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Wellable Employee Health & Wellness
97 Plays4 years ago
Talking workplace wellbeing with Wellable
HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR CONVERSATION
- Being healthy to the earth often equates to being healthy to yourself
- Companies are starting to invest in community health initiatives, so not just helping their employees who are living in those communities, but helping all local citizens
- There's a shift happening from ROI, return on investment, to VOI value on investment
- Healthy people are typically still very active and alert in productivity terms at 4pm
- No one ever asked us to create content on the health benefits of gratitude, the health benefits of finding purpose in your life, or the science of happiness, but we did it!
GUEST / NICK PATEL, CEO
- https://www.wellable.co/home
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/wellable-inc-/
- https://www.facebook.com/GetWellable/
HOST / MATT MORLEY
- https://biofit.io/
- https://biofilico.com/
- https://www.mattmorley.net/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattmorleylux/
- https://www.instagram.com/matt.aspiotis.morley/
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome
Introduction to Episode 30
00:00:11
Speaker
to episode 30 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we explore the themes of sustainability and wellbeing in real estate, workplaces, and hospitality today. I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biofilico Wellbeing Design and BioFit Health and Fitness. This
Wellable's Wellness Strategy
00:00:31
Speaker
time around, I'm in Boston in the USA, talking to Nick Patel, CEO of Wellable Employee Wellness.
00:00:39
Speaker
We discuss how Wellable are aiming to be the Netflix of wellness content, how existing trends in workplace wellbeing have simply been accelerated by COVID, how mental health at work has become less taboo now than ever before, his views on healthy building certifications as a communications tool for brands that care about employee wellbeing, and his thoughts on the role that technology, culture and physical spaces
00:01:07
Speaker
play in creating a truly healthy workplace experience. If you like this type of content, please consider subscribing. You can find my contact details in the show notes. Nick is online at wellable.co. Here's my punchy conversation with Nick Patel of Wellable.
00:01:27
Speaker
Nick,
Mission and Business Impact of Wellness Programs
00:01:28
Speaker
thanks so much for being here with us. Today, I want to start with the idea of your initially talking to a real estate developer landlord or a corporate exec. You've got to describe what Wellible is about, the problem you're solving. How do you tackle that?
00:01:43
Speaker
Yeah, fundamentally, we're in the business of making individuals healthy, happy, and more productive, not just in the professionalized, but in the personalized as well. And so our goal in terms of fulfilling that mission is working with employers, health plan properties, really sponsors who can support tailored wellness programs for their constituents, whether that's their employees,
00:02:06
Speaker
or their tenants, whoever that may be. If we're talking to an employer, I usually always open with beyond having a wellness program is the right thing to do for a number of different reasons. That's the reason you should be in this for the right reasons. That being said, there are benefits in terms of business success. So having a thriving workforce
00:02:27
Speaker
is also associated with having employees who are excited by coming to work every day, excited about giving 100% of themselves into that job. That results in more creativity, more engagement, more retention. All of these things will translate into the bottom line for those companies. When we're talking to a property manager or a building owner, it's the same concept. It's just a different channel to that individual.
00:02:52
Speaker
In that case, if you're a property manager or a building owner, your client is the employer. So assisting them in critical things for their business is helpful to retain those tenants, track those tenants, garner higher rents, things like that. So implementing programs that help their employees live healthy lives takes one thing off their plate or supports them in their own personal initiatives or company initiatives, all of which kind of results in just better business success.
00:03:23
Speaker
Very cool.
Adaptation and Digital Transformation Post-COVID
00:03:24
Speaker
I like the way you're presenting it, not just as filling a gap or reducing a negative impact, but in fact, spinning on the upside, which is adding to the business and generating positivity, generating revenue, whatever it might be, rather than just preventing bad things from happening. I think that's a fundamental point.
