Ep. 94: Wellness Is a Retention Strategy, Not a Perk with Lisa Snow

Episode Links:

On the Mend Wellness - https://www.onthemendwellness.com/

LinkedIn: Lisa Snow - https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-snow-nyc/

Summary:

In this episode of The Corvus Effect, I sit down with Lisa Snow, founder of On the Mend Wellness, who has spent 17 years helping leaders create genuine community through employee wellness programs. Lisa reveals a powerful insight from her work with executives: the same lack of systems preventing leaders from prioritizing their health is creating chaos in their businesses. They explore why wellness programs deliver measurable ROI, how the true cost of turnover can reach 213% of an employee's salary, and why employees want connection regardless of whether they identify as introverts or extroverts. Lisa also shares practical strategies for navigating return-to-office challenges and building effective community without making it feel forced.

Chapters:

00:32 Meet Lisa Snow

01:41 The Root Cause Behind Employee Engagement

03:59 From Personal Training to Corporate Wellness

07:17 How Wellness Hits the Bottom Line

09:55 Scaling Programs for Company Size

14:11 Bridging the Gap Between Leaders and Employees

17:59 The Power of Gift Boxes and Shared Experiences

21:44 Taking Things Off the Leader's Plate

23:45 Navigating Return to Office

28:07 The Real Cost of Turnover

29:48 Advice to Her Younger Self

31:34 How to Connect with Lisa

Transcript

Intro

Scott Raven: Welcome to The Corvus Effect, where we explore what it takes to succeed professionally and truly enhance all parts of your life. I'm Scott Raven, Fractional COO and your host. Each episode we go behind the scenes with leaders who've mastered the delicate harmony of growing their professional endeavors while protecting what matters most. Ready to transform from Chief Everything Officer to achieving integration in all facets of your life? Let's soar!

Meet Lisa Snow

Scott Raven: Hello everyone. Welcome back to The Corvus Effect. I am Scott, and today I am honored to be joined by Lisa Snow, founder and sales director of On the Mend Wellness, where she's been revolutionizing employee wellness for over 17 years.

A speaker, a certified personal trainer, and the architect behind wellness programs that help leaders create genuine community in remote and hybrid work environments. Typically working with companies between 20 and 500 employees, she provides everything from Zoom lunch and learns to chair yoga to beginner-friendly fitness.

But what makes Lisa's approach unique is her commitment to make wellness not only unintimidating, but beneficial to the bottom line of the businesses that she works with. Lisa, welcome to the podcast.

Lisa Snow: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

The Root Cause Behind Employee Engagement

Scott Raven: It is awesome to have you here. Let's just right into it. On the Mend, you say that On the Mend helps leaders create community through wellness. Now I've got a whole bunch of people who listen to this podcast who are those business owners. They've got too much going on, but they understand that culture is critically important to the future success of their business, and maybe they're struggling with employee engagement or retention. What have you found in your work which is actually happening behind the surface? What is the root cause that you can come in and help with?

Lisa Snow: I think most leaders are spinning so many plates and are so busy and overwhelmed and pulled in a million directions. They want employees to have a great experience. They want customers to have a great experience. They've got to drive revenue. And working in a small business can actually be very isolating for employees. If they're in person in a cubicle, it can be hard to connect. If they're remote or hybrid, it can be even harder to connect.

In the past, distributed teams were really giant national companies. Now we're seeing small businesses with 20, 40, 60 employees being in multiple states. And when you don't have the resources of a Fortune 500 company, it's much harder to help employees connect with each other. Maybe there isn't a budget to send people to a retreat or an offsite or bring everyone to headquarters for a holiday party.

And even if you do have the budget for that, what happens the rest of the year? I think helping employees have really meaningful relationships with each other and with the organization is just so much harder than it was 10 years ago.

Scott Raven: Now we say harder than 10 years ago. Like I mentioned in the open, you've been doing this for longer than that. So what was the spark? What was it that led you to say, I'm creating On the Mend?

From Personal Training to Corporate Wellness

Lisa Snow: I had been very lucky to be able to do a lot of one-on-one personal training and health coaching with leaders, with business owners, with partners in firms, with people that worked 80 hours a week. What drives someone like that initially to hire a trainer or a coach is they think they need technical help.

Scott Raven: What do you mean by technical?

Lisa Snow: What are the right exercises I should be doing, or how many sets and reps, or what should my macros be? What food should I be eating? How much water do I need? People think that it's those nuts and bolts that they need.

Scott Raven: I'll do the work. Just tell me what to do.

