Small Business Research Initiative
COVID-19 brought into sharp relief the importance of employees' health and wellbeing at work, both physical and mental; and radically transformed the nature of work. Many larger employers have attempted to address this through the development of wellness programmes for their staff. These have largely focused, however, on mental wellbeing, rather than broader occupational health; and have not kept pace with the needs of employees in a hybrid working environment. Most SMEs and self-employed professionals do not have the resources to commit to bespoke occupational health provision.
During the first phase of this project, Wellics successfully created and incorporated cutting-edge sensors capable of monitoring multiple elements within the workplace. These sensors are designed to track air quality, temperature, and noise levels, empowering businesses to implement data-driven approaches that optimise their work environments. As a result, employee health and productivity have seen significant improvements. Additionally, the integration of an artificial intelligence--based module for mental health and mood evaluation has proven invaluable, equipping users with essential insights into their psychological wellbeing and enabling timely intervention and support.
In the second phase, we now plan to demonstrate the concrete advantages of our platform to a wider audience. We plan to develop personalised challenges and competitive league-type challenges to embed wellness in corporate activities and encourage regular engagement, using strategies found in popular apps such as Duolingo, with 37 million active monthly users. This unique strategy aims not only to improve user interaction but also to cultivate a workplace environment that prioritises health and wellness. Additionally, Wellics intends to create an algorithm that connects wellbeing to workplace performance. This valuable tool will offer SMEs, small businesses, and independent contractors valuable insights into the impact of occupational health on business productivity and efficiency and allow users to measure the return on their investment in the services and steps taken to address workplace wellbeing more generally.
We have selected three complementary organisations at which to demonstrate our Phase 2 service: Kapitalise, a typical digital SME; Be-Safe Technologies, an OH provider; and Regus, an office provider with thousands of SME tenants. These diverse organisations will give us a representative sample of the main types of customer we plan to target in the first years of commercialisation. This evaluation will contribute to the existing body of research in this field and will help inform the decisions of relevant government bodies, e.g., DWP, a potential public-sector trial site.
Small Business Research Initiative
The COVID-19 pandemic brought into sharp relief the importance of employees' health and wellbeing at work, both physical and mental; and radically transformed the nature of work through increased hybrid working. Many larger employers have attempted to address this through the development of wellness programmes for their staff. These have largely focused, however, on mental wellbeing, rather than broader occupational health; and have not kept pace with the needs of employees in a hybrid working environment. Most SMEs and the self-employed do not have the resources to commit to bespoke occupational health provision.
There are both public and private providers that offer occupational health services to companies, but their capacity to deliver innovation is limited by a lack of time and a perceived lack of demand from potential SME customers, although this is partly driven by lack of awareness of options. There has been some innovation in occupational health assessment in recent years, _e.g._, the development of online assessment tools and remote apps; but these are more aimed at creating new business for occupational health providers' services generally. The lack of SME buy-in to occupational health services is recognised as a barrier to innovation and one we are keen to address in this project.
To address the challenge, we propose to develop our existing wellbeing platform (software-as-a-service) to provide a complete occupational health diagnostic tool for client companies or individuals. An initial assessment builds the unique employee profile and creates a baseline reading. We plan to couple this input with data from users' personal devices (_e.g._, smart-watches) and cheap environmental sensors installed at workplaces to build up a thorough picture of employees' occupational health needs. Where an intervention is needed, the platform will then identify a suitable service provider from the myriad suppliers on the market. This will allow SMEs to pay only for the occupational health services they need, making an employee offering much more affordable than blanket provision. Our tool will, in effect, act as an assessment and brokerage tool for a complete occupational health solution, removing a barrier to greater uptake of existing service provision and addressing a widely-recognised market failure.
We will benefit from the service through charging a monthly licence fee to SMEs and self-employed customers, and also a small referral fee when brokering an occupational health service to a client. We believe this is a unique approach ideally tailored to the market.
Unproductive workforce cost British businesses a total of £143 billion each year (Totaljobs 2019) while almost £91.9 billion in 2019 or on average 38 working days (Vitality 2019) are lost because of ill-health related absence and presenteeism in the workplace. If these 38 days are added to the start of the year, that makes February 21st, the UK's 'first productive day' (Mercer 2020). Good mental health is considered vital for safeguarding productivity. Numerous studies highlight the connection between employee wellness and engagement, increased productivity, and turnover reduction.
WELLMOJO is a highly-innovative platform (software-as-a-service) for workplace wellbeing that provides a unique 360° approach of wellness thus reducing the presenteeism and absenteeism rates within the organisations and improves the wellbeing of the employees. It has been designed around small easy steps, tailored around users' preferences, based on three-minute weekly videos with links to support material. Unlike leading competitors, our innovation is targeted at medium-sized companies (100--1,000 employees), which are looking for a flexible ready-to-use option, easy and cheap, which can also deliver quantified benefits to be used for recruitment purposes. Our main competitors, _e.g._ Virgin Pulse, Vitality, do not offer this flexibility and are aimed at large companies with advanced HR functions and databases. It will help employers to protecting its most vital asset, _i.e._, its personnel, assuring their mental and physical health, enabling them to cope with stressful working conditions or personal stressors. Moreover, WELLMOJO aims to **reduce presenteeism and absenteeism and improve productivity of employees**, by effectively enhancing wellbeing and tackling reasons of burnout.
WELLMOJO will proactively enhance mental and physical wellbeing in a holistic approach through personalised recommendations supported by Artificial Intelligence. WELLMOJO will combine data from various parameters (through wearables, sensors, and manual user input), _e.g._, physical activity, environmental stressors (interior), nutrition and sleep patterns, mood and stress level assessment, work performance and relationships into a wellness index that indicates in real time a person's wellness. It will also provide HR departments with valuable data on how to proactively prepare and support their teams and offer wellness services to employees. This will become a valuable tool to help companies manage their staff's wellbeing, in addition to providing a valuable service offering to help recruit and maintain staff.