00:03:43
Speaker
On that topic then, we've just been through a rollercoaster of the past 15, 16 months as we're talking today. How have you at Willable had to adapt within that employee wellness space and how have you had to, if at all, adjust your products and services in line with what's been going on? Yeah, it's a great question. I think depending on when you would ask me this question during the last 18 months, the response would be
00:04:11
Speaker
somewhat or significantly different. I think right now, we're in a place where we're looking backwards and kind of reflecting on these moments. For us, at least in America, the vaccination rate's high. We're feeling like people are coming back to work, things like that. And so as I look back on that time, even coming into March until today, I felt like we were going through three different phases, all at the same time.
00:04:37
Speaker
but extending at different times, if that makes sense. And so for us, and I think I would say just as a little caveat, I think most businesses went through this in some way, shape or form, even ones that were thriving in a digital world in COVID and ones that were heavily impacted in the sense that they were onsite or had to be physically present, but they all had this element that no one escaped this. And so there was this recovery phase, right? There's a response phase and there's this reimagined phase.
00:05:05
Speaker
The recovery phrase for us specifically, we are a comprehensive wellness provider. So what that means is that we are offering a number of different solutions all independently that employers or properties can implement in their program. So that includes software and that includes services, which were pre-COVID primarily onsite. So for us, our recovery phase dealt with helping our clients transition to digital solutions, helping some of our clients. We had an airline as a customer. And as you can imagine,
00:05:36
Speaker
Every aspect of their world was turned upside down. I could imagine being in the call center for that company. And so, you know, they were concerned about health and well-being. They were doing it for all the right reasons, but practically it was something that they could not even think about addressing in the months of March, April, May and things like that. So there's a recovery phase. Our on-site business was heavily impacted.
00:05:57
Speaker
There's a response phase is once we realize what was happening on how we're going to respond. We tried a number of different things we launched a program almost initially so it's very impressive that by mid March we are launching a new product we called at the time well alive.
00:06:12
Speaker
And it was the alternative to our onsite services business. And it was a streaming service. And we were doing effectively Zoom fitness classes and Zoom webinars and things like that that were throughout the day for five days a week that anyone can join or watch recordings of. Obviously, at the time, our instructors were all locked at home and things. We were concerned about bandwidth, internet, microphone access. They were sending out iPads to improve their quality because they were using home computers.
00:06:39
Speaker
Things like that at the end of the day. I think we're proud of that product But it wasn't something that we saw that was gonna be long-term and we were entering that reimagined phase of what's the world gonna look like? In the short term being 12 months or so also in the very long term so
00:06:58
Speaker
Pretty quickly, in May, we said, look, we think the solution, if you're going to do digital products or like that content, live is nice in many ways, but you are missing out so many of the benefits of being able to see someone's yoga posture, for example, in a live session, right? So we ended up launching what we called Wellable On Demand. It is our version of what we think is going to be the future. Like most products that are in this early stage, it's still
00:07:21
Speaker
in its infancy and it's still growing and changing. But really, it's thinking about Netflix for wellness content. So for us, we initially launched in July.
00:07:30
Speaker
a full library of high quality, you know, multiple camera angles, mic'd up instructors, things like that of all fitness classes for everything, Pilates, yoga, you know, prenatal and postnatal workouts, things like that. And from there, we're exploring additional content. Is it healthy cooking? Is it just written content in terms of recipes? We already launched a mindfulness and meditation series as part of that. And that's what we were thinking of the future of like this digital concept, because what we're seeing is a lot of our clients
00:08:00
Speaker
Many of them are still trying to figure out permanently what it looks like, but for the most part in general, there's going to be some, there's going to be more remote work than there was before. And whether that's employees in the office only three days a week, full time remote, things like that, you're going to need, every wellness program is going to need some type of digital element and content delivery. And I think that's what the future of our on-demand product is going to be.
00:08:25
Speaker
So with the shift then to a largely digital platform, in terms of the interface itself, how are your different audience groups interacting with Wellable? Is it via a specific app? Is it essentially online? How are they engaging with you? What's the interface?
00:08:46
Speaker
Yeah, so it's a tough question to answer because for our perspective of how we deliver health and wellness solutions is that just structurally, we offer a number of different products and offerings, all of which can be purchased independently and mixed and matched. And so the way we think about it is that every employer is unique culturally, you know, where they base geographically, their physical space, things like that. And they're comprised of very unique individuals. And in most cases, it's a very diverse subset of people.
