Ondo is a new wellbeing service from Mercer designed to achieve higher productivity, fewer absences and reduce employment costs.
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