Choosing the right
While company leadership realizes the importance of worker wellness, their efforts to show it are falling short: A Gallup survey of 151 CHROs found that a quarter viewed well-being as top of mind, yet separate data showed only 24% of employees strongly agree their employer makes it a priority. Whether this is due to insufficient support, too many platforms, or
A new solution from LifeSpeak aims to close the gap. Dubbed Holistic Wellness, it combines access to hundreds of health specialists along with curated classes and resources in the areas of mental health, nutrition, sleep, fitness and mindfulness.
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To expedite care at scale and still tailor support to each individual, the company has designed its own closed-circuit AI model, giving people access to secure, expert-driven chat bot interaction, which can give quick feedback, suggest content, triage members to the right professional and lay out a wellness journey for each person based on their input.
"Bringing all of these pillars of wellness together into one platform allows us to support people regardless of what they're going through," says Anna Mittag, chief product officer at LifeSpeak. "People's challenges don't fall neatly into any one of these categories, so we wanted to be able to draw from the deep wells of already-existing content [and] expertise, and bring them all to bear on one member's particular needs. That's where AI comes in."
Fast, trustworthy feedback
Depending on what a member communicates to the Holistic Wellness AI chat bot, they may receive resources, suggestions for next best actions, or a recommendation to connect with a specific type of health professional on the platform. To further its reach, Holistic Wellness's technology makes feedback from experts and resources available in both English and French, and offers subtitles in Spanish and other languages.
The ways AI enhances wellness offerings — hyper-personalization and facilitating access to digital and human touchpoints — are incredibly important, says Mittag. Whether a business has 10 or 10,000 employees, an AI model like the one created for Holistic Wellness can give them 24/7 access to vetted information and accelerate their care journey.
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But, Mittag points out, technology is a supplement, not a replacement, for the human component, which is essential for making people feel heard and build trust with a wellness offering.
"AI is a great way to scale [and] globalize our content, and also proliferate it more quickly than than we would have, but we will never stray from that anchor in human expertise," she says.
AI also plays a role in separate solutions offered by LifeSpeak, including one for substance abuse and another for caregiver and parenting support. Mittag urges benefits leaders to keep in mind that the well-being of employees is interconnected to their loved ones, and as such, wellness offerings should extend to their care, as well.
"The caregiver support line is an obvious example," she says. "We are targeting the caregiver themselves — that's what the foundation and mental health and physical health is there for — but it's really about the aging parent or the child with ADHD. It's very outward looking. Similarly, with our substance use management program, there is a path for somebody who has a loved one who is struggling with substance use. It's really not all about self help."
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A powerful tool for benefit leaders
The right holistic technology-based wellness offering takes the burden of juggling multiple point solutions off the shoulders of benefit managers, making it more cost effective and easier to present to employees, Mittag says. It can also be something leaders put to use in the workplace to spur communication about wellness, helping to establish it as an embedded part of company culture.
Mittag points to LifeSpeak clients who will start a meeting with a short video from the platform about a relevant topic, such as how to have a difficult conversation, and use that to kickstart a discussion among a team.
"You can't [say], 'OK, we've given you this platform, and now we wash our hands,'" she says. "You need to keep talking about it to truly mean it. Most people really want to do the best for their employees, but it's a two-way street."
