Ten Years of Wilbert Wellness

It started in 2016 with stair challenges, standing desks and reports on how “sitting is the new smoking.” Office wellness was everywhere.

The Wilbert Group got on board. We hired a speaker from The Energy Project to talk with our team about managing energy throughout the day. We bought everyone standing desks.

Some of it worked. Our team got the message that wellness mattered. Some of it brought eye rolls, and Caroline Wilbert recognized forced wellness wasn’t going to make an impact. 

Instead, she introduced Wilbert Wellness: a program that gives each employee $100 a month to spend on whatever wellness means to them. Who were we to define that for someone else anyway?

Ten years later, Wilbert Wellness is still going strong. It’s one of my favorite answers to the question, “What’s kept you at Wilbert all these years?”

The perk is great. Money to spend on wellness, no strings attached? Yes please. But what it says about our firm matters more. 

It says we value the whole person. We want people to take care of themselves inside and outside the office, and we’re not going to dictate how. We show up for each other, and we show up for ourselves. And as a result, we are better at our jobs.

In honor of 10 years of Wilbert Wellness, here are 10 ways employees have spent their wellness stipends over the years:

• Baseball pitching machine, to rediscover a childhood hobby
• High Museum membership
• Books from Barnes & Noble
• Nuuly membership, for clothes and athletic wear that make you feel good
• Massage membership
• Fitbit watch
• A longboard, also a childhood hobby!
• Yoga teacher certification
• Therapy
• Running shoes

Workplace amenity fads rarely become an embedded part of an organization. Wilbert Wellness did, and we’re grateful for it.