00:09:14
Speaker
All of which one different things right for some people having group fitness classes is a great opportunity others prefer a digital engagement experience a mobile app we try to offer all those independent of each other so if you look at a hundred of our customers. And look what they're doing broadly with wallable for the most part they're doing things that are at the very least.
00:09:35
Speaker
different small ways and in some cases different and very significant in big ways. And no one's right or wrong. There's not a wellness program that's perfect for every group or every building. And so that's what we're experiencing. So when you think about how people are interacting with art,
00:09:50
Speaker
are just solutions in general. It's not always necessarily a digital interaction, although that is our primary product. We are known as a software provider, but it could be pre-COVID groups that are just doing things on site. That was everyone, whether it's a warehouse company or things like that, everyone was always on site, and that's the way they felt the best opportunity to deliver was. And so in terms of how we communicate our programs and things like that,
00:10:19
Speaker
It really, again, depends on the program. For us, we are an end-to-end provider, so that includes the promotions of the program, it includes
00:10:27
Speaker
The delivery and execution of the program includes also capturing and responding to feedback. And so to the extent our clients give us that authority to message and communicate directly with the employee, we take advantage of that. With tailored messaging for people who aren't even participating, to people who are very active and we don't need to want to disrupt their way they're interacting with that program. For our best clients, like I said before, their individuals or their employees are very unique and different. They all want different things.
00:10:57
Speaker
they offer a very diverse mix of our solutions to their clients or to their employees, knowing that some will gravitate to some type of solutions, others will gravitate to others. And so our communication strategy kind of matches that. Depending on what it is, depending on who that demographic is, we're trying to do a diverse set of outreach and things like that to capture just a broad audience and then hopefully allow them to self identify what makes the most sense for them.
00:11:25
Speaker
I
Evolution of Workplace Wellness
00:11:26
Speaker
think it connects very neatly with the idea that the workplace culture and to some extent the brand itself, as in how the individual company's brand values and mission statement is reflected in terms of how they operate at a corporate or rather employee level. So that makes sense. But there's just so much happening in this space right now. And there's a lot of players emerging, a lot of content being created. You've been in the game since 2012.
00:11:54
Speaker
Have you seen the workplace wellness scene evolve? Obviously, there's going to be presumably a pre-COVID and a post-COVID, right? But I mean, just sort of looking at it at a bigger scale over the last decade, what have been the major shifts that you've seen that you're perhaps at a strategic, medium-term level tapping into?
00:12:14
Speaker
Yeah, certainly there's a pre-COVID and post-COVID narrative there. The one thing I'll say about COVID, I think everything is still settling a little bit, but I think the long-term takeaway from COVID, at least from our perspective, and I think it kind of makes sense in most industries, is that it didn't necessarily change the world. It really accelerated what was already happening, right? And so, remote work, we actually blog and talk about this a lot, but it's becoming more and more popular. Companies were hesitant to do it, and COVID, they were forced to do it, and then they realized,
00:12:44
Speaker
There are some growing pains, especially when you're doing it by unplanned and things like that. But they're realizing their sales teams can be productive while not traveling, which some groups were already experiencing and experimenting with. And so for us, I think the wellness industry in general is similar. The trends that we are experiencing, we're just accelerated.
00:13:08
Speaker
It's been, what, eight years since we were founded? So much has changed. You know, the funny little story, when we first started, Fitbit had just created their Fitbit zip. So if you remember that, it's like the one that you clip on your belt. And their real selling point was, oh, it's Bluetooth oriented, you have an app. It wasn't anything about being wrist-worn or anything of that nature. And at the time when we first started,
00:13:31
Speaker
You know, the iPhone was one or two years old. We thought the future of health and well-being from a digital perspective, that is, was going to be with these consumer apps and technologies. And so rather, you know, we view ourselves to distinguish between the two. There's consumer technology, which is direct to an individual. There's enterprise wellness technologies. And that's when you're going to go to a property.
