When most of us think of our jobs, a few things come to mind like late hours, constant emails, and, more recently, a plethora of Zoom calls. One thing that doesn’t usually come to mind is wellness. In fact, most of us would categorize wellness as one of the things we do to recover from the stress of work.
Now, Bellabeat, a tech-forward wellness company, is taking on the ambitious project of bridging the gap between work and wellness by launching a corporate wellness program. The aim of this new program is to help employees become more engaged at work and more productive.
How Bellabeat powers women’s wellbeing at work
If we’ve learned anything in this pandemic, it is that physical presence in the workplace does not necessarily translate to actual productivity. Bellabeat is trying to address this by providing programs that ensure that employees are not only physically present but mentally-engaged as well. Their corporate wellness programs have already inspired confidence in the corporate works as Microsoft, Coca Cola and LG have signed up for it already.
This is because employee disengagement actually costs businesses an estimated $500 billion each year. This disengagement is caused by a myriad of issues such as a poor sleep schedule and diet, stress, and dehydration. Too often, employees opt to simply power through these issues but statistics show that their quality of work declines when they do this.
To combat this, Bellabeat will be leveraging collected data and creating wellness programs for women that will help them live better lives and perform better as employees. All aspects of health are addressed; participants will be helped to improve their diet, regularize their sleeping patterns, and better cope with stress both within and outside the workplace.
This is not the first time that Bellabeat has taken on stress management. Some of their wearable jewelry such as their Urban Leaf jewelry has been used to track various health metrics and predict how the wearer will respond to stress on any given day. In the case of this wellness program, participants will be taught new habits that will ensure healthy lives for them and better productivity in the office.
An interesting facet of this new program is how user data is handled. Silicon Valley has been under fire in the last few years for its supposed mishandling of user data, with incidents like the Cambridge Analytica scandal coming to mind. Bellabeat, its management said, only uses ethically-sourced user data and once that data is collected, only processes and releases it ethically.
For the employees themselves, reports are generated which show how they have progressed using the wellness program and employees are also able to customize their privacy settings, putting them in control of how their data is used and shared among colleagues.
Additionally, Bellabeat has revealed that the employers themselves are pushing for the ethical treatment of their employees’ data and do not want to track their information.
“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,” said Melanie Messina, Bellabeat’s Head of Product
It’s easy to be skeptical about these kinds of corporate wellness programs. On the surface, it could be dismissed as one of the cliche, generic ‘team-building’ exercises that companies organize to appear modern forward-thinking. But Bellabeat says they do not offer any generic wellness programs or one-size-fits-all solutions to employee problems.
Bellabeat uses data and AI to track and analyze employee performance and wellness. By doing this, personalized programs are created for every participant, with no two people having the same plan. The program can be done on its own or in conjunction with other Bellabeat offerings like
Bellabeat has always been driven by data and how data can be used to create a better world. One of their top mission statements is closing the wellness gap between men and women as statistics show that women are underrepresented in wellness despite being a majority of the caregivers across the world. Prior to this, the company used data on customers’ menstrual cycles to create wellness programs and facilitated millions of workout programs using that method.
The Changing Culture of Workplace Wellness
As ‘hustle culture’ and the state of the workplace is under more scrutiny in modern times, the word ‘wellness’ means a lot more than just group yoga retreats and juice bars in the office. Now, it means taking into account employee health metrics and providing information and tools that actually help them do better both in and out of the workplace.
Bellabeat has already been in the business of curating wellness and this new foray into the corporate world has big implications. Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and LG are already on board and it will be exciting to see what comes next. Hopefully, it leads to a positive and permanent shift in workplace culture that ensures less stressed and more productive employees all around.
