COVID-19 Befriender

Inspiration

This circuit breaker has not been easy on any of us, with the new isolative measures, our COVID-19 experience continues to take a toll on our mental health. The National Care Hotline set up to offer extra support during this period has seen more than 6,600 calls by the end of the month since its launch on April 10 - attesting to the emotional struggles we as a nation are facing.

At 2359Media, we pride ourselves in our culture of care. We thus sought to design a platform as a means of checking in on the wellbeing of our employees and finding out how to better support them as they work from home.

COVID-19 Befriender was thus born- a chatbot that enables us to efficiently conduct bi-weekly mental health check-ins with our employees.

What it does

The COVID-19 Befriender is a bot that is installed into Google Chat. It asks employees a list of questions which include ranking their stress levels on a scale of 1-10 and even gives them the option to elaborate on their struggles. It also inquires how supported they feel in the workplace and if there are any additional resources they would like to bolster their work-from-home experience to tide them through the circuit breaker.

The responses collated by the chatbot will be sent to Human Resources for them to ascertain the core needs of employees and even conduct a personal check-in to find out more about their situation so that they can tailor specific resources towards the affected employee.

For companies that pride themselves in putting their employees first, the COVID-19 Befriender the perfect platform to check in on the well-being of your staff members and bolster your culture of care even in the midst of a pandemic.

How I built it

Challenges I ran into

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

What I learned

Through looking over responses as well as feedback on COVID-19 Befriender, we better understood what resources employees would like to be provided with - mental health advice, tips and tricks for one's wellness and now have a better idea of how they are coping with the workload and the stresses of COVID-19.

What's next for COVID-19 Befriender

We want COVID-19 to go worldwide, and are working towards enabling it to be installed across various platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. We've noticed a demand from the United States with regard to both the COVID-19 Defender and Befriender and hope to introduce these 2 robots as a bundle to help businesses keep track of both the mental and physical health of their employees during this period.