The Wellnia Litepaper
A Vision for Real Wellness in the Workplace
Imagine if you could increase a typical employees productivity by over 15%, and decrease their error rate and health care costs by over 25%, with incentives that amount to just 1 to 3 percent of their salary.
Plus, what if the same platform could help you prevent burnout and make sure that people feel safe in their workspace so that you can retain your talent longer!
These objectives are our guiding light at Wellnia and we aim to do what sometimes seems impossible, help people change their bad habits into healthy ones by leveraging behavioral psychology combined with just 3 key metrics tracked in a privacy focused way through wearables, like the beloved Apple Watch!
Our mission is helping create a happier, healthier and more productive workforce.
Why Hasn’t Someone Figured This Out Already
There are quite a few companies in the corporate wellness space but they all seem to fall short of our what we believe is possible. Just think about when was the last time that you met someone who actually made significant and lasting lifestyle changes thanks to their employer’s wellness initiatives and incentives.
The crux of the issue is that most of the existing programs are:
a one size fits all approach
watered down with metrics that don’t make a lasting impact
aren’t privacy focused
don’t provide enough incentives
don’t handle the critical onboarding process properly
are too expensive for smaller organizations
Our biggest takeaway from conducting end-user interviews is that no one wants their employer to know their health metrics, but they had a strong interest to participate in these kinds of wellness incentive programs if their privacy was respected and especially if they could receive valuable advice to help them improve their health in small ways over time.
Also, we found that end-users have very different incentive drivers. For example, some would much rather have their employer donate to a charity of their choice instead of directly receiving the equivalent of that amount.
Our Difference
At Wellnia, we are addressing all of these pitfalls through an innovative and privacy-focused approach that combines:
behavioral psychology
3 key metrics from wearables
AI-based contextual health coaching
actionable-insights from aggregated data
claims management for self-insured corporations
Plus, our biggest differentiator is that we handle the heavy lifting of the onboarding and implementation of this program so that you don’t have to hire any additional staff. We know that getting buy-in from employees and the onboarding process are critical, and that this is something that HR typically struggles with.
Let’s break down our approach and help you understand why we’ve chosen to structure our program in this way.
Leveraging Behavioral Psychology
Most of the existing solutions on the market fail to engage their users because their gamification and rewards just aren’t enough and take a one size fits all approach. We take an experimental approach to find the incentive levels that have the greatest ROI for your unique teams. Collaborating with PhD researchers allows us to be at the forefront of this fascinating branch of psychology.
For financial incentives, we set an upper-limit of 2 or 3% of an employees salary based on our agreement but we start with a much lower amount, like just 0.5% of their salary to evaluate how much this motivates them.
We also offer alternative options that can present a much higher driver and help them re-engage after set backs, like opting instead for a larger “jackpot” incentive, so each of their health metrics point are like lottery tickets.
Larger “prizes” can be the key to motivating those who are hardest to reach, while also keeping the cost of the incentives much lower than individual payouts of the same total amount.
Hyper competitive individuals may not care much about the financial incentives but are instead driven by leaderboards, where we can show their ranking among their peers while keeping the anonymity.
Some altruistic employees would much rather have their payout converted to a donation to a charity of their choice, especially if the employer matches it. This becomes a win-win as you’re able to make a tax-deductible donation while the employee feels beholden to not let their charity down.
Our proprietary algorithm automatically handles this fine tunning of incentives to offer based on the engagement of your unique teams, so as we understand what drives them better, we can dial in the approach that allows maximum ROI.
Plus, we handle the individual incentive payouts in order for employee’s health scores to remain private.
The Group-Based Approach
Positive peer pressure can be one of the most powerful drivers we can access. Our group-based approach allows teams to evenly split the incentives based on their aggregated scores and for you to be able to make the payouts yourself without having to use us as a trusted middleman.
We believe that generally the accountability to peers and group learning aspects will produce much better results than any of the individual incentives.
