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Beyond the Paycheck brings you candid conversations with CHROs and top people leaders who are rethinking how compensation and benefits impact more than just employee bank accounts. From the first paycheck to financial wellness programs, we explore how money shapes identity, equity, purpose, and power at work, and how forward-thinking companies are using pay and perks to transform lives, not just attract talent.
This podcast is sponsored by Aura Finance, the financial wellness platform designed to help employees feel confident, secure, and in control of their money.
See more at aurafinance.io
Beyond the Paycheck - Dennis Richter
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[00:00:00]
Kelsey Willock Jones: Welcome, Dennis Richter, Chief Business and People Officer at Fullscript. We're so excited to have you on this Friday morning. To kick us off, I'd love for you to share a little bit about your career and background, where you're calling in from today, and your current role.
Dennis Richter: Awesome. Thanks so much, Kelsey. Super excited about the conversation today around that human, the most important part of the business. So yeah, a little bit about me. I'm dialing in right now from the greater Washington, D.C. area. A little bit about me. I've had the most probably nonlinear career path maybe possible to get to where I'm at now, which is what I absolutely love.
But there's a common denominator on it, I promise. So I spent the majority of my career in the Army. I spent the first 12 years all over the world, lots of different roles, operations, leadership et cetera. But then had the chance to slide into consulting and did that for a few years in large big four firms and then smaller boutique firms.
And then I jumped into big tech, and within big tech had lots of different opportunities and fun there, whether it was at Google, [00:01:00] Facebook, and then ultimately I went to some smaller PE-backed businesses that corresponded to some of my previous career path, which is in the veteran space and things like that.
And then at Fullscript, we're right now working on revolutionizing the delivery of whole person care for our patients and our practitioners. Super excited about everything that we do, but at the same time, our business is rooted in the most important thing, which is the person. My day-to-day is I'm the chief people officer, run all facets of the people team, HR, recruiting, but also I help run the day-to-day of the actual business for our CEO
Kelsey Willock Jones: Thank you for your service, and thank you for joining us in
Dennis Richter: thanks so much
Kelsey Willock Jones: conversation, Dennis. I always love Speaking to folks that, are veterans because you all know so well how to work in team environments as well as invest in people. So excited to dig deeper into that. But before we get there, I'd love to hear a little bit about your first job, and if you recall, what you spent your first paycheck on.
Dennis Richter: Yeah. I had lots of side [00:02:00] hustles, when I was younger, whether it was babysitting or mowing yards and all those things. But like first real paycheck I was a dishwasher in a restaurant. I was 16, 17 years old. And my first paycheck, I actually used pretty much all of it to take my grandparents out for dinner 'cause they were kind enough to let me stay with them during the entire summer.
And so I used my first paycheck to take them out to a really nice dinner and thank them for hosting me.
Kelsey Willock Jones: I absolutely love that. And as a young person the selflessness in your first paycheck is rare, so I'm sure they very much so appreciated it. Can you tell me a little bit about how you think your money story, whether it was this first job, maybe your past career, has influenced how you think about supporting your people and making decisions in terms of pay, benefits, and beyond?
Dennis Richter: Yeah, honestly, I think you alluded to it, and this is, I think, a theme in my career in the selfless service model is I'm very much a, give more than you take. [00:03:00] And I think in most corporate environments or just business environments they're always thinking about revenue and EBITDA and hitting targets, which is of course fantastic and a goal because that helps fuel and fund the business.
But ultimately, it's how you take care of your teammates, your, your employees in the business and how well they show up. And so I've always thought about how can we maximize that ROI to give back to our team? Because if they're out kicking ass and putting points on the board for us, then guess what we get a chance to do?
We get a chance to hit targets and do great things on our end. And I think sometimes leaders in the businesses always want to cut these small little programs or these benefits or these opportunities away from what actually will help fuel your employees from actually putting the most outsized points on the board.