Lisa Snow: Bingo. And when you really work with leaders, you realize that part of the reason that they don't have time or don't feel like they have time to take care of their health and fitness are the same challenges that some of their employees have. Customers think I should be available 24/7. Answering my phone on the weekend. I am at my desk 13 hours a day.

Scott Raven: No boundaries basically.

Lisa Snow: That's a challenge. And beyond setting boundaries, it's why does every day feel like a fire drill? Well, maybe we don't have systems and processes. We don't have systems and processes for diet and exercise, but maybe we don't have systems and processes in the company.

Because if employees don't feel empowered to make decisions, or employees aren't all rowing in the same direction, then the owner becomes the bottleneck. That impacts the company and revenue, but it also impacts the founder and their actual health. If they're trying to have lower blood pressure or a lower resting heart rate, or maybe dropping a couple pounds, they can't focus on that if the business is always on fire.

Scott Raven: Because they got monkey brain going on and they're like, I'll get to it once I deal with these seven things which are more urgent.

Lisa Snow: Right. So for a leader that's working 10, 12, 14 hours a day at their desk, the traditional advice that they're getting from the medical world and from the fitness industry doesn't really work. If you are at your desk from 9:00 AM to 10:00 PM, that's not the moment when you're going to go do two hours of cardio. You've got to figure out how to fit that into your life, and we realized a lot of those same strategies also apply to employees.

Scott Raven: When we think about it, business owners are very passionate in terms of what they have built or what they have conceptualized or what they want their baby to grow up to. But they're business owners. At some point it has to help the bottom line. How does On the Mend hit the bottom line in a positive manner?

How Wellness Hits the Bottom Line

Lisa Snow: Employees and payroll for many small organizations are their single biggest cost. In the past, maybe the office rent was one of the biggest costs. Now that so many of these folks are hybrid, maybe working out of a coworking space, maybe fully remote, payroll is truly the highest cost.

For a lot of large companies, they're tracking and measuring everything to the penny. In smaller organizations, sometimes the owner isn't fully tracking the cost of turnover. Now owners, their company is their baby. They're tracking all kinds of numbers. They're thinking top line revenue, expenses, profitability, taxes, payroll.

But sometimes when it comes to each employee, we have blinders on a little bit, and we think Suzy Q made X dollars and she's moved on to another organization. So now we need to find a new person, pay them X dollars. But that's not really how it works. Retention is really the cost of the headhunter, training, onboarding, lost time.

We love working with professional services companies. We're certainly open to any industry, but we love law firms, accounting firms, consultants. If the client's favorite attorney leaves, that client is gone. So what was the five-year value of even half of that attorney's book of business or half of that consultant's book of business?

Scott Raven: And the owner is probably thinking, how much am I going to retain? Because how many of those clients are like, well, I didn't really sign with the firm. I signed with Suzy Q and I want to follow Suzy Q.

Lisa Snow: Right, so this is absolutely part of a retention strategy and really trying to reduce the cost of turnover that's crippling so many smaller companies.

Scott Raven: Fantastic. Now, when you talk about these smaller companies, there is a range in terms of what the founder has in terms of the connection with their employee base. Some are small enough that the founder knows everybody personally. Some are a bit larger, that they've grown to the point that they know some of the key players, but a lot of the players may be coming in or out. How do you adjust what On the Mend delivers based on the maturity of the company that you are working with?

Scaling Programs for Company Size

Lisa Snow: That's a great question. In a tiny business with maybe 20 or 30 employees, there may not even be an HR leader yet, even fractionally.

Scott Raven: Correct.

Lisa Snow: You are literally dealing with the owner and the partners who handpick these people, and it's incredibly hard as a leader in a smaller organization because no matter how organized and logical and data-driven you are, there's always an emotional connection to those employees.

When those people leave, you second-guess yourself and you say, well, did I make the wrong hire? This is a fantastic person, but maybe they weren't right for this role. And you can really drive yourself insane. So having an outside team focused on retention can help you get out of your own way.

Wellness can really provide an opportunity for employees, not just to exercise or to learn about interacting with their doctors or learn about nutrition. It's really an opportunity for them to also interact with each other and build deeper relationships. In a smaller business where people already know each other pretty well, you can even take that to the next level.

In a company with 200, 300, 400 employees, it's more likely that there's in-house HR, more likely that there was a talent acquisition person, hopefully, or at least a recruiter who helped bring some of those folks in. So it becomes even more important to think, did we have really clear job descriptions? Do people have clear expectations of what they were supposed to be doing? Do the managers doing that hiring have a clear idea of what makes someone a culture fit for the company? Because if we've done all that pre-work correctly, now when we start adding wellness and start adding employee benefits, you're going to get even more out of that.