We require a minimum threshold of at least 12 people to ensure anonymity within the group, which also helps people from dropping out since they don’t want to disappoint their team mates.
Privacy-Focused yet Insightful
Employees are extremely hesitant to use any kind of health tracking apps if their employer can access their data. We respect their right to privacy by either using our anonymized group-based approach or being the trusted middleman handling the individual-based incentives so their employer never knows how an individual is scoring.
We only provide access to aggregated data for managers and executives to understand the overall health, including the trajectory and trends, of their organization and departments. We can provide these kinds of aggregated insights for team as long as there are at least 12 participating members to provide a level of anonymity.
Imagine being able to prevent burnout by being alerted when a department is being pushed too hard and seeing when they are recovered enough for the next sprint.
Furthermore, we can help managers benchmark their health trends against the cumulative aggregate of all of our other clients, allowing them to see how they stack up, while keeping all of the individual and company data private.
Our stringent privacy policy ensures that we will never sell or share any of individual data, so your staff can rest assured that their metrics will remain safe. Privacy and trust are at the forefront of all our key decisions and we make sure that end-users feel safe using our platform.
We know that trust is hard won and easily lost!
Security
We go beyond HIPPA compliance and ensure the highest level of data encryption possible, so that even if our databases were ever compromised there would be no way to connect the health data to an individual’s identifying data.
Plus, unlike so many of our competitors who use a “multi-tenant database”, we go the extra mile to utilize a “siloed” database approach to ensure that your data can never be accidentally or intentionally accessed by someone outside of your organization.
We regularly do security audits by trusted third-parties to ensure that our infrastructure remains hardened.
The 80/20 of Health Metrics
Pareto’s Principle states that about 80 percent of the results are from about 20% of the effort. Which is why we’ve chosen to focus on just the top 3 key health metrics that are easy to accurately measure with Apple, Garmin and Fitbit watches:
Sleep Quality
HRV - Heart Rate Variability
Heart Rate Zone Training
These three metrics are intertwined and give the most accurate picture of someone’s overall health and lifestyle.
Since most people tend to fail when they set the bar to high (think of New Year’s Resolutions), we recommend the staggered approach where we start with tracking and feedback on just on metric at a time for a user.
Here is why we’ve chosen these 3 key metrics and why number of steps doesn’t matter compared to these.
#1: Sleep – The Cornerstone of Success
“Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day -- Mother Nature's best effort yet at contra-death.”
― Matthew Walker, Author of ‘Why We Sleep’
If you aren’t already convinced that sleep is THE most important thing when it comes to mental, physical and emotional health, I challenge you to read through Matthew Walker’s seminal book ‘Why We Sleep’, which will probably scare you into giving yourself at least 7 hours of sleep opportunity each night.
The fascinating thing about sleep is its affects on appetite and blood-sugar levels, so it may be the first step in curbing diabetes and other metabolic disorders.
Here are some sobering stats to leave you with thanks to the CDC:
$411 billion is lost annually in economic productivity in the U.S. due to sleep deprivation, accounting for the equivalent of 1.2 million working days lost per year.
Poor sleep contributes to more than 100,000 motor vehicle crashes each year, resulting in an estimated 71,000 injuries and 1,550 fatalities .
40% of adults report unintentionally falling asleep during the day at least once in the preceding month due to insufficient sleep.
#2: HRV - Your Stress Score
HRV stands for Heart Rate Variability and is THE measure of how well your body can respond to stressors, both physical and mental. Pro athletes have been using it extensively for decades.
What’s amazing about HRV is that it provides a comprehensive view of your overall health since stress, sleep, diet and exercise are all reflected in your HRV. So we are able to directly show people the affects of their lifestyle choices.
HRV is also considered a “Life-Force” score, since it naturally drops gradually as we age and acutely tanks when we push ourselves too hard. Caffeine and other stimulants can mask our actual energy levels, so staying on top of your HRV can help you make sure you don’t burnout and then need a lot more time to recover.
