The Mercer service uses technology and strategies that are commonplace in social media to address two significant barriers to successful wellness: low engagement with wellbeing services and how to make behaviour change sustainable.
Ondo is built around a social community, keeping people connected – especially relevant in current times – through a scrolling news feed in the same style as social media services.
In addition, it creates habit loops to encourage people to regularly return to their services. This uses a trigger, action, reward investment approach to help people start and sustain healthier habits.
It also creates a deeply personalised experience by building a range of personality tests into the application to better understand the individual.
Finally, the service is gamified to make it fun – not normally a word you would associate with HR and benefit technology.
This is an innovative service that delivers far more by way of technology than many so-called wellness propositions I have seen.
Ian McKenna is founder of FTRC