5 Best Ideas for Work Wellbeing | UX, cartoons and wellbeing

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Are you planning to get some work wellbeing services, apps or activities to your workplace? Would you like to know which ones have a great user experience? Keep reading!

During my years of working in Solidabis was passionate about work wellbeing and user experience (UX). I brought many wellbeing services, apps and activities for our employees to trial. Some trials were short, some became permanent practices.

In this post you can find five of my favorite work wellbeing services, apps and activities, and a few words about our user experience with each of them:

Auntie
HeiaHeia
Cuckoo Workout
Employee wellbeing surveys
Feedback Fridays

1 Auntie

What is it? Auntie “offers hassle-free online services that support the mental well-being of employees before problems such as stress, overachieving or finding motivation become overwhelming.” Auntie has solutions for employees, HR-managers as well as leaders.

Good UX: A really low-threshold to get support when needed. Easy and flexible way to meet Auntie-professional via video-calls. Discussion topics are not limited to work, they can also be about personal life. I can warmly recommend this service!

2 HeiaHeia

What is it? HeiaHeia is a fun app to promote wellbeing at work. It is a combination of wellbeing challenges, personal programs, and social engagement. https://www.heiaheia.com/solution

Good UX: We were able to create our own personalized exercise challenges. Those of us who participated felt increased sense of community. We also exercised more than usual during the challenges. Some of us were motivated by reaching the common goal. And some were motivated by staying on top of the ranking list.

3 Cuckoo Workout

What is it? Cuckoo Workout is “a gamified wellbeing app that brings joy to your day!” It inspires to take breaks throughout the day and features several fun and short activities, giving your body a break from sitting and your head a rest from work .

Good UX: The gamification aspect really motivated many us! Who wouldn’t want to win a game? And the break exercises were really fun and versatile. You didn’t have to sweat, yet it gave a great break for your body as well as your brain. Wonderful way to recover during the workday!

4 Employee wellbeing surveys

What is it? Traditionally work satisfaction surveys are used to collect data to measure how satisfied employees are. We wanted a survey that would allow employees themselves to reflect how they are doing and what could they themselves do to make things better. So we designed our own employee wellbeing survey to do just that.

Good UX: This type of survey helped us think about things like basic psychological needs at work settings: we reflected how much autonomy, competence, relatedness and meaningfulness each of us had in our work. And when we came up with ideas how to improve things ourselves, we didn’t have to wait for someone else to do something to improve the employee experience. We were empowered to do it ourselves!

5 Feedback Fridays

What is it? Genuine, positive feedback is so important, and yet so difficult to give sometimes. To lower the threshold to give feedback I initiated “Feedback Fridays”. It is a dedicated day of the week when anyone can give kudos to any colleague, about anything good they had recently done. Big or small. I created a Slack-channel for this purpose. No-one needed to be embarrassed to give or receive feedback since it’s Feedback Friday and feedback is expected then!

Good UX: I genuinely feel this theme day did improve the culture of positive feedback. It became so popular that we couldn’t always wait until Friday! Colleagues started to complement each other when ever they noticed a reason to do so, regardless of the weekday :-).

Summary

There are lots of great work wellbeing services, apps and activities out there. Out of the many we’ve tried, the ones I recommend the most are the five described in this post: