Kimberlie Cerrone
Founder & Executive Chairman
Tiatros
Kimberlie is a dealmaker and IP strategist who has been a C-level executive at nine venture capital-backed companies, two of which she was part of the team that took the company from formation to IPO. She practiced technology and IP law at two of Silicon Valley’s top law firms where she was an early advisory to technology companies. Kimberlie has a B.S. from the University of Illinois, an M.S. from New York University and an MBA from University of San Francisco. She graduated from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law and is a member of the California and USPTO bars.
What main take-away did you bring back from our last Think Tank meeting?
Loneliness and social isolation in the workplace are emerging as a high priority for employers to sustain a mentally healthy business and a healthy bottom line. These issues lead to stress, anxiety, depression and substance abuse. They can cause poor workforce health outcomes and lead to an array of physical illnesses. Social connection is a critical determinant of health and THE key factor in emotional well-being and emotional fitness in the workplace, as well as in the community. Employers need to take swift action to address loneliness and social isolation to foster the mental health and well-being of a wide range of employees with varying needs via advanced behavioral health support services programs and social healing environments.
Thinking about the future, what do you believe should be the focus of research in the field of workplace health and well-being?
While The American Psychiatric Association Center for Workplace Mental Health has done tremendous work in validating the core business case for mental health in the workplace, far more research is needed about the total economic impact of unaddressed stress, anxiety, depression and substance abuse on job performance and satisfaction, productivity, employee disability and absentee rates, employee retention rates and the ability of an organization to innovate effectively in the corporate environment. Additional research that would prove beneficial in this realm is identifying and quantifying costs associated with comorbidities for both employees and their family members, including expenditures for the total indirect costs associated with lost productivity, reduced performance, providing medical care for anxiety, depression, and substance abuse and the very significant impact of the added cost of co-morbid mental illness on the total cost of caring for chronic disease conditions, including, for example, musculoskeletal conditions, respiratory problems, pre-diabetes and diabetes, chronic pain, pregnancy, etc. When employers fully realize the hard-number costs of avoiding behavioral health services, they will surely turn their attention to them as part of their benefits strategies.
What’s on your professional reading list that you’d recommend to fellow HERO members?
Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change, Marc Benioff
“Research: People Want Their Employers to Talk About Mental Health” – Kelly Greenwood, Vivek Bapat, Mike Maughan
To Combat the Mental Health & Substance Use Public Health Crisis Employer, Physician and Policy Groups Partner – National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions
Mental Health, A Workforce Crisis – CEO Roundtable American Heart Association
How CEOs Are Making Mental Health a Less Taboo Topic at Work – Fortune
Mental illness is one of the top four chronic conditions people face today, according to our Path to Better Health Study – LinkedIn, Karen S. Lynch, Executive Vice President, CVS Health and President, Aetna Business Unit
