How The Raine Group encourages employee wellbeing with WONE
Sherri Williams is a Partner and the Head of Investor Relations and Fundraising at The Raine Group. Raine is a global merchant bank that advises and invests in companies in the sports, media and entertainment spaces, including DraftKings, Imagine Entertainment, and SoundCloud.
As a senior leader at The Raine Group, what were the challenges you were looking to overcome with a wellbeing solution?
The firm has been around for 15 years, and I’ve been part of it for 12 of those years, so I’ve seen the growth and challenges that we’ve lived through over the last decade and a half.
Like most other businesses, we’ve been through a transformative few years. COVID has changed the business landscape by moving us from predominantly office based work to a hybrid model. Along with technology advancements that enable 24/7 communication, these changes have posed a lot of challenges for people, both personally and professionally.
As a result, since COVID, I’ve been an advocate of bringing mental health awareness and education resources into the workplace.
How is WONE an effective solution for your wellbeing needs?
When Walking on Earth was first introduced at Raine, it was my own personal curiosity about the platform that drew me to it.
Raine has a subscription to the WONE Platform for employees, and we also have a bespoke Speaker Series that WONE has designed for us. I was attracted to the platform because I had the ability to pick and choose what I was personally interested in, as the programming had so much variety on offer.
I found the sessions with WONE transformational. I gained so much knowledge about how to manage my own stress in a work environment. I gained a clear understanding of the difference between the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, and how to manage these systems using simple breathing techniques, to help manage my stress during the day.
We’re in a people business. Our assets are our people. We should invest in our people’s mental and physical health so that they are at their best at work. I truly believe that leadership has an important role to play in driving meaningful change. So the next step for me was how I could take those learnings and apply them to my own management and leadership style. Now I walk away from the sessions with WONE thinking about how I’m going to be a better manager for my team, and knowing I’ll perform better at work as a result.
We’ve been working with WONE for over a year now, and I’m a huge advocate. I’m always talking about WONE to other companies. I’ve done a lot of informal advocacy and also referrals to people who are interested in the topic.
How has WONE increased engagement and helped evolve the culture at Raine?
I think collectively the world has done a great job of building awareness of the personal stress and anxiety that many people live with. However, I don’t think people are fully comfortable talking about this in a working environment. WONE has been instrumental in helping change this at Raine.
Having a shared topic and experience through WONE sessions, has built relationships across the company at all levels of seniority. I’ve noticed an increase in engagement between work colleagues as a result of using the WONE Platform. For example, I can see other colleagues of mine in a WONE session, and that gives us the opportunity to connect outside of that session to talk about our shared interest. It’s given us a forum to connect, check in with each other, and share our experiences with each other.
Additionally, the WONE speaker series helped us advance company culture by encouraging open dialogue.
As a high performing business with lots of high performing professionals, it was important to us that we had speakers capable of bridging their own experience with that of the commercial world. Our speakers included the former Olympian, Jack Green, and the Harvard Professor, Dr Ashley Whillans, who spoke to high performance and time management as it relates to pressured work environments. Through the Q&A with these incredible experts, we were able to encourage open dialogue around Raine specific working culture and pressures, in a way that we haven’t done previously.
The combination of these two solutions has really helped us build relationships across the business.