00:13:50
Speaker
an employer, a health plan, and ask them to be the sponsor of a program. So they're obviously, and then market's the same, but delivery is very different, sales process is different, things like that. And so, back in 2012, we thought the future was gonna be connecting all these consumer technologies and the consumer grade solutions, let that market determine who the best products were, aggregate that to a single platform, and expose that to employees
00:14:19
Speaker
or tenants or whoever it may be. And that was a big differentiator. I remember going to employer groups, trying to talk to them as a small company and made the comment, look at this Fitbit, it's going to be great. People are using it and they're asking the question, are people really going to
00:14:35
Speaker
use a Fitbit or an activity tracker. They're asking us, you know, not a lot, or telling us not a lot of their employees have smartphones yet. So that was a story in 2012. Now, if you didn't connect to a Fitbit, like at the time our competitors weren't doing that, that was like the novel, that was our biggest key differentiator. Now, if you don't connect like Fitbit, Apple Watch, you know, Garmin, these technologies, it's a non-starter. So in eight years, what became our biggest differentiator is just table stakes.
00:15:02
Speaker
to do something about how quickly a mood. Just in general, I think the two biggest trends that were always happening pre-COVID, and I think it was accelerated due to COVID, and we were experiencing these changes at different rates, certainly in the early years, was a move to holistic well-being. That was happening before we started, but I think in earnest really got momentum. Mental health, certainly pre-COVID,
00:15:25
Speaker
was still taboo in the workplace in terms of a conversation. Less so now. It's made a lot of progress due to COVID, for sure. But it was always something that was gaining momentum. Now when we talk to employers, they're asking, how does Wellable address mental health in the workplace? They ask us about financial well-being, things of that nature that just weren't nearly as popular even five years ago. The second big takeaway, at least in the US market,
00:15:53
Speaker
for sure, is that the original wellness programs, first introduced in the 1970s and became really popular in the 90s and early 2000s, effectively had oversimplifying gear, two big elements, a biometric screening and a health risk assessment.
00:16:10
Speaker
If I draw your blood of all your employees or tenants, I can capture information that data is good for you. And my argument may be just because you have data doesn't mean it's good, right? There's going to be some actionable intelligence from that data that makes it valuable, but data in itself is just an attribute.
00:16:27
Speaker
And then the same thing with the health and risk assessment. It was heavily clinical focused. It was a self-assessment. So you're often asking clinical questions to an employee who doesn't necessarily know the answer and just feels like they want to get through the assessment and answer the questions.
00:16:42
Speaker
Tons of research has always questioned those, even for decades, but they have this element of stickiness to it. Employers, like Safeway is a very famous case study for an employee wellness program here in the United States, and their whole program is built off by micro screenings and HRAs.
00:16:57
Speaker
And if you're Safeway, it's hard for you to walk away from a program that you built that had a case study on it that's been very widely touted and things like that.
Holistic Wellbeing vs Biometric Screenings
00:17:07
Speaker
But new programs aren't adopting the solutions and we were finding that old programs were willing to slowly peel them away.
00:17:14
Speaker
COVID certainly accelerated that in the sense that you couldn't do biometric screens anymore. So a lot of companies suspended that for the first time in a decade or so. And now they're asking themselves, well, we didn't have it before. Our wellness program is still showing positive results. The biometric screening doesn't cover certain holistic elements like mental health and things like that. And I think they're slowly moving away from those. So those are the two big things I find
00:17:39
Speaker
or trends that are happening or celebrating COVID and are continuing happening. It's a transition to holistic wellbeing and moving away from things like biometric screenings and health risk assessments.
00:17:51
Speaker
So a lot of change, a lot of movement, an industry that's in full evolution and I think very much going in a positive and exciting new direction. One of the new entrants that I am involved in and that I wanted to sort of bring into the conversation here just to see how it connects is around healthy building certifications where you're dealing not just with well-being interior design but also
00:18:15
Speaker
operational and facilities management processes is a way to create effectively the idea of a healthy building certification so it's a third-party standard things like well and fit well now that can either happen again at the owner level or it can happen at the employer level so how do you
00:18:33
Speaker
does the app rather does the business will connect with that directly indirectly where's your position on that because it clearly there are some crossovers between the two right where it could just be this a way to quick start that whole process for a business going through one of those certifications.
