Guru Gowrappan Verizon Media CEO and Alan Murray Fortune President & CEO join Yahoo's Reset Your Mindset at Work special

Guru Gowrappan Verizon Media CEO and Alan Murray Fortune President & CEO join Yahoo's Reset Your Mindset at Work special. Topics range from mental health to how companies can help their employees cope with the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic and the isolation of working from home.

Video Transcript

JULIA LA ROCHE: Welcome back to Reset Your Mindset At Work. I'm Julie La Roche, and I'm honored to bring in our next guest. We have Alan Murray, the CEO of Fortune, along with Verizon Media Group's very own CEO Guru Gowrappan. Welcome to you both. Really interesting conversations that we're having around mental wellness, so I would love to get your reactions.

Alan, I want to start with you. You've been hosting, I've noticed, quite a few CEO calls, and there was one that really caught my attention. It was with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and he revealed to you a startling statistic around mental health at his company that something like 36% of employees reported having mental health issues. I'm wondering, what are you hearing from the C-suite of America these days?

ALAN MURRAY: Yeah, I think it's a big issue, and we would all make a mistake if we overlook it. I don't quite know how Marc Benioff got that figure of 36%, but he was quite confident and quite precise on it. And then the same day, I was on a call with the CEO of Synchrony, and she said something very similar that they had seen a pronounced increase in calls to their mental health distress line.

And I think it's a lot of the things you've been talking about for the last hour. I mean, there is stress that comes from the pandemic itself. A lot of people are feeling stressed from isolation. Some people are having domestic problems that have been exacerbated by the situation we're all in, and I think it's something that's really important and shouldn't be overlooked.

JULIA LA ROCHE: It certainly is, and Guru, I want to bring you into this. Because even long before the pandemic, I noticed at work, you all were doing a lot around mindfulness, meditation, mental wellness, those sorts of things. I would like to know from your perspective as a CEO, why was that such an important critical step even before the pandemic? And then how do you think the pandemic's only going to amplify the importance of those initiatives?

GURU GOWRAPPAN: Thanks, Julia. And one of the things that I've always said-- and Alan and I have talked about this too. --which is your mind is your master. So when you think about that, you have to nourish and take care of it. And it's unfortunate, but also, I think there's a silver lining in this pandemic that it's become a forcing function for companies to really tackle mental health head on.

And it's been exciting to hear all the different speakers, and even what Alan has shared in terms of insights about how people are changing on a personal level. But I think we started early on. And in many ways, we've always said that investing in this, keeping your employees healthy and happy, mentally, emotionally, physically, then they're more productive. I mean, it's as simple as that when you start thinking about.

ALAN MURRAY: Yeah, and Guru, there's another important thing going on that I hear in these CEO conversations. And I thought Mark Bartolini captured it very nicely. There's a fundamental change in the way the economy and business operate today from 10, 20 years ago. He talked about how we used the steward scarce-- you steward the scarce resources and you overuse the abundant resources.

It used to be financial resources that we were stewards of, and it was people who solved the problems. And there really has been a change with the rise of tech, the increase in the value of intellectual property. Finance is now the abundant resources. It's the people who are so critical to companies today. You have to pay attention to the people, or you risk undermining your most important assets.

GURU GOWRAPPAN: Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Alan. I think that's how we've been, of course, approaching it, and it's good to see, finally, everybody stepping up to this. But there's so much more work to be done.

JULIA LA ROCHE: I think you both bring up a really important point, and I'll pose this question to both of you. And I'll start with you, again, Alan. The business community's response to the pandemic, I was wondering if you could assess that. And do you think people are starting to understand the role of business, and where this theme of stakeholder capitalism and the importance of stepping up and taking care of all of your stakeholders, which also includes your employees, not just your shareholders?

ALAN MURRAY: Yeah, well, as you know, Julia, the move towards stakeholder capitalism was well under way before the crisis hit. And frankly, I wondered, geez, everybody's in a crisis. They have to look at their bottom line, and maybe this stuff will go away. But interestingly, it's been the exact opposite. I think the nature of the crisis has emphasized the importance of a move to stakeholder capitalism.