Kelsey Willock Jones: So you bring up a really important point and one of the focal points of the conversation today, which is investing in the whole person. And what I see [00:04:00] that often as is, investing in physical health, mental health, financial health beyond just the paycheck itself. Can you tell me a little bit about a program maybe you're working on at Fullscript or a program that you've introduced in the past that you're particularly excited about that has helped support and invest in the whole person?
Dennis Richter: Yeah, our mission at Fullscript is helping people get better. And so my team's mission is helping our teammates continue to get better. And one of the things that I've been particularly excited about is, I've been at Fullscript now a little over two years, and, we had a lot of different programs to recognize talent and, all these things.
The one thing that was actually missing was something that corresponds back to the mission. And while we have great perks and access to an employee store for phenomenal supplements and things, we weren't giving our employees access and flexibility to do certain things with those benefits. And so I actually wound [00:05:00] down some of the programs that we had that were just there, I think, for vanity, and actually put money in their pocket.
And so we launched this thing that we just called a wellness fund. And that wellness fund was to go to our teammates to use for whatever they want. They could use it for nutrition programs, exercise programs, yoga classes, but also we've had a lot of people where we've bridged gaps and provided them better access to mental health locally so that they can really take care of themselves as they go through, various inflection points of their journey.
The best part is it's their money, it hits their paycheck, and they can do what they want with it. Great.
Kelsey Willock Jones: I think that in the world that we live in, where we each have such unique desires and needs that giving folks the decision-making authority over how they wanna spend those dollars is certainly a shift in the future of benefits that I'm seeing in many of these conversations. Where do you think that companies are falling short in terms of investing in the [00:06:00] whole person?
Dennis Richter: I would say, when I think about supporting the whole person, I think you alluded to this earlier, right? It's the financial aspect, the family responsibilities, and then I always just sum things up in just general personal challenges. I think one of the biggest issues is that the industry, to a certain extent, is over-corrected.
They wanna support the whole person doesn't mean the employer should insert themselves into every corner of every employee's life. For me, rather, it's fundamentally about removing that friction from the day-to-day. It's providing high-quality healthcare, competitive pay, clear expectations, meaningful benefits, and operational flexibility.
I think about you and I, we had a little bit of rapport before we kicked off today. You're out doing some family things away from home. I just got home. The best part is we could have this conversation from wherever. And that operational flexibility is actually one of the best benefits that people don't talk more and more about.
And I [00:07:00] think the industry consistently falls short in confusing programs and program coverage with actual impact. And for me, I always try to productize things for, let's just say, our friends in finance or some of the other leaders. I always think about if a benefit that sits at 2% adoption isn't really an employee support strategy.
It's really just shelf wear and wasted OpEx. And so to me, real support comes down to ruthlessly auditing what actually removes friction from your talent's lives and doubling down on how you can support them to do their best work, but also be available for what matters most, which is what happens outside of work.
Kelsey Willock Jones: So I want to double-click on that point, which is, tying back to the concept of ROI. Not all programs directly impact the bottom line or make entire sense when it comes to the spreadsheet and you're having a conversation with the CFO, such as, how does work from home impact the bottom line, even though we might very much so know it does from a [00:08:00] cultural perspective or flexibility.
So how do you think about sponsoring programs when the spreadsheet doesn't so obviously support your argument?
Dennis Richter: Yeah, I think, and most companies out there, whether you're 50 people or 50,000 people, do some semblance of a, a culture survey, a pulse survey, or something out there. One thing that most places do really wrong is they don't bring all of those results directly back to the people that they just solicited this feedback from.
And if you actually take the time to really distill down the themes, especially in an environment where those surveys are almost always anonymous. If you really listen to the comments and then tie that to what you're hearing anecdotally from leaders within my team as my, business partners are talking to our employees of all levels all the time, you can quickly understand what matters most.
And it ultimately comes down to me and my position to have confidence and conviction in a [00:09:00] room where others may not feel as strongly as I do about certain things, to your point, on the balance sheet. And I'll give you a good recent example. I'm very big on creating the moments that matter, and one of the things that we heard so much from our teammates all over the US and Canada was that they wanted not lots of in-person events and offices.