00:18:51
Speaker
Yeah,
Healthy Building Certifications
00:18:52
Speaker
absolutely. I mean, I would even lump in, ask why do we have these certifications? I think it helps people hit certain standards and goals. But I think for really, it's a good way to communicate. If you're in a building, for example, it's a way for you to communicate that we are investing in the health and well-being of the tenants.
00:19:09
Speaker
And for most companies who value health and well-being, that is something that may impact their decision in terms of where they want to set their office and things like that. It's similar to the healthiest places to work. Companies often strive for that because the recognition of that healthiest place to work attracts the right talent. It emphasizes your values in terms of caring for the employees and things like that. So it ends up being the end product in many ways.
00:19:37
Speaker
of a number of things that you're engaging with prior to ever getting that certification. And so as it relates to healthy spaces, especially this new normal or this kind of post COVID normal that is still kind of unfolding and figure out how it all shakes out. We found or we find I think that promoting health and wellbeing
00:19:59
Speaker
In general, across three buckets is where employers should strive. And we help in many of those areas, but not all of those areas. And by engaging in kind of these three areas or buckets, if you will, that results if you want to go through the certification process and get that recognition, which allows you to capture more value for all that hard work.
00:20:18
Speaker
that you're engaging in. And so those three buckets are technology, culture, and physical spaces. Technology, we always talked about this even prior to COVID. Remote work was increasing. People are looking to be healthy, not just, you know, when they're in the eight hours a day in their offices and things like that. And to be able to have a distributed
00:20:38
Speaker
health and well-being strategy there has to be a technology element there's no real way to do that well outside of that element and so investing the right technologies and we're technology company. As it relates to health and well-being is really important and we offer a number of solutions depending on the type of wellness program that you want to offer a culture.
00:20:59
Speaker
I always talk about properties in this way is that people forget that properties have culture too. Culture is something that companies often associate with your company culture, but properties have culture too. And it's from, you know, is it inclusive? How is the dynamic in the public spaces? All those things are pervasive and people gravitate to the culture. I mean, that's what culture is. It's what people are doing when someone doesn't tell them what to do in some ways, right?
00:21:24
Speaker
And so buildings have cultures, employees have culture, and what we've always said is we provide content. We blog a lot. We have thought leadership. We actually have a group within our company called Wellable Lands, which is doing proprietary research.
00:21:39
Speaker
a number of different things, including culture. And that's something that we try to improve, but it's really something outside the scope of what our company does, outside of a guidance and consultation. So we know it's one of the key pillars. And, you know, we're actually personally focusing a lot on diversity, equity, inclusion right now in terms of just research and understanding what that means.
00:22:01
Speaker
And we read an article from a professor at Harvard that I thought was summed up pretty well. She said there's no amount of employee wellness programs or company benefits that can offset racism in the workplace. And that I thought cut the nail on the head as it relates to
00:22:20
Speaker
how important culture is as it relates to employee health and well-being. And the last is the physical spaces, whether it's on-site gyms, healthy food options, either at a cafeteria for the company or within the building, air quality, things of that nature. But as companies or buildings kind of pursue health and well-being in the lens of these three areas, I find that they typically can sail through the certification process.
00:22:44
Speaker
the certification process in our view is really getting recognition for all the work you're doing as it relates to the health and well-being. I think that's a crucial insight there to unpack and in a sense almost demystify some of these healthy building certifications that can seem quite imposing and
00:23:04
Speaker
really a mountain to climb when you're coming from a standing start. I think the point you're making very clearly, and it's a powerful one, is that if you're active in this space, if you're already engaging with the idea of workplace wellness and you're looking after your employees, then in a sense the certification
00:23:19
Speaker
You may not have a hundred percent of it but you might be seventy to eighty percent of the way there by having already worked with someone like yourself over a few years to kind of roll some of these concepts out and rather than the certification becomes a third party corroboration of the hard work you've done rather than.
