March 2026 Yon Hardisty

Issue #21: Being Better Together

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Leaning Out to Be In

I want to be honest with you about something.

Lately, my wife and I talk at length about how the world feels unsteady right now. I think you feel it too. Whether it's the news cycle, the economic pressure, the general sense that things are shifting faster than we can process them, there's a lot pulling people inward. A lot of reasons to close the door, pull down the shades, and just try to get through the week.

But here's what I know from building Healthtek, and from years of watching what actually makes people healthier: the instinct to draw inward is the exact opposite of what helps. Connection is not a luxury we earn after everything settles down. It's the thing that helps everything settle down.

This month, we're talking about interconnectivity. Not as a concept, as a practice. As a choice organizations are making right now about how they want to show up for their people. As a framework for how we at Healthtek are thinking about access, engagement, and utilization not as separate pillars but as one continuous act of building something together.

Because healthcare is better when we're all better. And we are all better when we lean on each other.

Let's dive into it.

​
Yon Hardisty

In this issue:

Don't Draw Inward Three Words That Changed Everything We Said We Support Women Here's What That Looks Like When The World Feels Scary

Launched March 2026 Healthtek PeerSupport

Human support for every moment that matters.

Meeting your people where they are, whenever they need it, so your organization can thrive from the inside out.

When your employees need support, they need it now-not next week, not during business hours. Healthtek PeerSupport quickly connects them with trained Support Advocates, 24/7/365, using our peer network or add your own peer teams.

Why PeerSupport?

1. Rapid Response: Fast connection time when stress strikes, support is instant
2. Peer Network: Offering a flexible peer network or train your own peer support team using Healthek Learning (a Learning Management System)
3. Real Human Connection: Trained Support Advocates, anonymous, no login, not chatbots, or automated responses
4. Confidential & Safe: Judgment-free, anonymous support in a secure environment
5. Flexible Integration: Works standalone or integrates with your Healthtek Hub and Wellness Challenges

Don't Draw

Inward

When the world feels unstable, connection isn't optional, it's the point.

Here is a pattern that plays out in every recession, every period of political upheaval, every time the news gets heavy enough that people start dreading their morning phone check: organizations pull inward. Budgets tighten. Programs get cut. The things that feel hardest to justify on a spreadsheet such as community, connection, culture are often the first to go.

It's understandable. It's also almost always the wrong call.

The research on social connection and health outcomes is not subtle. Loneliness and social isolation increase the risk of premature death at a rate comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The U.S. Surgeon General declared a loneliness epidemic in 2023, noting that roughly half of American adults report measurable levels of isolation and that number has only grown since.

What's happening right now in the world is the uncertainty, the polarization, the pace of change that leaves people feeling like they can't quite catch their breath and is precisely the kind of environment where disconnection accelerates. People stop reaching out. They assume everyone is fine, or that nobody has bandwidth, or that their own struggles aren't serious enough to mention.

The organizations that get this right in 2026 will be the ones that resist that pull. The ones that say: now more than ever, we invest in the connective tissue of this place. Not because it's easy, but because it's what healthy organizations and healthy people actually require.

Connection Isn't Soft. It's Strategic.

We've spent years talking about employee wellness as though it were a perk, something you offer when times are good and cut when they aren't. That framing is holding a lot of organizations back. The data is clear that connected employees stay longer, perform better, show fewer symptoms of burnout, and recover faster when hard things happen.

Right now, people are struggling to simply stay employed. This is scary for most families and in a world that keeps giving people reasons to disconnect, the organizations that build real connectivity into their infrastructure are building something genuinely durable. That's not a feel-good story. It's a competitive advantage. And people remember.

At Healthtek, togetherness (and interconnectedness) is the idea we've been building upon from day one. Not togetherness as a slogan on a wall. Togetherness as an operational commitment to access, to engagement, to utilization of the tools and communities and human connections that keep people well. We want you to be well and to do well everyday. This includes keeping active. We want you to be your best self that you can be.

Keep reading because the rest of this month's newsletter is about what that actually looks like in practice.

Join a Wellness Challenge

By Downloading the App

Where iPhone or Android App Store Search +Health Challenges Download Press Download Create A Username and Password

+Health Wellness Challenges helps you build lasting health habits through simple, effective challenges you can share with the people who matter most. The public app is FREE, so what are you waiting for, go download the app today.

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Understanding

Menopause

Menopause is not a disease or illness, but a normal stage of life. Occurring in women who are on average age 51, it is possible however, to experience changes anytime between the ages of 40 to 60. It is usually preceded by perimenopause, which can last 2-8 years. Menopause, which is caused by the natural decline of hormones such as estrogen and progesterone, has a wide range of symptoms. These can range from mild to severe and vary for each individual. Fortunately, treatment options are available and working with a care team can make symptoms more manageable.

Read More →

Three Words

That Changed Everything

Is Your Technology Being Used?

I know what you might be thinking. Those three words are "I Love You." Not this time although we do love our clients. Instead we are talking about "Access, Engagement, and Utilization."

Most wellness programs fail not because they're bad programs. They fail because nobody uses them.