And if you look at what's going on in the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, where you have companies that used to be extremely short term bottom line focused and hoarding their intellectual property all working together trying to find solutions to the health problems, it's a very different way of operating than we're accustomed to seeing in the past. So I do think there are some silver linings to this crisis and things moving in a good direction. Guru, I don't know if you see it the same way.

GURU GOWRAPPAN: It's amazing that you mentioned it. If you think about the four stakeholders, the employees, customers, shareholders, and society. If I think about the previous world, you know, most companies you think about, it's customers, shareholders, then somewhere employees, and then society trickles down. The biggest change here, which is employees first.

Now what do you do for employees and society? That's your input. I always say, employees and society is your input. The output is, what do you show to the shareholders, and what you show to the customers? In a way, I think it's coming down to that in terms of stakeholder. And I think this pandemic, the silver lining, as you said, Alan, it's really accelerated that change.

ALAN MURRAY: Yeah, absolutely.

JULIA LA ROCHE: And along those lines, Guru, we're talking about addressing some of the challenges-- maybe some of the challenges within society. And right now, I know at Verizon Media, mental health is incredibly important to them announcing $10 million in ad inventory for the cause. I wanted to get your thoughts on what do you think the role is of Verizon Media in addressing this crisis.

GURU GOWRAPPAN: Yeah, you know, I would step back a little bit, Julia, and I will say that large corporations need to step up in times of crisis. I think Alan is saying the same. We're seeing that shift. We made, when I think about Verizon Media more broadly, less about a statement, but more truly saying, it's a priority internally. Let's start with ourselves first, our employees, and then externally. So internally, people have seen it.

We made mandatory health education for all employees. That's mandatory. People are going through it right now. In some cases, we've started the pilot. The idea is by Fall, most of them will have gone through it. We also now provide 24 by seven crisis support counseling, mindfulness programs, community support to our neurodiversity ERG.

And in the last piece that you mentioned, of course, Verizon overall, we've contributed to the COVID response overall. But part of that are of the more than 50 million that we contributed. About 10 actually was dedicated to mental health organizations, who have seen a spike in demand in their services, so a lot of that. And then from a consumer and society perspective, we launched Yahoo Life, which was all around mental, physical, emotional well-being, really going after it.

So the first and foremost, I always say, mental health is, first of all, you've got to take care of yourself. So for me personally, what do you do for yourself and your employees? And then how do you start working with community and society broadly?

JULIA LA ROCHE: Good points to bring up in. And in closing for both of you, this pandemic created a lot of time to reflect, and I'm wondering if there's anything that's maybe shifted your own mindset, anything that's changed for you all personally.

ALAN MURRAY: I don't know who has time to reflect. I've never been busier in my life. It's amazing how eliminating the commute time and the moving time has forced us all to sit on Zoom calls from eight o'clock in the morning until nine o'clock at night. I think the biggest change I hear from businesses that I agree with is that the ability to do things virtually has turned out to be much more powerful and much more effective than we thought. I think it's going to cause a big change in the way we work in the future.

GURU GOWRAPPAN: I agree with Alan, and it will be interesting to see a year from now when a lot of use are used to working from home. But the normal life comes back. A year or a year and a half, you know, you have the vaccine, and you have the herd immunity and all of that. How your personal life interacts with your work life, it'll be interesting.

I think to Alan's point, too, I mean, we're all learning as we speak. I mean, this is the first time-- I heard this. --about 11,000 years in humanity, where first time, we're all facing the same issue. And they're solving that. What a big change and habit, I think, you know, Alan, that you've talked about is important. I think it's built a lot of resiliency.

We are seeing it. I'm seeing it in CEOs and our teams. It's really brought in a lot of acceptance. You can't do much. I mean, you have to say, this is what it is, and we're going to do what we can and walk through it.

I do come back to, I think, the big difference is self care and taking action, which is whatever is in your control, right? Really focusing on that, and I felt like there was also a lot of the speakers today-- from Mark Cuban, to Dr. Harris, to Serena Williams-- everybody were really talking around, how do you become more resilient, how do you accept it, how do you take care of yourself, and how do you act, right?

ALAN MURRAY: And I would--

JULIA LA ROCHE: Certainly a learning experience for us all. Guru and Alan, thank you so much for joining us.