00:23:37
Speaker
we've got no idea where we're at we need to do the certification and then implement all of these policies to align with the certification it's a subtle point but the certification is really kind of like doing the exam having done the hard work right and you're there to help with the hard work so you can in a sense do all of that first and then the certification just comes later rather than starting with that and having to roll all of this out because there's a lot to do right.
00:24:02
Speaker
Exactly, right? How does it connect them with ESG? Because then this is the other thing, you talk to people in this space and like, oh, okay, there's well, there's fit, well, there's all these healthy building certification things going on. And now we've got to deal with ESG requirements coming in. So environmental, social and governance coming in, maybe from above a more of a sort of corporate strategic responsibility level. From what I can see around the S in the ESG, so on the social side, there's a part of that, which is
00:24:32
Speaker
inclusion and ethical business practices. So if you like the social angle projected towards how a business operates externally, but then internally the S is, as I see it really all about company culture and how a business looks after their employees. So has the ESG boom, if we want to call it that, had a direct impact on what you're doing and do you see Wellable effectively as a tool within that central S in the ESG?
00:25:01
Speaker
I do and in some ways what's interesting about ESG is that the definition is continuously expanding. So before I think ESG when people often associated with this several years ago it was around largely a sustainability movement about going green and what we found actually
00:25:19
Speaker
by the requests and demand of our clients, both current perspective, is that they often lump that sustainability element into employee health and wellbeing. And so the general concept being that, you know, being healthy to the earth is often being healthy to yourself. Walking to work or biking to work has both of those benefits and they're deeply, deeply connected, clean air,
00:25:42
Speaker
for your body, it's good for the earth, deeply, deeply connected. And so we find that that definition, I would have told you when we first started this company, that we would never be in the concept of sustainability just broadly. And now we find that they're overlapping very heavily. And so that's where I think our biggest splash happens as it relates to the ESG movement. But to your point,
00:26:05
Speaker
it's finally becoming a concept that they're thinking about. We are a business, especially for public companies that are trying to be ESG focused, that it is all stakeholder focused rather than shareholder focused. The biggest stakeholders you have in a company are your customers and your employees. And so thinking about their health and wellbeing and things like that, it's all deeply connected. Well, we often talk to companies when we think about community health initiatives,
00:26:34
Speaker
And at the public health level, governments, especially local governments that are doing a really good job about driving community health have done an extremely good job of connecting with the private sector off the concept of, yes, this is the right thing you should do. That is what ESG is about in many ways. These are the right things you should engage in, similar to you should have an employee wellness program for the right reasons. But by the way, there are all these extra ancillary benefits that come from it. In the case,
00:27:01
Speaker
of the ESG movement where we're seeing really big changes in impacts on public health at the local level. It's the private sector recognizing something that you would think is fairly obvious is that you recruit and retain employees from the community that you operate in. So if you're in whatever town or city you may be, having healthier citizens of that town or city
00:27:25
Speaker
is gonna translate into your company benefits as well. Obviously your wellness program could help accelerate those type of things. And we were finding that companies investing in their community health initiatives, not just to help their employees who are living in those communities, but helping all citizens is where the wellbeing movement is most deeply tied as it relates to ESG.
00:27:47
Speaker
And from our company, we're actually running a bunch of community-oriented programs. Now, we started originally just as employer-focused. We've started expanding into properties. And now we have a number of groups from public health departments and things looking to run community programs. And a lot of it's just driven by the CSG movement.
00:28:07
Speaker
I've seen that very much. There's been this kind of kicker in that particular piece of ESG around community. Certainly the Black Lives Matter moment, I think, was a turning point in that. And it really then suddenly put community up there, not just in terms of ethical business practices or ethical procurement policies for a business.
00:28:26
Speaker
in line then with how you look after employees, but then there was this piece in between around the community. I think that's a strong point to mention. But underlying all of this then is that discussion with the CFO where they're saying, okay, that all sounds great, but show me the data, show me the evidence of how this is having a tangible impact on our staff and on our business.