They just wanted the right times to get together with their teammates to both celebrate the business, but also balance out getting to know each other and spending time together within their smaller teams. Not an easy sell for me to go talk to finance and say, "Hey, I wanna change this amount of investment, and I wanna increase this amount of travel budget so that we can bring more people together."
And they go what's the upside for the business?" It's hard to say because I don't know outside of, I believe the sentiment is going to be really high, and I think the excitement around it's going to be strong. When you get there and you finally get to the moment and you have [00:10:00] the event, everybody's riding the high of hanging out, hearing all day from leaders all over our business about the direction of where we're going, socializing that night.
Some of the teams bookending that with their own little smaller off-sites. What it ultimately turned into is something our teammates were talking about, not for days, not for weeks, but for months. That amount of ROI, that sentiment to me is what fuels them when we ask them to grind on a sprint for a project or deliver something a week earlier.
Those are the little things that they remember. You can't just slap a number on that with ROI in the moment. You just have to be willing to say, "Look, it's on me if this doesn't work, but I really believe this is going to turn out the way that we hope it will." And then you just have to, roll with it.
Kelsey Willock Jones: I love how you mentioned that the anecdotal and the qualitative ROI is extremely important in the argument you make, even when you're [00:11:00] working with folks that are very much so numbers people. 'Cause I imagine that, the folks that you had to speak with to get that budget shift approved also might have attended that event and just felt the sentiment rather than it, come out of a metric saying, "I liked the event," or, "I pressed the smiley face that the event was good."
They themselves felt motivated. So it's obvious when we talk about it. It's not always obvious when we simply try to quantify it.
Dennis Richter: That's right. Absolutely. Yeah, there's always an intersection of that. I think sometimes people lean really heavily one way or the other, and you just have to, sometimes just trust your instincts and also be willing to get it wrong. I'd have been completely fine if some things wouldn't have worked out.
I wouldn't have regretted my decision to, have conviction in my voice to fight for that.
Kelsey Willock Jones: You're teeing me up perfectly for my next question then, which is, can you tell me about an experiment that you've run in introducing perhaps a new benefit or a new strategy, a program that didn't go the way you expected and what you [00:12:00] learned from it?
Dennis Richter: Yeah, there's always a lot of talk around recognition and how do you find ways to recognize your, great impact, just a fun moment, a moment of support. And the problem is that word encompasses a lot of things, but it also means a lot, and it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
And I remember, getting pulled into, we gotta come up with a better platform for recognition. And so we went out and leveraged this third-party platform and implemented this so that, we could basically have these public kudos and public shout-outs for folks. And the one thing that, I quickly realized myself being, in this population, actually don't love public recognition.
I'm a little bit more on the sort of quiet professional side of things. To me, no news is good news. Or if you give me, some praise maybe privately, but I don't like the public shout-outs. And what I realized is that the recognition platform, while there were lots of people who were really vocal, if you [00:13:00] actually looked at the population participating, it was the same super vocal population in the business.
And not a lot of the people that were actually really giving us that outsized performance were the same ones in the background who aren't really vocal, but just get their jobs done. And so I just remember resetting with my team going, "Hey, I think this was a great experiment. I just don't think this is something we should continue to build around and scale in the go forward."
And it actually changed my entire thinking, and it's one of the first questions I ask every new person that joins my team or anybody that I meet who's new to our businesses: How do you like to be recognized and why? And ultimately, I learn a lot about them just based off their answer. And because of that little bit of that failure of that platform a long time ago, it's completely reshaped my entire approach to how I onboard and think about onboarding new teammates and talent.
Kelsey Willock Jones: I really love that because I do think that, as you mentioned, recognition is so important, but we all like [00:14:00] to receive it in different ways, similar to we all like to receive feedback in different ways. Some of us like the direct, some of us like a little bit more sugar-coated, et cetera. But how would we know other than being direct?
