The problem your project solves
People are working in new conditions and under a lot of extra stress during the pandemic. This will affect people’s mental health and wellbeing but also businesses’ and organizations’ ability to perform during the crisis and when recovering from it. According to the research by Dr. Wilmar Schaufeli, the burnout rate in the EU was close to 10 % and it varied between 4,3 % (Finland) and 20,6 % (Slovenia). Not recently done, but the Last deep-dive in the EU showed that the cost of burnout and exhaustion is at least €20 billion per year. According to another study, the cost of stress is more than €600 billion in the EU per year. The number of burnouts and the costs associated will surely increase now in the pandemic crisis and current working conditions. We don’t yet have enough data on the impact and costs of the current crisis.
HR and leadership are also facing new challenges. They have too much workload already and are failing to support the work communities. They need help in assessing the mental wellbeing issues, spotting emerging problems early on, and focusing their support and efforts on those teams and people who need it the most. But it is not only HR who needs support in this new situation. We ALL need support today and when facing the long-term effects of the pandemic.
Even if you still can continue working, you have to learn new ways of organizing your work, collaborating with your team, and balancing work and family. At the same time, stress and anxiety have increased, but we all are more alone than ever before and have to tackle these issues in isolation.
We need more support at work and we long for the social relationships with our friends, families, colleagues, and customers. It’s now harder to get any support from colleagues or supervisors with limited or no connection with them.
This is why we want to help teams take better care of their mental wellbeing together.
The solution you bring to the table
Our solution is a web-based app that can be used on any device. With our solution, team members can keep track of their mental wellbeing, have meaningful discussions about problems and emerging issues, and help themselves as well as each other to better cope with this situation.
Based on our proven platform
We are building this solution on our existing platform. The platform can reliably survey employees, create insightful reports for individuals as well as teams, and offer information and exercises to improve well-being.
The platform is available, scalable, and already proven and works on all devices. It supports multiple languages and can be tailored to different work cultures. It takes just a few minutes for any team or organization to get started on our platform and requires only email addresses to invite employees to use the platform. Customers usually onboard themselves on our platform. Any team or the whole organization can start using our platform since it is cost-efficient even for a small team or community.
Our user feedback has been very positive so far and utilization rates far higher than most traditional survey solutions. From the user’s point of view, it is not only a survey but also a personal guide that gives feedback and suggestions on how to improve well-being. We value data privacy and the employees’ own answers and all activities in our app are only for her eyes not for the organization. In addition, our app is GDPR compliant.
Expanding our platform to meet the new needs during the pandemic
By extending our platform, we will be able to tackle three main issues:
- How to track mental well-being and health-related issues reliably and get timely information to use within organizations and teams during the pandemic and after it,
- how to help individuals self-manage their stress, anxiety, and other mental well-being related issues, and most importantly,
- how to help teams use this information for finding their lost connections with each other and to learn to support each other in this new situation.
Our solution provides real-time reporting of the mental well-being screenings to both teams as well as the whole organization. The individual, team, team leader, management, and HR all have the same real-time anonymized reports available all the time during the crisis. This way connections and social support can be increased within teams despite the lockdown or self-quarantine, and the leadership and HR of the organization can be alerted if problems start to arise and focus their support and actions towards the teams in need.
Our existing platform has content on subjects such as work engagement, stress management, and mindfulness. We are now expanding on that to bring more science-backed surveys to screen for the mental well-being of employees. We have already started implementing Anxiety screening and will be adding others such as Resilience.
We are also adding more self-management exercises to help people cope with the added stress, increased anxiety, and prepare them to be more resilient when facing uncertainty, etc. These exercises are built-in to the app so that every employee can access them whenever they need it. Our artificial intelligence-powered platform will also suggest suitable exercises directly to people based on their state of mental well-being.
The app also collects feedback to share anonymously with the team. You can then have meaningful conversations with your colleagues on how to tackle any emerging issues and how to support each other. When you continue using the service, you can quickly see if your results improve and react fast if new problems arise. One part of our suggestions is to promote sustaining your social network and relationships both at work and at home. We all need these interactions with other people to get through mentally challenging times.
