Welcome to “Enjoy the Journey.”

I’m Erin Lanciani, Chief People & Experience Officer at Sage Therapeutics. Coming off 2020 made me really reflect on the journey we have been on at Sage. I often get calls and questions about that journey, so thanks to COVID eliminating my commute and travel time, I had additional time to reflect and write about our journey as a biotech company. These articles tell the story of Sage over the last seven years – the highs and the lows. From start-up to commercial, recruitment to reductions, and negative data to bouncing back, you’ll see for yourself how we thought about and handled each chapter of our story, keeping our people at the heart of all we did. I tried to make the articles short, easy to follow, and very practical. I hope you find them interesting and they help in some way with your journey. I’d love to hear from you – your thoughts, stories, and advice once you’re done reading each one.

In this chapter, we’re looking at how, in the aftermath of our restructure, we re-established Sage as a great place to work.

The Calm After the Storm?

?At the time of writing, Sage’s Glassdoor overall rating is 4.4/5. The average company rating in 2021 is 3.5. Considering our organization-wide restructuring just over 12 months ago, 4.4 feels pretty good.

From?our last chapter, you know 2020 heralded Sage’s hardest times yet. Faced with a lower-than-expected uptake of our product ZULRESSO? (brexanolone), a negative Phase 3 study with our lead investigational product, zuranolone, and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to restructure, losing over 50% of our staff in the lowest ebb of our journey.

Through all the change and upheaval, some important things remained. We were still a great team of people; smaller, but still purpose-driven, passionate, and smart. Our mission was still our mission: making medicines that matter to help people get better sooner. And we still Put People First, every day, every decision.

With these core foundations still in place, we knew we could re-establish Sage as a great place to work. We might have gotten through the storm, but there was no calm after – we were in the middle of a pandemic! We had rebuilding to do because we still believed in our commercial product and development programs and our ability to help millions of people suffering from Brain Health disorders. This chapter explores some of the ways we regained trust and momentum ensuring the well-being of our people remained our highest priority.

Getting Back on Track.

I mentioned in the last chapter that lack of clear internal communications through the negative Phase 3 study was problematic. We didn’t pull everybody through on the journey. Lack of communication combined with the COVID-19 situation and working from home created an atmosphere of anxiety. Our voluntary turnover skyrocketed from 8% in 2019 to 28% in the 6 months post-restructure.

Our errors spoke to us and we listened and responded. Transparency, honesty and good, clear, regular communication played a huge role in getting us back on track.

Communication is a 2-way street. Listening is one part and responding is the other. We doubled down on these efforts and emphasized our core value of “grow through learning and change”. We listened to our employees through more groups, surveys, informal settings, and open forums. We also implemented a new communication platform to focus on:

• How are people feeling about support during the COVID-19 pandemic?
• How are people feeling about the business?

?Navigating COVID: Ask, Listen, Respond.

We knew the pandemic wasn’t a static situation. So, we took our first pass initially at what we thought would support and help people best as they shifted to working from home. People’s well-being had to come first, and then navigating the work would come after that. We trained all our managers on this approach.

We established a COVID People Task Force and put several actions in place at the onset of the pandemic:

1. We gave people a lot of flexibility with their workload. 9 – 5 was off the table. It was important to us that folks didn’t feel trapped at their computers. If they wanted to take 2 – 4pm to exercise or cook, and then work at another time, that was fine by us! We saw managers write things in email signatures like “Our working hours may not match, so please don’t feel you need to reply right away!”
2. We blocked a 12 - 1pm lunch hour with no meetings allowed. This helped people deal with Zoom fatigue and feel like they had guaranteed personal time to just take a break and get away from the screen.
3. We took our traditional “Summer Sizzlers” (bi-weekly Friday afternoons off) and switched them to “Quarantine Sizzlers” (weekly Friday afternoons off).
4. We did a full-week company shut down in July. Because it was a company-wide break, people didn’t need to work harder in the run-up (as is often the case in the approach to vacation time), and people came back to empty inboxes, which they really appreciated.
5. We put in the Calm App for all Sageans and ran a lot of workshops on brain health, to encourage them to look after themselves.
6. We switched a lot of our on-site classes to digital classes, like yoga, workouts, and meditation.
7. We maintained social events where we could via Zoom – we still did happy hours, family painting sessions, and one of our Scientists even ran Science Lessons to support Sageans with children at home.