Dennis Richter: Yeah. I remember I heard a great line once from somebody when I was chatting with them about, talking about feedback, and somebody's like feedback's a gift." That's what they kept telling me. I said some people are not great gift givers in life, though." And same thing for feedback.
I agree. There's a time and a place for it, and that time and place is usually as soon as possible. But the delivery, your expectations of that conversation, they vary greatly depending on who's on the opposite side.
Kelsey Willock Jones: It makes me think of the this is like a, a relationship therapy term, but there are agreements and then there are expectations.
Dennis Richter: Right
Kelsey Willock Jones: And if you don't make an agreement, then we can, fall into the trap of expectations that miss the mark.
Dennis Richter: That's
Kelsey Willock Jones: so how do you get clarity, you ask. I really love that.[00:15:00]
Dennis Richter: Yeah
Kelsey Willock Jones: So another point that you had brought up, especially around the concept of where employers might be missing the mark in terms of holistic wellbeing, is around this concept of financial health. So can you tell me a little bit more about how you think about the importance of financial health for employees and why it's important to the company?
Dennis Richter: Oh, for sure. It, it would be hard for me to think of maybe any greater stressor for employees. Ultimately financial well-being, it's a workplace issue because financial stress doesn't clock out when someone clocks in or vice versa, right? And it's something that weighs heavily , on people.
And I think that companies a lot of times just make the mistake of defining financial well-being too narrowly, right? It's not just about salary. I say this to my-- to employees and to people all the time at conferences or other things. You can always go somewhere else and make more money, but it ultimately comes down to healthcare costs whether it's an [00:16:00] unexpected expense becomes a crisis.
It's are benefits and other things, are they interchangeable in a way that employees can actually access the programs that they need at the moments they need them most? And so hopefully I've started to see a little bit more of this as as the conversation around compensation philosophies, right?
You always hear about equity and predictability and fairness. The key word missing in there is flexibility. That's the key word I think that's often missing. And so when I think about like the best financial well-being strategies actually start with reducing uncertainty and then being clear about what's available and building benefits that people can actually use, and again, removing that friction, because the last thing you want when you're dealing with, a financial crisis or any other crisis is additional friction and bureaucracy to get access to the things that you need most.
So I think it's just really about creating or avoiding creating [00:17:00] unnecessary financial anxiety is just mitigating having bad systems and difficult access to those.
Kelsey Willock Jones: The challenging understanding of the value. I think that we all know healthcare has gotten so overcomplicated that it can add in itself its own financial stress, not understanding, the mechanics of which, what you're gonna pay, not being able to forecast. I think we've all been there.
Dennis Richter: for sure
Kelsey Willock Jones: it applies to so many different types of benefits, whether it's, insurance, retirement, beyond. What is a shift in compensation benefits or even just HR overall that you see coming that most HR leaders are not ready for?
Dennis Richter: I think I would probably go the route of just, I call it hyper-personalization without creating structural inequity. And what I mean by that is, for, all the, decades I've been in and around this space I think compensation and a lot of benefit architectures have been [00:18:00] designed around these kind of imaginary average employees.
So they take this swag of, a 30-year-old single person who's in good health, and here's what that cost will be. Not understanding that you can have a 26-year-old who's living alone caring for a parent or a sick, sibling. You could have a working parent that has toddlers. You can have, a generational caregiver situation with, two or three people living in a household of varying levels of health.
And ultimately, you can have a 50-year-old planning their retirement. And guess what? They could all be on the same team at the same company, in the same department, and yet the realities of the life are completely different. And yet these programs are built around the average. When you're thinking about stop losses and, costs for the employer and what you offset from the business, it's all based on [00:19:00] swag.
Here's what it was last year. Here's where the industry is going, and let's try and pick something in the middle. To me, personally, I believe the future is the absolute opposite of that. It's fewer things, significantly better things, and more flexibility. And going back to that sort of hyper-personalization, if you give people access to them, then that team I described of a 26-year-old living alone with, somebody else and with a family member you've got generational living, you've got working parents with toddlers, you've got somebody approaching retirement.
