We like to describe Lea Picard as “picture-perfect”. Not only does she dabble in photography as a hobby, she also perfectly represents our guiding values of honoring, empowering, and supporting clients and their families in every possible way. She’s worked as a Client Services Manager at Family & Nursing Care for over two years, playing an important role in the company’s expansion goals: working with clients, professionals, and families in the Howard County region as we expand services to meet the needs of those in the area. Lea is also the Client Services Manager for the Seabury care management group, helping to assist their clients with private duty home care needs.

Lea loves forming meaningful connections with clients, which is why her favorite part of her job is going on home visits to clients. Always ready, willing, and able to lend a helping hand, Lea volunteered her time during COVID-19 in 2020 to assist in preparing and distributing much needed PPE packages to Caregivers.

Next month, Lea will be volunteering her time once again to help someone in the Family & Nursing Care family – she’ll be working as the photographer at a co-worker’s wedding!

With a dedicated staff whose daily work activities revolve around being responsive to the needs of clients and their families, caregivers, and professionals, the Human Resources team at Family & Nursing Care puts a special focus on making sure the staff themselves have opportunities to attend to their own personal wellness.

Over time, HR has introduced programs to meet these needs, like making baskets of healthy fruit available in the office, ordering in a salad bar for lunch once a week, and providing discounts on gym memberships.  As COVID-19 took hold in 2020, some of these initiatives became displaced while more of the staff began to work from home.

With the staff needing to put forth even more effort to attend to the needs of others and attention to personal health and wellness becoming even more important during this time, the HR team deliberated on how to motivate the staff to continue meeting personal wellness goals.  Then they found GivHero.

GivHero is an app that offers an innovative solution to support workplace wellness and social causes. Through the GivHero app, staff can compete in wellness challenges and easily track their progress toward meeting the challenge goals through syncing their smartphone, watch, or other tracking device to the app, or through manual entry.  The reward for meeting the goal is a donation from the company to one of a number of social causes or charities selected by the staff member themselves.  Along the way, staff can check up on co-workers’ progress and offer support to coworkers toward meeting their goals, or even engage in some good-natured competition.

For the initial GivHero challenge, a goal was set for Family & Nursing Care staff to take 5,000 steps a day for one month. Family & Nursing Care donated $1 per participant to the charitable cause of the staff member’s choice for every day that the goal was met.  Over 30 participants stepped their way to donating $564 to charity and enjoyed some friendly encouragement and competition along the way.  Over the course of the month, 5,260,363 collective steps were taken by Family & Nursing Care staff members.  Enough steps to walk from the Silver Spring office all the way to Los Angeles!

As she works to put together the next challenge, HR Manager Gabriela Marr is quite happy with the results GivHero has already provided.  “With an entire staff who innately have that giving spirit, what better way to motivate them to focus on their own health and wellness than by offering them a chance to give back while doing it,” she said.