A Revolution in Wellness Planning
by Roger Lis, Senior Consultant
You stand in the breakroom staring at the wall as you wait for the coffee to be ready, exhausted and now irritated that the person who poured the last cup didn’t brew another pot but satisfied that you have an excuse to take a ten minute mental break. As you stand there—full of emotion, reflecting on all the things going on in your life—you realize that you need to find better ways to deal with the challenges you’re facing. You’ll need some help to do it, but you’re not sure how to get the help you need.
Today’s best companies invest in their people. This investment often includes designing and funding a wellness program to help people face both physical and emotional challenges in their lives. But it is difficult to know how to invest resources in a way that will truly support wellness. Wellness programs aren’t one-size-fits-all, and traditional EAP programs, although important, are not always enough.
Traditionally, when crafting a wellness program, a company surveys their employees, asking them to describe their needs and the challenges they’re facing. Here is where companies typically fail. A wellness roadmap must be dynamic in order to support the changing experiences of employees, yet we can’t constantly survey people to find out what they need. Also, people don’t always know what they need. Often, when it comes to understanding what’s bothering us in our lives, we can’t put a finger on it. We experience a wide range of feelings and symptoms, many of which are subtle. As a result, we may have a difficult time noticing and describing what’s wrong.
There is a better way. We can ask people to provide input through a different kind of assessment: one that “senses” their current state not by asking them to describe it, but by answering a series of questions that sample their resilience level. At Kintla, we developed an iOS/Android application that asks users about their stressful experiences and, in particular, about how well they feel they regulate to lessen effects of these stressors. The app asks people to identify stressors emerging from three sources: internal, work, and family/personal. It also asks them to identify the types of regulation techniques they use to cope with stress, which are classified in three categories: Bottom-Up, Top-Down, or Relationship-Based.
An employee may, for example, have constant negative thoughts (an internal stressor), get criticized by the boss (a work stressor), or become frustrated with their spouse or child (a family/personal stressor). Each of these stressors has the potential to debilitate them emotionally, but only if they fail to regulate their emotions when the stress hits.
Did they go for a walk, or check in with someone who supports them? Did they meditate or see a coach?
We know that simple actions like these, once integrated into our daily routine, have the power to improve our emotional health, but its hard to know how often we’re taking them, or whether the techniques are making an impact. The app makes this information concrete: when the app’s measure of stress exceeds its measure of regulation, the individual user’s resilience score drops. Fluctuation in a user’s resilience score gives them a general sense of how well they’re regulating their emotions under pressure. In addition, through the repeated exercise of answering the questions the app poses, people can learn to observe their emotions in the moment and, if they give permission, report anonymous data for wellness planning to their company.
This type of behavioral “sensing” tool can provide a company with real-time intelligence on where to invest resources. For example, if trends show that employees are experiencing elevated internal stressors, leaders in charge of wellness may offer a program with tools for dealing with personal perceptions and self-expectations. On the other hand, if they see increased stress related to work or personal lives, they may offer more programs offering support across those dimensions. They can also learn what regulation techniques are working and which techniques may need more support. They may learn that providing access to a gym or sponsoring a team walking challenge would help as an exercise regulator. Whatever the particulars, regular data flowing in on the stress and regulation states of the workforce will provide companies with more dynamic, more accurate, and more focused insights than those produced by traditional surveys.
Visit us at kintla.io to learn more about our work and our approach.