Now they get to figure out what matters most for them, and then guess what? Life changes, most often unexpectedly. And when that moment changes, it's often extremely difficult for your benefits to change. You need to have a qualifying life experience for that change to be okay. What does that actually mean in today, in, in this day and age?
And I go back to so many of the situations I've been in personally in my [00:20:00] life. So I think the hardest part is that leaders aren't going to be ready to kinda shift their mindset on how do we plan this? And more importantly, I think the rigid structure of insurance and benefits in general that businesses are dependent on has to open their eyes and their aperture a little bit and realize it's just not as black and white as people think it is.
Kelsey Willock Jones: Couldn't agree with you more, especially given that's where the consumer market has already gone. Hyper-personalization, whether it has to do with marketing or what we consume. It, I log into Instagram, and I-- it knows exactly what I wanna buy tomorrow before I even wanna buy it. And the workforce is expecting the same because that shift has already happened more broadly in their lives.
So even when you were talking a little bit about wellbeing dollars, it's a perfect example, albeit it's actually pretty simple, right? Give people the choice to use their dollars in the way they want [00:21:00] to. That's personalization. They're making the choice on their own rather than their employer making it for them.
Certainly brokers and even vendors themselves beyond it is a catch-up that needs to be made.
Dennis Richter: Yeah, and even on the flip side of that, it really quickly is if you think about, car insurance, if you're a safe driver and you're driving the same car and year over year, no tickets, no issues, no nothing, more often than not, your premiums can go down. And yet in healthcare, you and I could be on a preventive healthcare journey doing all the things we're supposed to do, being extremely proactive about our health.
Dennis Richter: You and I aren't Going to get any credit from that from our insurance. They're not gonna lower our premiums because we're extremely healthy and being extremely proactive. The brokers aren't gonna think about that you and I are on healthcare journeys and way out in front of issues and catching them way before they become what they would view as expensive, high dollar claim problems.
There's no [00:22:00] credit for that. And so why would you not want to reward people especially in society now wellness is at an all-time high of, discussion. To your point on social media, it's everywhere. And yet at the same time people would say what's in it for me? I'm paying the same thing for my insurance, whether I'm doing all of these right things or if I'm just doing nothing, I'm paying the same premium just because of how old I am and where I work."
Kelsey Willock Jones: There's so many more questions I wanna talk about, and this could lead to another 35-minute conversation, but I'll refrain from doing so. But I certainly agree with you, especially in the realm of this massive healthcare shift needing to happen. It's such a unique way to think about how do we actually start to reward good behavior?
Because we already have all these programs such as, show up for your doctor's appointment, maybe we take 100 or give you $100 as a gift and whatnot. How do we take that so much of a step further that more industry-wise the incentives are there, [00:23:00] and also the cost reduction starts to happen for employers that's so sorely needed.
Dennis Richter: That's right
Kelsey Willock Jones: So my last question for you, Dennis is there any last words that you'd like to leave with our audience?
Dennis Richter: Yeah, I would say, we were talking about this before and I think, I'll bring up the two letters that we've managed to avoid this entire conversation because I think it is going to underscore what's so important about our chat. Is everybody's so wrapped up in all facets of AI and conversations around AI, and yet everything we just talked about today actually has to do with the most important thing, which isn't the technology, it's the person.
It's the person behind the technology. It's the person leveraging the technology and the person you want to learn more and develop that technology. If you don't take good care of them, especially as leaders and businesses you can't expect technology to lean in and do that for you
Kelsey Willock Jones: Mic drop. Absolutely love it, especially as a person that believes so deeply in, in supporting people and elevating them in this highly [00:24:00] technologically forward world. I sincerely appreciate that sentiment. So thank you so much, Dennis, for joining us, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your weekend.
Dennis Richter: Awesome. Thanks so much, Kelsey. This was awesome. Have a great weekend