00:28:50
Speaker
How does Wellable play into that conversation around generating hard data and I feel like almost analytics around the impact of working with you? Yeah, there's
ROI to VOI in Wellness Programs
00:29:02
Speaker
a transition to a couple of questions. Previously, you mentioned about what's changing in the employee wellness space. And I didn't mention this, but this is something that certainly was happening in the top of the list as well, is that there's a shift
00:29:15
Speaker
from ROI, so return on investment, to VOI, value on investment. So the classic model going back to the original old school wellness programs was that I could invest a dollar into an employee wellness program and I would extract $2 in savings. If you're in the United States where you're covering your health insurance for all your employees, that would most likely show up in your healthcare costs. And that's why you did the investment. It was a strictly financial decision. And what we've transitioned
00:29:46
Speaker
from that in a couple of ways. One, A, that's really hard to measure, right? There are all these external factors that are in play. They're outside your control. COVID being a great example. More commonly, you know, a high flu season one year also has an impact on your claims and things of that day to day or through year to year, but doesn't necessarily show
00:30:07
Speaker
doesn't always get removed from a wellness program, per se. VOI, for example, says let's consider those financial benefits. Let's consider all these other things that have financial outcomes, but don't show up in a certain hard dollar. So things like employee retention, depending on the number you use.
00:30:25
Speaker
it can be the cost of someone's full salary for a year to just recruit a new employee so it's always cheaper like it is in business to retain a customer then find a new one same thing with keeping an employee who is familiar with your processes you don't have to go through the training or the finding of that talent things like that greater productivity so less sick days greater productivity in the sense that people have fatigue at the end of the day
00:30:53
Speaker
Healthy people are still very active and alert in contributing at the highest levels at four p.m. When they're working and things like that. So there's a long list of what those value on investment elements could be. So the first place we always start with the companies is why are you having this program?
00:31:10
Speaker
What are those key kind of value on investment metrics that you would measure success? So whenever we have a client join our kind of wellable family, they fill out a long kind of questionnaire. And one of the questions is, how do you want to measure success? And that's really trying to capture these VOI elements. And then from there, you have to capture the data. So if someone says, yes, I would like to see less sick days, we need to find out where in their time and attendance records that data sits.
00:31:37
Speaker
If it's about healthcare costs, how can we have access to those healthcare claims to begin to measure those things? And so for most companies, especially the ones we're working with who in many cases are either transitioning from a different wellness vendor to our platform or just launching a program for the first time, they conceptually have an idea of things they want to track, but they don't necessarily haven't implemented anything around that. And the first step is that data capture based on those specific elements that you want to measure.
00:32:04
Speaker
And from there, depending on what those elements are, the measurement process is a little bit different. In every scenario, there will be some kind of confounding variables, for example, COVID, right? So looking at healthcare claims over the last year, there's no way for you to segment that out perfectly, but you should consider that as you think about the value you're getting from. And at the end of the day, you can measure program success
00:32:30
Speaker
through these value on investment metrics, but we always talk about why are we doing these programs? It's for the right reasons. It's for those employees. It's for those tenants. So I would always encourage employers, and we have it built into our program, capturing the feedback of those participants, right? There's no version of
00:32:48
Speaker
Our sick days dropped, our healthcare costs dropped, and then every employee hits the program. That's not a successful program. It really comes down to that. So in every scenario, you're capturing their feedback. You want to make sure what they're doing is fun, because if it's not, it's not sustainable. And you want to make sure you're really building a program based on the needs and the wants of that audience.
00:33:07
Speaker
I like it. It's a qualitative approach combined with some of the quantitative data to give you some real tangible feedback from the front line. It strikes me a lot of what you're doing then is in a sense about content creation. What's
Content Creation Strategy in Wellness Programs
00:33:22
Speaker
the strategy behind your content creation? In terms of deciding which subjects are going to be most relevant or
00:33:27
Speaker
monitoring the seminars, webinars that are getting most uptake from your end users. Have you structured that and how do you go about anticipating or responding to demand in terms of that content that you deliver?
