How Zoom improved mental health care access, utilization, and recovery for its employees
Founded in 2011, Zoom provides a secure, reliable video platform that powers communication needs for businesses and individuals, including meetings, chat, phone, webinars, and online events. Its success skyrocketed during the pandemic, but even with this abrupt growth, Zoom continues to foster a supportive work culture. In 2022, the team received one of Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Awards for Best Places to Work.
Zoom’s motto is to “deliver happiness”—to its customers and to its own people. This philosophy guides its benefits strategy as the company works to build a thriving distributed work culture.
In the middle of 2019, we decided that we needed to bring on a stronger mental health benefit,” said Zoom Head of Global Benefits Sheila Krueger. “Our employee assistance program (EAP) was sufficient, but not really proactive in helping our employees. And we felt that the number of visits that they had available was not sufficient to really support good mental health.” The lack of timely, accessible care was apparent in Zoom’s EAP usage, which was extremely low. Ultimately Zoom was providing—and paying for—a benefit that wasn’t being used by its employees because it wasn’t effective.
In early 2020, Zoom launched Lyra as a comprehensive mental health solution for its global workforce, solving the issues that employees were facing with access, utilization, and recovery. “It was really important to Zoom and our leadership that we partnered with a company that had evidence-based care and was able to provide us good reporting on it,” said Krueger. Lyra provides Zoom with comprehensive quarterly reports that include the number of members who sought care, average validated clinical outcomes, and client satisfaction rates. “I’m so impressed with Lyra’s reporting, which is miles above what we were getting from our old EAP,” said Krueger.