In terms of the programming, something like a Lunch and Learn has unlimited participants. I don't care if there are 15 people that attend or 500 people that attend because it's still going to be incredibly interactive. We're still going to have group discussion in the main room. We're still going to have breakouts. It's still going to be about learning, but also internal networking within the organization.

With something like a chair stretch class, even if you have hundreds of employees, you want to break that down into classes with 20 people or less typically. So you might be running that several times a week. In bigger organizations, people can become incredibly siloed. An employee that works in marketing might only know other folks in marketing. They might not know the people in the finance department.

So you really need to get in and have conversations with the leaders. Maybe we're starting by just running classes inside departments, but maybe down the road we want to build a class where there's one person from sales and one person from marketing and one person from finance. So they get to know each other in a fun, low-key social situation that's not a work meeting so that when those folks go back to work, they don't say, ugh, that's Lisa in the sales department.

Scott Raven: Yes. Forced community, for lack of a better word, versus effective community.

Lisa Snow: Bingo.

Scott Raven: Now let's expand on that thought a little bit, because oftentimes I could imagine when you're brought into a situation that the leader, whether it be the founder or the head of HR, has clear points of view in terms of what they think needs to be addressed, what the definition of good looks like, that may not be what is true at the employee level. I'd love for you to elaborate in terms of what you see when you see the dissonance between what the leaders think they need versus what the employees truly need.

Bridging the Gap Between Leaders and Employees

Lisa Snow: That is such a huge challenge because employees who maybe have a background working in corporate and are maybe just now coming to work at this small business are used to programs that are the flavor of the month. They're used to leaders who have good intentions and are really trying, but maybe there's a little bit of check the box. Maybe there's a little bit of, we're doing a wellness program to say we did a wellness program, or we're doing a wellness program because the CPO says that we have to.

Scott Raven: It looks good on their corporate website in terms of say, look what we provide.

Lisa Snow: And now they're at a small business where the owner actually cares not just about revenue, but cares about them as a person, cares that they don't have heart disease, cares that they are alive to see their grandkids, even if that happens after they've left that organization.

It can be really hard as a leader dealing with employees that expect you to not care, that expect the bottom line to be the only thing that's happening. So I think it's really important, regardless if it's us or any other wellness provider, for you as a leader to attend and participate yourself.

Scott Raven: Hmm.

Lisa Snow: It doesn't matter how well-known the speaker is or how much you pay them, if you are not engaged and you are not asking questions. Maybe it's a chair stretch class. Be there yourself. Be willing to laugh at yourself.

Scott Raven: Right.

Lisa Snow: When you model that behavior, you're going to get more of that behavior back from employees. I think a lot of leaders want to listen and they want to read the feedback that they're getting from engagement surveys.

Scott Raven: Right.

Lisa Snow: But most leaders would say, if I asked them if they wanted fitness classes versus just more paid time off, everyone's going to say more paid time off.

But in reality, no employee wants to be fully isolated, regardless if they're extroverts or introverts. Employees want their coworkers to know who they are.

Scott Raven: Mm-hmm.

Lisa Snow: They want to feel valued, not just by the boss, but by the other people on their team.

Scott Raven: Right.

Lisa Snow: Working someplace for two or five or 12 years where no one knows if you have a cat or if you have human kids, or if you play pickleball, can be incredibly demoralizing. So even though people may not verbalize to you that that's something that they want, when you give them that opportunity to feel appreciated and connected, they will tell you how much it meant to them.

Scott Raven: Right. Because everybody wants to feel like they are more than a number at a company, that they want to feel like they are a person who is a part of something. And part of the way that I understand that you create this sense of shared experience is through the gift boxes that you provide, particularly when we're talking about situations where not everybody is in the same physical office. Some people are remote, to be able to provide standard things such that everybody can experience the same way or at least in the same manner.

The Power of Gift Boxes and Shared Experiences

Lisa Snow: Especially in the remote world, having real tangible things is so important. At some companies, the culture is very much, we have never in all our lives seen each other without our suits and ties, and we're not going to share. Now, if that's your culture and people are happy with that culture, then maybe just doing lunch and learns and not doing anything active is okay.

But if you have a team that prior to becoming remote, they got together to do a 5K to raise money for a cancer charity, or there was a company softball team, or people were just connected in a more meaningful way and they miss that, giving them the opportunity to do a very beginner-friendly fitness class together can be such a great way to reconnect.

You can have people just do cardio only, or no equipment only. But when you give people a gift box of home fitness equipment, you give them a present, you give them something to unwrap, you give them a shared experience, you give them a reason to want to try out a class. Because again, we're always going to say, do not make wellness mandatory. I do not want hostages. This is an employee benefit. People need to have fun.