What you have done during the weekend
In this hackathon, we have taken our platform and started building an extended version on top of it to create a Virtual Mental Health Guide for teleworkers that is tailored to help during and after the pandemic.
We focused on market research to find ways to get the solution widely available. We chose a few selected markets within the EU and focused our discussions with the mentors around accessing those markets. In addition, we conducted a short market survey to get insights from multiple EU states.
We also updated our concept by exploring new work psychology research on themes such as anxiety, stress, resilience, coworker support, and meaningful work. All the content in the app is and will be based on scientific research. We had several fruitful discussions with mentors and other members of the hackathon to elaborate on best practices and tools in the domain.
Last but not least we updated our go-to-market strategy. We will continue focusing on our “home market” (Nordics) and start the expansion first to one new market (e.g., Germany). Secondly, we will focus our sales and marketing efforts on industries that are impacted by the pandemic but not in total chaos (e.g., Pharma, Insurance, IT, Consultancies, Creative agencies). The reason being that we need to support the wellbeing of employees who are still working. Thirdly, we are in the process of connecting to new sales channels and networks from these new markets e.g. benefit (and other) platforms. We are also investigating which local corporate venturing or startup programs are available in our focus countries. And as the fourth action, we will focus marketing and sales communications on immediate needs and benefits; Teleworking or remote working, work-family balance, mental health, and anxiety in the crisis, resilience to bounce back from the crisis.
The solution’s impact to the crisis
Our market research during the hackathon validated a few of our assumptions. Employees are facing more stress and anxiety. The use of new virtual channels and 24/7 online teleworking is starting to take a toll and is causing increased exhaustion.
Most teams and employees have either none or very limited support for their mental wellbeing at work while working remotely. They simply don’t have any tools to track and improve their mental wellbeing. In addition, only one of the respondents commented that she has support available from the team and colleagues. The feedback for the research confirms the research findings from the previous pandemics.
We aim to reduce anxiety and stress among employees and help them learn coping strategies and build resilience so that they are more prepared to face this pandemic and the aftermath of it. If we succeed, there will be less anxiety, depression, and burn-outs following this pandemic. Also, we believe that building resilience in employees and organizations will enable them to bounce back when things start to normalize.
We also aim to reduce the workload of HR and leadership as well as occupational healthcare (psychological counseling) and make their work more effective by 1) helping them be proactive and react timely to arising problems and 2) focus their efforts to those in need and to those issues that arise.
The necessities in order to continue the project
We are now continuing to create more content on our platform to cover more topics related to the pandemic and mental health and wellbeing in general. This allows us to help employees and work communities already today, but also to support them during the rebuilding phase towards the new normal.
We are also preparing to expand to a few selected markets within the EU, namely Germany. Our service is as mentioned earlier scalable already today. The fast expansion will take place with EU or private equity financing. The slower expansion will be financed from our own cash flow and balance sheet. Plans are on the way for wider expansion for the coming years because we believe the long-lasting mental impact on people during and after this pandemic will be massive. With new customers and the right investors, we could have the capability to speed up the expansion. Each day we work to find more partners, collaborators, pilot customers, and sponsors.
One option outside our chosen hackathon track would be to provide our service “for-free” to all front-line workers or even all citizens in the EU to support their mental health, reduce anxiety, and build resilience. With external financing and sponsors our team is committed to having this up and running at the latest before the summer holidays.
The value of your solution(s) after the crisis
The pandemic will have long-lasting effects. Our solution will help people long before the crisis and also help them to become more resilient and strong so that when they face new challenges or stressful situations, they will handle them better and have less negative mental issues.
The same applies to teams and organizations using our solution: they will too have a better chance of facing challenges together. Also, the solution helps in “normal” times by helping the organizations become more engaged, creative, effective, and so on. This will also help in rebuilding after the crisis, but eventually also improve their competitive edge and business success. People make great organizations, so taking care of their mental well-being is essential.
Our solution is not developed only for the crisis. It works both in the time of crisis but also in the business-as-usual phase. After the vaccination and / or other measures have taken place to allow organizations and individuals to return closer to the normal daily life we are there to support their mental well-being at work. We help people and organizations with measures based on several decades of positive work and organizational psychology research. This will also allow organizations to be more productive in the long run without risking the wellbeing of their employees.
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