Unhealthy employees in your company? Try Zoojoo.be

Putting on weight as soon as you join a company isn’t uncommon. A friend of mine who joined Google straight out of college, put on close to 10 Kgs in a matter of a few months. Work life imbalance, high food intake (a lot of junk at that) and a sedentary lifestyle is the perfect concoction for health problems.

It is estimated that Indian companies lose up to $54 Billion every year, because of unhealthy employees. Corporates who are aware of this run wellness programs within their organizations to tackle this. However, these efforts have largely been ineffective due to lack of engagement, leading to lesser employee participation.

In an attempt to tackle this problem, Avinash Saurabh and his team at Zoojoo.be are working on a cloud and mobile based entreprise wellness platform, which includes a diet and nutritional tracker, which has been made more engaging for its users.

A B to B to C play

Avinash shared that the clients for Zoojoo.be are businesses. “But at the end of the day, our focus has been on the user experience of the end user. Most wellness programs aren’t engaging enough,” said Avinash.

The diet and nutrition tracker on Zoojoo.be is equipped with features like support groups which allow peer to peer motivation. Furthermore, the platform has been heavily gamified, so as to provide the users with an incentive to use the platform and adhere to it.

While Zoojoo.be is a technology platform, Avinash beleives that a creating a user experience that will enable better engagement is very improtant. Zoojoo.be is still running a private beta, but Avinash revealed that they have got a lot of positive feedback from companies like MindTree and Logica CGI.

Will a carrot and stick method really work here?

We spoke to a HR consultants and a similar sentiment resonated among all of them - Health is a very personal thing and no external factor can motivate people enough to lead a healthy lifestyle. Deal, reward points and other incentivization techniques have grown old beyond a point in time. Employees aren’t receptive to a system forced upon them.

The key for Zoojoo.be is that it is a platform that aims to engage its users at a personal level. We have reviewed a few health tracker apps in the past, and what we’ve learnt from them is that its user base varies from very high usage to no usage at all. This suggests that there are a set of users who are internally driven to use these tools every day, while the others just lose interest after a point in time.

Enterprise might be a great distribution channel for Zoojoo.be, but the key to its success lies in how personalized it can get and in how the enterprises use them on their employees. Lets hope for the best.

Visit Zoojoo.be to request a demo