A study in the European Heart Journal found that every 10 ms increase in HRV is associated with a 20% reduction in the risk of death from all causes!
#3: Heart Rate Zone Training
You probably already know that regularly getting your heart rate up in the “zone” is the key to:
Cognitive Enhancement
Metabolism
Stress Resilience
Greatly reducing the chance of heart disease, the number one killer in the US
Studies show that spending just 90-150 minutes per week in the moderate-intensity "Zone 2" (60-70% of maximum heart rate) can significantly improve cardiovascular health and endurance. Zone training can also increase heart rate variability (HRV) by as much as 10-15%, indicating better stress resilience and recovery.
Moderate intensity training is generally when you’re heart rate is elevated but you can still keep a conversation going. You don’t need to go into the “red-zone” where you are so out of breath that you can’t talk to get most of the aerobic benefits.
Hiking is by far the best way to get your zone training in since it also helps with mental and emotional health. All of the smart watches nowadays will help you calculate your threshold for Zone Training and help you stay in the zone.
AI Health Coaching
The average person will struggle trying to implement healthy lifestyle habits because there is so much misinformation out there. Remember when low-fat diets were the fad, until a body of evidence made it really clear that healthy fats were actually the key to mental health and longevity.
There is no “one size fits all” type of diet and your dietary needs change over time. By analyzing HRV after a meal we are able to show users the real-time impacts of their diet, and offer them suggestions for more healthy options that fit their unique body.
Our Health Coaching initially focuses on building a strong foundation and helping people fill in any deficiencies. For example, most people are deficient in Magnesium which is an ideal supplement to take in certain forms before bedtime to relax the body and brain.
The key is providing the health advice contextually, like if a user has had a poor night of sleep, reminding of ways that help offset the effects, like taking vitamin C to boost their immunity. Plus, providing them with tips throughout the day to better their chances for catching up on their sleep the next night, like no caffeine within 8 hours of bedtime.
Even though we are utilizing AI for our Health Coaching to make it more engaging, we have guardrails limiting the recommendations to a specific set that are generally considered safe by medical professionals. Also, we always suggest that the user consults with their doctor before taking any new supplements or making drastic lifestyle changes.
Feedback is Gold
Psychological safety is one of the three things employees value most in today’s workplace, but only 86% of regular employees feel psychologically safe! This means that if you don’t have a mechanism for employees to be able to submit meaningful feedback without fear of retaliation then you could be loosing some of your top talent for issues that you could have addressed, had you known about them.
Wellnia is designed with emotional health in mind, so we provide users with a chance to provide daily feedback on how they are feeling. This gives you a barometer of the overall sentiment of teams and the corporation.
End users aren’t able to be see the results of others, so they aren’t swayed, but managers and executives can see the aggerates to understand if they need to address some issue causing disharmony.
This daily check-in also provides your employees with a way to safely and anonymously air any grievances by aggregating the feedback so that it doesn’t contain any identifying information and allows managers to digest it quickly and easily.
Using the honest feedback from employees, our AI Coach can provide strategic tips for managers to utilize emotional intelligence to help address the issues properly.
Wearables are Literal Lifesavers
We’ve heard from multiple senior leaders whose lives were saved because they had an Apple Watch that warned them of an irregular heart beat, so they were able to seek medical attention quickly enough to avert heart failure.
So we believe that these devices by themselves are already inherently helpful in so many ways!
Offsetting the Cost
With our pricing model we are targeting a 10X return on the costs of our service when you add up the savings in productivity, health care costs, burnout, and talent retention. We take a sliding scale approach so we are accessible to organizations of all sizes.
Also, we know the costs of the providing wearables, such as the Apple Watch, can seem like a big expense initially so we help structure the arrangement so that the cost actually comes out of the employee’ earned incentives, making it easier to justify.
Our Vision
Our vision is to redefine workplace well-being by turning data into actionable insights, fostering a culture where every employee thrives—mentally, physically, and emotionally.
