful, and it encouraged them to take the role,” said Maureen.
“We needed a solution that was impactful but lightweight and easy to start. We didn’t have the bandwidth or appetite for a resource that took lots of time and effort to implement”
As the first fully-female-founded startup to reach unicorn status, diversity has always been exceptionally important to Modern Health’s employees and leadership team.
The company already had Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) - a rarity in companies of its size, but a crucial ingredient in promoting connection and belonging for remote employees.
Given the company’s commitment to diversity, Maureen wanted to ensure that the ERGs had a chance to shine during the onboarding process. So to increase awareness of the ERGs and clarify the value that participation brings, ERG leaders created a ‘Meet the ERGs’ video. Originally intended as a tool to drive ERG membership among new hires, Modern Health found that hearing a personal “pitch” about each ERG also encouraged long-time employees to join.
Modern Health’s ERGs even discovered that Spokn was a great resource for engaging members throughout the year - especially around heritage months. For example, “During AAPI Month, instead of the simple slideshow that we’d done before, Modern Health ERG leaders invited employees to share reflections on influential Asian American and Pacific Islanders that others in the company should know. We all found it was a meaningful but really easy way to add depth to their AAPI celebration,” said Maureen.
For Maureen, Spokn hasn’t just helped her team to meet their People priorities. It’s also helped her enrich Modern Health’s remote culture in ways she never imagined would be possible.
Leaders and employees at Modern Health took notice: as the year drew to a close, each business unit recorded a thank you message to their People team business partners. “Members of our team were crying when the video played at the last People Team Meeting of the year. It was such a meaningful way to say thank you,” recalled Maureen.
As she considers her priorities over the next year, she’s excited to go beyond Modern Health’s existing use cases to further tap the power of video for professional development. She’s particularly excited about two types of content: first, video stories to help employees recognize the diverse shapes that career paths can take at a company as dynamic as Modern Health. She also sees Spokn as a great resource for crafting bite-size insights to enrich Altitude Academy, Modern Health’s leadership development program.
See how Spokn Stories can bring your culture to life.