An EAP that few people reach out to. A wellness app downloaded once, opened twice, forgotten. A mental health benefit buried tucked deep inside an onboarding packet. The gap between having a resource and seeing real impact can be wider than expected, and many organizations are still figuring out how to close the gap.

This year at Healthtek, we're organizing everything we do around three pillars. Not separately. Together, in sequence, as a single system that makes wellness actually work.

Access Without Engagement is a Brochure

A lot of organizations have solved the access problem on paper. They offer things. They communicate them. And then they measure utilization and wonder why the numbers are so low.

The answer is almost always engagement. People don't use things they don't trust, don't feel seen by, or don't believe will work for someone like them. A generic wellness portal aimed at an office worker doesn't engage a construction foreman or a retail shift lead or a nurse coming off a 12-hour rotation. Not because those people don't need support, they desperately do but because the resource wasn't built with them in mind.

Engagement is the bridge between access and utilization. It's the question of whether the thing you're offering feels like it was made for the person holding it.

If you think about your systems, at your workplace, are they doing these three things well? If not, it might be time to speak up.

Engagement Without Utilization is Hope

You can build the most beautifully designed, deeply relevant, perfectly communicated wellness program on the market. If people don't use it at the moments they actually need it, 11pm on a Sunday, after a hard shift, in the parking lot before they go back inside then the engagement was nice, but it didn't move the needle.

Utilization is where everything becomes real. It's the chat that gets sent. The peer support connection that happens at 2am. The wellness challenge a team actually completes together. It's the measure that separates programs that look good in a pitch deck from programs that actually change health outcomes.

How Healthtek connects all three

Our platform was built to move people through this sequence without friction. Hubs make resources accessible — one place, no maze of portals. Wellness Challenges drive engagement by making health a shared experience rather than a private obligation. PeerSupport closes the last mile in the moment when someone actually needs another human being and needs one now, not in three business days.

These aren't separate products sitting next to each other. They're a connected system, and the connection is the point. Because a person who can't access care doesn't get engaged. A person who never gets engaged doesn't utilize. And a person who never utilizes stays exactly where they were, struggling quietly and alone.

In 2026, this is the cadence we're building toward with every partner, every organization, every community we work with. Access. Engagement. Utilization. Together.

We Said We Support Women. Here's What That Looks Like.

When it comes to supporting women, look no further than the Resiliency Network and what it means to put community where your words are as well as other resources such as LivWell Partners and Forestr.org, all of which are primarily run by women. It's also true that most of our partners, employees, resellers, and friends are women. I'm not certain that we planned it that way, but it's worked out that way none-the-less.

It's easy to say "we support women's health." A lot of organizations say it. Fewer of them have built anything specific around it.

We want to talk about something concrete this month, something that started as a recognition of a gap and became one of the clearest examples of what interconnectivity actually looks like in practice.

Menopause affects roughly 1.3 million women in the United States every year. Most of them are in the workforce. Most of them report that their symptoms which can include sleep disruption, cognitive changes, anxiety, mood fluctuations, and physical discomfort that ranges from annoying to debilitating and can go completely unaddressed by their employers. A 2023 survey found that nearly 900,000 women leave the workforce annually due to menopause-related symptoms. Not because they want to. Because no one built a system that met them where they were.

The healthcare system has historically under treated and under-researched menopause. The workplace has mostly pretended it doesn't happen. Women navigating this transition have been left to manage it privately, without language for it in most professional spaces, and without community around it.

That's not good enough. And we said so not just in a newsletter, but by building something.

The Resiliency Network: Community in Action

The Resiliency Network exists to give people access to health information, peer connection, and live support in a way that actually meets them. Not simply a resource library. Not a chatbot. A living, breathing community hub with real content, real conversation, and critically real human peer support available live 24/7/365 days per year. If you haven't checked it out yet, take a look at our wellness video library too, available to everyone, all the time.

For women navigating menopause, the Resiliency Network offers a space where this topic isn't taboo, isn't minimized, and isn't treated as something to quietly endure. It's a space where the conversation can happen with people who understand it from the inside, through peer support that is live and accessible right now. It's also a place for hundreds of additional helpful healthcare articles and support for not just women but men too.

This is what building something together looks like. Not a brochure that says "we support women's health." A platform that asks: what do women actually need, when do they need it, and how do we make sure it's there?

We're proud of what's been built here. And we're just getting started.

When the World Feels Scary

I'm going to close out the newsletter by saying, the world feels scary right now. It's not just you that feels that way. Almost everyone I talk to feels a sense of uneasiness.

It would be really easy to hide and just go along with our daily lives like nothing is happening.

I would challenge you to do more.

Get outside and get moving.

Grab a friend and go for a walk and talk.

Keep the TV off for three days straight.

Avoid social media doom scrolling at night.

Call that special someone that you haven't spoken to in years.

And turn that scary, uneasy feeling into action.

Reaching Out Matters

Lately, I've been leaning into my friends, family, and co-workers telling them that it's OK to recognize that the world is anything but normal right now and that we need each other more than ever before.

So, don't delay.

Call a friend, family member, or co-worker that you haven't spoken to in quite awhile and tell them, "it's OK, I feel like you do and this too shall pass."

Sometimes that one call or kind gesture makes all the difference in making a scary world...less scary and makes us all better together.

To your health,

Yon Hardisty