We were one of the first companies in biotech to go remote and after that, we focused on the idea that leading is not rushing back. When COVID-19 first hit, a lot of companies sent out the “back in 2 weeks” memo, multiple times. We thought it better for people to know more categorically where they stood. So early on we communicated that we wouldn’t be back before October 2020 (this was of course after a couple of our own “we’ll be back in 2 weeks” memos).

These early response actions reminded people that Sage was still Sage. We still put people first, we still thought about what would make people’s lives easier and better.

When people had been working from home a short while, we ran our first survey and sought feedback on how they felt about our support. The results were incredible. 91% of people felt they were being actively looked after and cared for by Sage. But they also gave feedback on what more we could do.

Next, we put in place a cross-functional group of employees. A lot of them hadn’t worked together before, but we knew they’d raise and investigate issues and find solutions. They went away, spoke to their teams, gathered information, and came back with recommendations to support people further. The Leadership Team approved every suggestion!

So we asked, people responded, we listened, and we acted. Again, this was key to regaining trust, helping people feel listened to as well as supported.

?August/September 2020 arrived, and our next set of COVID-19-related benefits rolled out:

• We heard the flexibility worked so we continued with and encouraged it.
• We heard people needed to upgrade their working environment, so we provided 2 stipends for upgrades (new technology, workout equipment, whatever they needed).
• We heard the anxieties of parents with children at home, so we provided access to online educational support through Tutor.com and Ed Navigator.
• We heard running an office at home is expensive, so we started paying a monthly reimbursement for home office expenses.
• We heard the experiences helped people feel connected, so we ran more – cocktail making, game nights, cooking classes…
• We heard the July shutdown was greatly appreciated so we did another all-company shutdown in December 2020 (we had been doing it every year prior, so we certainly kept it).

These benefits were designed not only by listening and responding to the needs of our Sageans but with flexibility in mind. People could use the benefits in ways that worked for them, based on their life. A one size fits all approach wouldn’t work.?

You may be wondering how we funded all of this. We got a lot of rebates from many benefits we already had in place – transportation, t-passes, food budgets to stock our kitchens, even health and dental insurance rebates, and our experience budget; we couldn’t have summer outings or company-wide events. So, we simply redeployed this money back into other benefit areas and implemented all of our COVID benefits in a cost-neutral way.

So many Sageans really exemplified Rise to the Occasion on this. The Events team and the Benefits team – they really could have taken a step back, everybody was stressed, drained, worried… but instead, these people were energized, seeing this as a challenge. Rise to the Occasion they did.

Looking back, it almost felt natural. Maybe that’s just compared to how difficult the restructure was for all of us. But I also think it’s because Put People First is a way of life at Sage. Our concern for each other is part of how we operate. And our CEO and Leadership Team were so supportive of this people-first approach, they gave us complete buy-in because they absolutely believed it was the right thing to do.

From “HR” To “People and Experience.”

?We also went through the process of renaming our HR department to “People and Experience.” We didn’t really feel like “HR” showed our dedication to thinking differently and commitment to people, and we wanted to reiterate our dedication to experience and their wellbeing.

As with most things at Sage, this was a collaborative effort. From within HR to other people across the organization, we asked for people’s thoughts on a new name. We wanted varied input – it turned out people loved the idea, and through many iterations, People and Experience was landed. We felt this reflected our purpose and goals pretty well.

People: We’re here for people, to support the well-being of all Sageans, and to ensure that as a function that we have the right people, at the right time, with the right capabilities to maximize potential and drive business results.

Experience: We’re pioneering a brain health movement from the inside out. We’re inspiring excellence, thinking differently, and being bold. We’re delivering on our One Sage organizational strategy, pulling the whole company together.?

We redesigned our operating model to match our new name. We created 4 capability hubs:

• Experience Hub, all around culture, DEI, internal communications, and social impact.
• Talent & Growth Hub, all about learning, career development, onboarding, organizational development, and talent management.
• Total rewards about compensation, benefits, wellbeing, and recognition.
• Operations and Analytics Hub focused on a digital experience, data, and process management, HR systems, and workforce insights.

We also have our Business Partner organization, which focuses on partnering with the business to help achieve our strategic goals.

We shared our new name and enhanced operating model with the company. We also took the opportunity to refresh our P&E strategic priorities which were:

• Win in Brain Health by hiring and building high-performing individuals, teams, and?organization.
• Cultivate a One-Sage Mindset and unparalleled inclusive experience.
• Increase org effectiveness and?efficiency through the use of digital technology and?analytics.

