Young Living’s Chief Science Officer Dr. R. Michael Buch was honored with a gold Golden Bridge Award during the 12th Annual 2020 Golden Bridge Business and Innovation Awards®.
Dr. Buch won gold for Product Development Executive of the Year. According to the company, he has been crucial in developing Young Living’s exacting standards, resulting in annual sales of several billions of dollars of the company’s wellness products. He implemented a rigorous quality control standard to hold Young Living’s products to strict specifications and oversaw the investment of over $750,000 in laboratory upgrades to ensure the use of only the highest-quality raw materials. In addition, Dr. Buch expanded Young Living’s research to implement greenhouse testing, analyzing how various plants are affected by environmental factors in production. These learnings informed Dr. Buch’s research, with the intent of adding to the academic knowledge base as well as understanding how best to grow plants at a larger scale.
“It’s an honor to have Dr. Buch named a gold winner by Golden Bridge Awards,” said Mary Young, CEO at Young Living. “Mike has been instrumental in making Young Living unparalleled industry leaders. Our products are known to be the highest-quality essential oil-based wellness products available, and that is in no small part due to his implementation of new standards and innovative product research.”
Young Living was also honored with a bronze Golden Bridge Award for Company Work-From-Home Implementation of the Year and Team of the Year during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The bronze Golden Bridge Award honored Young Living’s success of its working-from-home implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company demonstrated this excellence in a number of ways: Young Living has been proactive in keeping its employees safe by initiating an emergency leave bank as per the Communicable Disease Policy to provide flexible leave to employees impacted by COVID-19 and by extending its PTO policy to include emergency paid leave. Young Living was one of the first Utah-based companies to implement a work-from-home policy, transitioning 95 percent of employees to work remotely. It then utilized various platforms to bring employees together with virtual resources, such as virtual fitness classes, virtual happy hours, virtual live-and-learns, bi-weekly executive town hall meetings, and a variety of other free resources to maintain and improve employee morale and company culture despite the obstacles of the pandemic. Young Living sends frequent employee surveys to evaluate the feelings, attitudes and mental health of employees so the company can find innovative support methodologies.
