Few things have made us more collectively conscious of our health like a global pandemic that is about to turn a year old. Every part of our lives was touched by the COVID-19 outbreak, especially our work culture. Millions of people are working from home but studies show that we are working longer hours and our mental health has collectively declined.
As vaccinations are taking place around the world and corporations are gearing up for a post-COVID environment, it is clear that some things have to change moving forward. Now, Bellabeat, an ambitious Sillion Valley wellness company is leading the charge.
Bellabeat: women’s wellbeing matters
Bellabeat has been making waves in the wellness industry for a while now for its subversive business model. While many of us have come to associate any digital wellness company with data mismanagement, Bellabeat takes a different approach. For starters, all their data is collected ethically and they have committed themselves to close the wellness gap among men and women.
This has been seen with their wellness programs that use menstrual cycle data to create plans and their wearable tech that aids in the creation of these plans while blending in with everyday outfits. Now, they are taking on an even more ambitious project; a corporate wellness program.
Creating custom plans for individuals is challenging enough but Bellabeat is going a step further by taking on corporate clients and creating plans for their workforce. So far, Microsoft, Coca Cola, and LG have signed up, indicating that there is indeed a market for this sort of resource. It has been estimated that companies lose around $500 billion each year to disengagement and this is not solved simply by having the employees in the workplace.
If these employees are stressed, have a poor sleep schedule, are overworked, or have a bad diet, it will reflect in their performance. Bellabeat’s strategy is to address all these pain points in a way that is unique to each user. Their sleeping patterns will be tracked, as will their eating habits. Their workload and stress rate will be under scrutiny and this data will be compiled and analyzed by AI and a wellness plan will be recommended.
Employers themselves also seem to be on-board with ethical data collection and handling. During interactions with corporations, Melanie Messina, Bellabeat’s Head of Product, shared that companies aren’t at all eager to track their employees but are more focused on them being more productive.
By working with larger forward-thinking companies, we found out employers don’t want to track their employees, they simply want them to be happier and more productive – therefore we created a dashboard exclusively for employees to view and share their wellness between colleagues,” she said.
Only the employees themselves would be given a detailed overview of their metrics and will have the power to decide how much of it is shared and collected. All of this data will be used to promote better lifestyle habits among participants and this, in turn, betters their health and helps them make better decisions in the workplace as well as be more productive. Overall, this is a win-win situation for Bellabeat, the companies, the customers of the companies, and the employees.
There is the option to go through the corporate wellness program by itself or make use of Bellabeat’s other products along with it. These include the Leaf, the Time, or the Spring. These tools track, in real-time, all the users’ health metrics such as their heart rate, sleep cycle, and movement. The Leaf, for example, uses these metrics to determine how the user will respond to stress on any given day.
If the user has had poor sleep for days, they are less likely to be able to cope with stress and this affects workplace performance. But by using the Bellabeat program, this can be caught in time and steps can be taken to correct these patterns.
Should this be successful, the companies involved will see a spike in employee engagement and productivity and the employees’ overall health will improve.
Wellness in the 2020s
As we approach a post-COVID world, it is likely that workplace culture will change. We are already critically examining the way corporations treat their employees and what effect that has on their health. We can expect, among other things, more options to work from home and more emphasis on employee health, particularly among multinational companies.
Bellabeat is getting in on this by offering an authentic and personalized experience for all participants and this sets the stage for wellness programs that will come after. It is also reflective of people, particularly millennials and gen Zs, taking their health more seriously and seeking more personalized services.
This has been seen with the rise of the personalized meal kit industry, curated subscription boxes and now, wellness is being integrated into this new culture. Over time, this will hopefully create a better, more engaged, and healthier workforce as well as corporations that treat employee wellness as a priority and not an afterthought.