Scott Raven: Let's paint a figurative picture. So let's say I'm a part of this. I'm a former marathon man, a runner who is probably the most inflexible physical person that you've ever seen in my life. I failed sit and reach as a kid, for lack of better term. So I'm getting this box. What am I experiencing as I get the box and I'm like, okay, what have I signed myself up for?

Lisa Snow: We might throw in some resistance bands, some yoga blocks, some things that are going to make that so much easier. We get a lot of desk workers who feel like they're not flexible. What's beautiful about blocks is they make the floor not so far away.

Especially for the person that knows they need to stretch but maybe doesn't like stretching, maybe doesn't make time for stretching, having some resistance bands in there and knowing that some of it could be strength, some of it could be something that's more fun or more accessible to them is really important.

I just want to lower the barrier to entry to everything. If people have to go out to a sports store and buy bands, now you've given them just another excuse to not get started, versus feeling like the company's investing in me.

Scott Raven: Right. Now let's turn this back around to the leader for a second, because we're talking about all these wonderful things that the employees are receiving, but the leader in the back of his or her mind is like, great, one more thing that I have to think about in terms of everything that is bouncing around in my monkey brain. Why would you challenge that thought?

Taking Things Off the Leader's Plate

Lisa Snow: This is about taking things off the leader's plate, not making them more overwhelmed.

Here we are. This is January 2026. Healthcare costs are going through the roof, health insurance costs are going through the roof, and especially for smaller organizations, you may not be able to control that. If you are in a community-rated state, even if your employees are healthier, healthcare costs may be what they're going to be. So reducing the cost of turnover becomes even more important to not have that financial squeeze.

It's so important, especially if you're at the point that you've outgrown just the bookkeeper and you now have a controller, or you have a fractional CFO.

Scott Raven: Yep.

Lisa Snow: That person is such a great resource and they're truly on your side. Really going to him or her and saying, let's find out how much money are we spending on turnover.

Scott Raven: Mm-hmm.

Lisa Snow: Is that good or bad relative to other folks in my city or in my industry? And most important, has that gotten better or worse from before COVID to now?

Scott Raven: Yeah, let's elaborate on that. Because in this benchmarking exercise that you speak of, a lot of leaders and owners are grappling with return to office edicts and whether or not they are going to make it a point that return to office is mandatory or some sort of hybrid approach. How do the programs that On the Mend offers allow for more smoothness based on whatever decision that these founders and leaders are making?

Navigating Return to Office

Lisa Snow: Return to office is so tricky. I know a lot of you guys out there have already done it successfully. So if that's you and you're focused on this quarter and driving forward, just stop for a second. Give yourself a round of applause that you did it because it's so hard.

If you are still struggling and you are still trying to get back to hybrid or back to fully in person, I would just really think about your communication strategy around that. If people are going to be back three days or four days a week, do they get to choose which days they're coming in, or do you choose?

Neither way is right or wrong. If you have clients that need people to be in certain days, maybe you need to require that. If you can give them flexibility, that's going to lead to even more retention. But maybe you can't. And just because you're back in person doesn't mean that people are together.

Because now we're living in a world of distributed teams. You might have a company that only has 50 employees, but they're in a dozen states, and those folks are back in person on client sites. Maybe those people are back in person at WeWork. Are you creating opportunities for them to interact?

The biggest piece is, obviously you have logical reasons for everything that you're doing as a leader, but does the employee understand that there's a logical reason why they need to be back? Not just because you need to supervise them, not just because maybe they felt micromanaged by other leaders in the past. They need to have meaningful work that requires them to be in the office. Nothing is going to demoralize people faster than feeling like they spent 90 minutes driving to the office to sit on Zooms with customers.

Scott Raven: Let's explore that a little bit further. My wife is an employee at a very large company. They're doing return to office. She talks all the time in terms of the what's not in it for her, such as commuting to a location, parking, et cetera, and the lack of productivity during those hours that she currently gets by being in a remote setting.

From your perspective, as you are pitching the what's in it for me to the employees, why should they, why is this more pro than con? What is it in the messaging that you're helping these organizations with?

Lisa Snow: Your point is fantastic about the fact that employees feel like there's a loss of productivity when they go in, because they're on the train, they're in the car, they're stuck in traffic. All this stuff is happening.

So there has to be a payoff for them in terms of higher sales, better relationships with customers, collaboration with other employees. Can you build great collaborative cultures on Zoom? You can, and we've helped people do that. But there's something incredible. Let's say you're a marketer about being in a room with a whiteboard and actually being able to pitch ideas to a team for a video that you're going to shoot.