We really double down on our approach and mindset within People and Experience. We continued, where possible, to reinforce moving from process and rule orientation that can drive many organizations to look at things from the following perspective:

Whatever you’re thinking of putting in – is it right by people? Is it a good experience? Is it smooth, easy, and helpful for people? Does it enhance their working life?

?Less policy, policy, policy. More communication.?More people, people, people!

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Navigating Communications: Transparency and Clarity.

Moving forward from the restructure, we realized we had to significantly enhance our communications. This was never clearer than in our survey results, where Sageans told us they needed a better understanding of our strategy and approach post MOUNTAIN trial data.

We asked, Sageans spoke, we listened, and we knew we had to come up with a plan to move forward.

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, we didn’t really finish pulling through the internal communications on the MOUNTAIN trial results and we did not celebrate the work the teams did to complete the study like we did in a previous study. We didn’t focus on how we already had 2 positive studies of zuranolone, and what we learned went into the design of our next trials.

We really upped the frequency of two-way communications – focus groups, surveys, coffee with LT sort of things I mentioned in the last chapter. We explained carefully what had happened in the MOUNTAIN trial, how we did have a plan and did still believe in the product. But we also had to focus on looking forward, not just looking back at how things had gone with the MOUNTAIN trial. Drug development is not easy for any company and the paths are often complicated especially in the Brain Health area.

One of the biggest worries on the minds of Sageans was: “Will there be more layoffs if we have another negative readout?” You can never make any promises, but we were very transparent about our pipeline, about the readouts we had coming up, and how we had gone through the reorganization with the aim of?doing it once. We tackled these tough questions in Town Hall head-on, letting people know that even if the results of our next Phase 3 trial of zuranolone in major depressive disorder (named “WATERFALL”) came back negative, we expected to still be in growth mode, albeit a little slower than anticipated.

A very strange phenomenon was that our communications internally followed the same path as the questions we were answering externally. Investors and employees were asking the same questions! Most people told us they felt our stock dropped more than it should have. That’s because even our investors took a little while to get the full picture (and many still are working back to full understanding). So, another area we focused on in our internal communications was how our stock price isn’t a “report card” (you might remember this piece of advice from all the way back in Chapter 2, Preparing for IPO!). People would read into stock price performance, but so many factors can affect it. A drop in stock price didn’t mean bad news or another restructure was on the horizon. This is something we still focus on and it is not easy.

Another big issue we faced was that people felt frustrated because of the restructure and its effect on their own roles. There seemed to be this belief that the Org Chart had become static. So, we encouraged managers to have very proactive conversations with people, making sure they still had opportunities to move around within the company where they could. We appreciated that people may have had to take on different kinds of work, so we made sure to align our expectations as to how much work could actually be done (less people = less output!). We didn’t want anybody to feel they’d taken a “step back” if we could help it. Instead, we reiterated our commitment to helping them grow.

Are We Back on Track?

Of course, nothing helps more than some positive data, and we’ve had a couple of positive data events since the pandemic hit. We have also welcomed our new CEO and entered a new collaboration with Biogen, a global biotech company, which has provided further financial stability. The momentum at Sage is picking up again.

What’s really incredible is that we’re growing again, fast – and 17% of our hires in the last 12 months have been re-hires, people we lost in the restructure. With a 90% acceptance rate on our job offers, we know we’re doing something right.

The communication and efforts we’ve put into fixing our mistakes and re-establishing trust have brought us a long way. We have refocused on our purpose, what we’re doing, why we’re here, the fact that we are working to make medicines that matter and change people’s lives. We are not perfect and never will be, but we keep learning, growing, and adapting.

We have reconnected with our mission.

At Sage, it’s always been about the patients, the purpose, and the people. We’re a great team, fostering an incredible, unique culture. It feels good to remember what we’re here for, in the midst of the chaos of the last 12 months all around the world.

It feels good to be on the up again.??

Sage Advice

1. Communicate Out: Share what you know, when you know it, in the right way. Keep things clear and transparent, and never assume everybody knows what’s going on. If you don’t tell people the story, you run the risk of them making up their own version.
2. Communicate In: Listen to your people! Let them guide you, let them tell you what they need. But don’t just listen – act on what they tell you.
3. Less Policy, More People: From a People and Experience perspective, try not to get bogged down in rules, processes, and needless boundaries. Instead, Put People First. Look at how you can make their lives easier and support them. No matter what’s going on in the world, people will recognize when you genuinely care and put them first.

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