Working Well: Tips From Dr. Elyse Dub

Amenities have never been better than in today’s corporate life. Some companies offer ergonomic sanctuaries, artisanal coffee on tap, and wellness stipends. Yet, amidst the polished glass and open-concept floor plans, there is a paradox: Workers have never been more professionally connected yet personally isolated. The water cooler, once the village square of the office, has gone digital.

Elyse Dub, PhD, a Short Hills resident since 2009 and the founder of Insight Onsite, recognized this dissonance. A psychologist with more than 20 years of clinical experience, she found herself at the receiving end of a trend in early 2020.

“I launched Insight Onsite at a time when I began receiving more and more calls from friends, friends of friends, colleagues—really anyone who knew that I was a psychologist— looking for guidance and reassurance,” Dr. Dub says, noting that many of the inquiries were from high-functioning professionals looking for a lifeline. “What stood out to me was how often people shared that they were stressed and hiding out at work just so they could call me.”

If the stressed-out executive was going as far as retreating to a conference room to find clarity, perhaps the solution wasn’t to drag them out of the office, but to bring the insight in. “I realized that mental health support can happen anywhere,” says Dr. Dub, who now often “meets people on their turf.”

A Pivotal Moment

Initially, Dr. Dub envisioned Insight Onsite as a platform for expert-led seminars—a way to disseminate psychological wisdom to the workforce. However, she soon noticed that the audiences were hungry for dialogue. “I quickly realized that group participants really wanted to talk with one another about the topics I was presenting,” Dr. Dub explains.

Recognizing that the collective power and wisdom of multiple voices in the room were just as essential as her own and those of other experts, she pivoted her business model. Insight Onsite evolved from a lecture series into a bespoke facilitation service, creating “meaningful, solution-driven conversations within workplaces about mental health-related topics such as stress and work-life balance.”

The necessity for this service is underscored by the statistic that the average person spends close to 110,000 hours at work over a lifetime. To encourage using that time to recognize the potential for building relationships—and how each of us brings a unique human perspective to the workplace—
Dr. Dub notes that in our polarized world, employees feel like they are “walking on a tightrope” about what to say and how to say it.

Collective Wisdom

Dr. Dub explains that workplace mental health and talking with colleagues about things that matter is not therapy. She likes to think of it as a curated experience for the professional and human soul. Insight Onsite establishes cohorts that meet once or twice monthly, fostering trust over time. It’s less gripe sessions and more strategic exchanges on navigating the complexities of being human while maintaining high performance. Whether the topic is the middle-aged generation’s caregiving burden or the nuances of stress management, the goal is to unlock the assets already present in the room.

“My one key message would be that every workplace holds a tremendous amount of knowledge, wisdom, and experience,” Dr. Dub says. “In fact, it is this collective insight that is an organization’s superpower.”

The Metrics of Belonging

In an era where talent retention is the ultimate competitive advantage, Insight Onsite offers innovative solutions for improving employee connection, productivity, loyalty, innovation, and feelings of belonging. “Engaging Insight Onsite is significantly less expensive than having one person leave your organization,” she says.

Dr. Dub recognizes the importance of her work. One participant shared with her: “This group is what’s keeping me here.” In another instance, the program bridged a gap between colleagues who had previously viewed one another as unapproachable. These are the subtle shifts in culture that data alone can’t capture but that define the success of an organization.

Dr. Dub is fulfilled by helping organizations slow down and truly engage. Insight Onsite not only reframes watercooler conversation but introduces a new standard of workplace engagement with the permission to be human, present, and connected.

Photograph courtesy of Dr. Elyse Dub