00:33:45
Speaker
Yep, so we work with a diverse population, so everything we're doing is effectively all of the above. And in some companies, webinars resonate really, really well. Other ones, they don't. And just for cultural reasons, based on individual interests and needs, sometimes marketing issues. So our goal is to offer a diverse set of content, so just actual material and topics covered, and deliver that in a diverse way in terms of different media types.
00:34:10
Speaker
articles, video content, long form material, short form material, things like that. The one thing I'll say just as a business founder is I never thought that we'd be as much in the content game as we are now. Looking back on it, it seemed pretty obvious, but it never occurred to me.
00:34:28
Speaker
We have a very large content team and they're very busy. And I always felt like they're always behind in terms of trying to get things out. And to their credit, they're doing an incredible job of pushing things out. And so when we think about content, we think about the combination of two factors. One, responding to demand.
00:34:47
Speaker
So if there's demand for a greater mental health resources and things like that, we need to respond to those areas. And we're constantly doing that and we're going to do that in different formats. And maybe we overweight certain type of content, medium formats and others based on the feedback we're getting. And for the most part, I think that's the easy part because you're getting clear guidance on what people want. I think what's tricky is we often are seen as a thought leader.
00:35:11
Speaker
By our clients, we're trying to be so I guess it's no surprise there. And so when that perspective is put in, we're being asked to think about the future in a way they have not. So for us, no one ever asked us to create content on the health benefits of gratitude. No one asked us to produce content on the health benefits of finding purpose in your life.
00:35:34
Speaker
or the science of happiness. Those are all things that, conceptually, when you talk to an employer or a property and say, hey, these are things that are really important. Have you considered trying to incorporate that into your wellness program? And we show all the data around, tying it to, you know, health benefits and wellbeing. They jump on it quickly, but it was something no one ever demanded.
00:35:53
Speaker
I think that's the hard part is thinking about what are these emerging dimensions of health that are critically important that people aren't necessarily thinking about. So when you go talk to most employers, they're asking us to do physical activity programs and nutrition programs.
00:36:07
Speaker
Obviously, we need those. Some groups now are asking for mental health and financial well-being, but we cover so many dimensions of health and well-being in educating those employers on why those dimensions are important. It's critical. And then, you know, identifying where those areas to invest in. So that's what we spend a lot of time thinking about. It's actually why we formed Wellblams. It's supposed to be this thought engine for us, not just for our content creation, but also for just general topics in the HR and property management space.
00:36:37
Speaker
And so the big thing we're working on now is, as I mentioned before, is diversity, equity, and inclusion. I don't know exactly how that means from a product perspective or how we're going to deliver that content, and we're still exploring it, but we know that's critical to the future of health and well-being, and make sure we deliver that in a format that kind of is powerful to our customers. I really encourage listeners to have a little dig around on your site. I found it really
00:37:05
Speaker
interesting and insightful to spend a little time moving through the space that you've offered, the content that you provide online as a way to see almost taking the temperature of what both you think is important and relevant and presumably what the world of work is asking for in terms of relevant content. So just seeing the diversity of the articles and the headlines out there was a real eye opener for me.
00:37:31
Speaker
It's been fascinating. Thank you so much for your time. You've got a really exciting future ahead, so I wish you the very best of luck. How can people reach out, connect, follow along, see what you're up to? Yeah, absolutely. If you have any questions, you want to connect me directly. My email is just nick at wellable.co, so not .com, just .co. But a great place to start, as you noted, was our website. So on our website, wellable.co, you can check out our blog. Definitely subscribe to it.
00:37:59
Speaker
I think a couple years ago we won our award for the best wellness blog. We continue to produce a lot of interesting content there. So if you're just broadly interested in health and well-being as your HR person or property person or whatever it may be, it's just a great way to get different pieces of content on current issues, emerging issues, and really the future of health and well-being at the enterprise level. Awesome. Thanks again. It's been great. Great. Have a good one.