Or if you are a consultant and your main job is being an expert, but sales is part of it, and being a rainmaker is part of it. The fact that that customer can come in and see you face to face and shake your hand has so much value. So as a leader, you have to show them that they're getting something back for all of that commute time and that it's not necessarily just leading to lower productivity.

Scott Raven: I agree. Now, let's fast forward a little bit. I always love to ask this question in terms of it's 10 years from now. What do you hope are sentences people would say of you through On the Mend that are absolutely true?

The Real Cost of Turnover

Lisa Snow: I would love for people to come away from this with subjective and objective changes.

So we look at the average cost of turnover is 213%.

Scott Raven: Right.

Lisa Snow: That means if there's an employee who you're paying $100K and that person leaves and you didn't want them to leave, that's potentially costing you $213,000 times dozens of employees. We could be talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars that organizations are losing every single year.

One thing that I really want people to come away from is no matter how challenging the economy is or how challenging healthcare costs are, that they feel as a leader less stress, less overwhelmed, less squeezed, more in control.

From an employee perspective, I really want people to feel seen, to know that the work that they did at the organization mattered.

Scott Raven: Yep.

Lisa Snow: And that their coworkers were willing to spend time with them outside of meetings talking about clients to actually get to know them as a real human being who made a difference.

Scott Raven: Impressive. And speaking of making a difference, as we go into the traditional close of these episodes, I always do a tip of the cap to Randy Pausch's book, The Last Lecture, and the final head fake that this book was written for his kids. And I always spin a little bit. So I'm going to spin it with you this way. You are now talking to Lisa Snow 17 years ago. What would you tell that Lisa based on what you have learned?

Advice to Her Younger Self

Lisa Snow: Maybe talk less, listen more.

Scott Raven: Mm-hmm.

Lisa Snow: You really have to help leaders push pause and think about what are their biggest challenges, not just what you think you can help with.

Scott Raven: Right.

Lisa Snow: But what is the bottleneck for them? Is it turnover? Is it they're trying to do too much and they're not delegating to their team? Is it they're so passionate about the mission and vision of the company that maybe they haven't stepped back to make sure that everyone on their team really understands what the mission and vision is, or who a target client is, and just making sure that they're really communicating that message to the folks that they're leading.

Scott Raven: Yes. Communication and clarity are key and critical in order to get things done because nobody ever gets anything done great by themselves. You need people as part of your army for sure.

Lisa Snow: Yeah. I've worked with so many coaches myself over the years and always encouraged leaders to get executive coaching for themselves and just being such an advocate for that. One of the coaches that I've gotten to work with would always pound into our heads: clarity is kind.

Scott Raven: Yes, clarity is kind for sure.

How to Connect with Lisa

Scott Raven: Speaking of providing the folks clarity, let's give them some clarity in terms of how they can find you, how they could potentially engage with you or work with you. Give them details.

Lisa Snow: I am Lisa Snow. The company is On the Mend Wellness. I'm very active on LinkedIn, so please find me there. The website is onthemendwellness.com.

Scott Raven: Excellent. And are there any special offers or engagements in terms of people if they're like, hey, I want to try this a little bit, or some sort of introductory offering?

Lisa Snow: So great to be here on The Corvus Effect. We'd love to offer a complimentary consultation to any of the leaders out there, regardless if you end up working with us or not, just to help you brainstorm what some of your goals might be for a wellness program and for employee engagement.

Scott Raven: Fantastic. Well, Lisa, you have been phenomenal and I think I've put a very different spin in terms of the importance of wellness, not just as a feels good, but as a necessary in today's environment.

Final Thoughts

Scott Raven: Any final words before we close out this episode?

Lisa Snow: For all the business owners and managers out there, I think we can all be very siloed. If you are running engagement surveys, really think about what surprised you from those, and what action have you taken and what action do you want to take this year based on that.

Scott Raven: I agree. And as we say here a lot, it is about the action. It is about the pursuit of what you truly want that matters. So I hope that all of you who are listening will take Lisa's words to heart. Lisa, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I appreciate you.

Lisa Snow: Thanks for having me.

Scott Raven: To my listening audience, thank you for spending the time to listen. Make sure you go forth and act on the wisdom that you have heard here. Please feel free to subscribe and share with those people in your circle. And as always, leave us feedback so that we know how we can improve in terms of the impact that we're trying to create from this podcast series. Until next time, I'm Scott. We'll see you on The Corvus Effect. Take care.

Outro

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