The focus on “healthiest and happiest” is very intentional within LEON's mission — a healthy and happy group of employees encourages resiliency, and resiliency is the foundation of every high-growth business.
Resiliency requires intelligence awareness, actionable strategies, and a deep understanding of the “fitness” of an organization; unfortunately, we saw how the legacy products of corporate wellness were broken — fragmented and slow rather than coherent and actionable. This meant that businesses were facing a difficult choice, particularly as they scaled. Do you prioritize growth at the expense of company wellness? Or do you put company wellness at the center of everything at the risk of slowing scale and limiting growth?
Our response was to create an intelligent, actionable framework to optimize both — Wellness Intelligence. And what we’ve seen is that Wellness Intelligence is so effective for this purpose because it equips leaders with a real-time understanding of how best to support or challenge their teams, right when they need it. It not only allows your VP of Sales or Head of HR to execute actionable strategies for individual teams, but has the power and flexibility needed to operate across a global business operation.
But what do we mean by “wellness intelligence”? And why is it so transformational for both businesses and their employees?
Wellness is the initial building block of resiliency, and resiliency is the bedrock for company growth— by focusing on company wellness, we build an organization that is highly adaptable to change, but gritty enough to focus on the long-term mission. That interplay between wellness and resilience is how you evolve to build a highly “fit” organization, an organization that is built to last.
Much like a coach prepares a group of professional athletes to compete at the highest levels using performance KPI’s, Wellness Intelligence is your KPI for sustained growth, your Performance Index.
We’ve already witnessed a dramatic change in terms of what we consider “company wellness.”
Company Wellness, and by extension employee health and happiness, is surprisingly misunderstood, as we have seen time and time again.
The most startling example over the past 100 or so years. For a century, employee well-being has continually evolved from workers' rights and the labor unions of the late 19th century, the advent of women and minorities entering the workforce, to what we call the “future of work” today. Truly, how we understand and define company wellness or employee health and happiness has continually evolved for the better.
Much like our sense of “company wellness” shifted with the adoption of labor unions and civil rights; now, a worldwide pandemic has exposed areas where the future of work can do better.
That shift in definition only accelerated with the rise of the Covid-19. For the first few decades of the 21st century, thanks to the creation of self-insured insurance plans, and startup “culture," the mission of wellness revolved around health prevention as a cost-savings mechanism, as well as creating a more inviting, engaging and diverse work environment.
We swiftly lost that perception — in just one year, the concept of understanding company wellness and its relationship to sustained organizational growth has largely usurped the now “legacy” company wellness models. The signs were just too obvious. Offices went remote, in most cases forever, and burnout and mental health issues in the workforce were massively elevated due to changes in every facet of our lives. But above all, the culture we relied on to keep our employees happy was removed, maybe forever: kombucha on tap, office happy hours, and face-to-face interactions were ended.
Suddenly, you no longer had your finger on the pulse of your organization
The transformation in what we thought of as “wellness” was dramatic. While the office allowed people interaction and communication, Covid-19 and the new normal set a new standard, or in this case, a new low.
This change to our entire world broadened the definition of “wellness”. What was once talked about as a health care problem — now became an organizational problem. Ultimately, we started to ask questions about the overall resilience and adaptability of our people and our companies.
This concept of company resilience and adaptability leads to a very specific understanding that distinguishes “company wellness” from mere “employee well-being” — it has become more predictive in nature, almost Darwin-esque in its ability to assess the rate of adaptability of an organization.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.”
All these rapid changes have now led organizations to try to understand issues such as employee burnout, mental health, and overall resiliency at a scale that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. With Leon, it’s now possible to maximize company wellness, by using real-time intelligent data, and a predictive analytics framework to help you quantify organizational wellness.
This is what has been missing until now: previous iterations of company wellness solutions still relied on wellness perks and company culture and lacked a contextual understanding of the long-term adaptability of an organization. All of this meant they were still tied to a faulty understanding of company wellness (because it was hard to quantify) and more importantly, how to improve it.
But when we discuss “company wellness” we don’t imply businesses will necessarily be purchasing more gym memberships and hiking the Himalayas as a team.
Instead, we see businesses improving company wellness by using intelligent data and smart recommendations. This is what Wellness Intelligence can offer. It gives you a deep understanding of team health, resiliency, and organizational culture. But more importantly, as the data set becomes more robust, your company wellness is increasingly enhanced by Playbooks— carefully tailored strategies and activities that leaders can use to create better experiences and drive wellness across their entire team. Wellness Intelligence is used in not only quantifying company wellness but also, to help you understand the exact teams that are in need of support, and how to best support them.
We might be a long way from the legacy world of company wellness, but this modern approach is very much in keeping with the broadening scope of the “future of work” that we’ve been seeing with each wave of workplace transformation.
Creating a more resilient and “fit” organization, then, isn’t about providing wellness perks to your employees or bagels in the breakroom, but it is about being able to understand wellness as a key performance indicator to sustained growth — and Wellness Intelligence by Leon is the best way to do that.
And like all good products, it has benefits for both parties: wellness intelligence is better for your business and better for your employees. (unlike your traditional employee engagement software of that legacy world we discussed before) That’s because providing timely, proactive, contextualized Playbooks, helps create a healthier, happier, and more resilient team of employees — that ultimately helps you both thrive.