Working Well: Ron Rock Of Microshare On How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental, Emotional, Social, Physical & Financial Wellness
An Interview with Karen Mangia
Remote Optional: Companies will need to accommodate a range of demands from returning workers. It may be that requiring a reason to work from home will be off-putting enough in the future to risk losing employees. I don’t think the corporate sector has fully let go of the 20th-century approach to things like office attendance.
The pandemic pause brought us to a moment of collective reckoning about what it means to live well and to work well. As a result, employees are sending employers an urgent signal that they are no longer willing to choose one — life or work — at the cost of the other. Working from home brought life literally into our work. And as the world now goes hybrid, employees are drawing firmer boundaries about how much of their work comes into their life. Where does this leave employers? And which perspectives and programs contribute most to progress? In our newest interview series, Working Well: How Companies Are Creating Cultures That Support & Sustain Mental, Emotional, Social, Physical & Financial Wellness, we are talking to successful executives, entrepreneurs, managers, leaders, and thought leaders across all industries to share ideas about how to shift company cultures in light of this new expectation. We’re discovering strategies and steps employers and employees can take together to live well and to work well.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Ron Rock.
Ron Rock is CEO and Co-founder of Philadelphia-based Microshare, a leading provider of smart building data solutions to multinationals, governments and other institutions around the world. A serial entrepreneur, he brings three decades of experience as a bridge builder between new technology strategies and legacy enterprises. Prior to founding Microshare in 2013, he founded Knowledge Rules, a business process management (BPM) firm sold to Accenture in 2010.
Tell us about a formative experience that prompted you to change your relationship with work and how work shows up in your life.
Myfirst job out of college was as a salesperson for IBM selling personal computers. I had a quota to hit every month and every quarter. Soon I realized that even though it was the weekend or the evening, even if I were out on a date, I would be worried about hitting my numbers. This was a big change from my previous job in college, when I worked as a cook at Denny’s. I worked the graveyard shift from 11 at night to 7 in the morning. You’d work like crazy and it would be really stressful, but when you were done, you were done. My IBM job didn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. It had results that had to be delivered. And so from a very early age, I learned to be results-driven. This led me a few years later to put one of the first cell phones in my car. It took up half the trunk of my ’85 Honda Accord, but it allowed me to get work done whenever and wherever I wanted, boosting my productivity and results.
Harvard Business Review predicts that wellness will become the newest metric employers will use to analyze and to assess their employees’ mental, physical and financial health. How does your organization define wellness, and how does your organization measure wellness?
Microshare’s interest in wellness extends beyond our own employees for the simple reason that we actually provide data solutions that track wellness for our clients. Our specific product in this vein, EverSmart Wellness, creates data that in the first instance helps HR, wellness and facilities management pros understand the true health and safety of the indoor environment, including air quality, sanitation, density and traffic patterns, as well as automated anonymous ways for staff or tenants to register complaints, note their satisfaction or report issues. The anonymous part is so important: No one wants to be the person reporting a clogged toilet or temperature problems in a room. But these are critical issues for the mental and physical wellness of occupants as well as a company’s need to reassure staff that the hard lessons of COVID-19 have been taken to heart. After an initial remediation period, we also enable the sharing of this data back out to the occupants: in effect, democratizing wellness data via an app or dashboard. Nothing reassures like empirical data.