You’d be hard pressed to find two topics more prevalent in the working world today than flexibility and wellbeing. So much so, that they make up two-thirds of the topics covered in LinkedIn’s 2022 Global Talent Trends report. 

Getting both of these things right will be the key to, not only finding and keeping good talent, but also in equipping them to achieve their potential. 

So how do you best combine them? Well, the wbcsd “Healthy people, healthy business” report says that flexibility in health and wellbeing is truly embedded when personalised support for all individuals is achieved.

Sounds simple. But in practice, it’s much harder than it sounds. Primarily because true personalisation in wellbeing involves two areas: needs AND preferences.

Needs

Needs are the areas of wellbeing that an individual is having trouble with, or would like to improve. Broken down, these are the 6 pillars of wellbeing; sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress management, community, meaningful activity. Then within each of these pillars, there are specific goals or areas that need work. 

Personalisation is often considered to be guiding individuals towards their specific needs within a pillar.

If we take sleep for example, poor sleep could be:

• I can’t fall asleep, or
• I can’t stay asleep throughout the night, or
• I’m not getting enough deep sleep

The list can go on, and then replicated for each other pillar.

In short, there’s a lot of goals. And helping people find the right goal for them is critical for personalisation. But it doesn’t end there.

Preferences

Preferences are an often forgotten element of personalisation in wellbeing. But they are, arguably, the most important aspect when it comes to creating habits that drive actual sustainable change. 

Preferences relate to how people want to do stuff. Some people like to consume info via reading, others via video. Some routinely track their exercise, others move intuitively. Some like gamified apps, others like to limit screen time as much as possible.

Accounting for these preferences is critical to ‘meeting people where they are’ – something that is key to fostering sustainable behaviors and habits. 

Two people could have the exact same goal, but if one prefers to read information and the other prefers to watch a video, then any “personalised” resource of either format based purely on their goal is going to miss the mark with one of them.

Our uniqueness as humans goes beyond what we’re trying to achieve, into how we would like to achieve it.

Bringing it all together

The breadth of wellbeing makes it incredibly hard to create truly personalised experiences for all. Educational things, practical things, online, offline, sleep, nutrition, stress management, community, meaningful activity, exercise. The list goes on.

The data we’ve seen at Betterspace emphasises the range required to engage the masses. 

With… 

• over 500 different resources, 
• spanning our 6 pillars, 
• including books, products, videos, apps, in person activities etc
• Thousands of users from various companies, industries, backgrounds

The most commonly used resource has been used by 5% of people. 

It’s no wonder then that many People and Wellbeing teams are overwhelmed trying to cater for everyone. Finding all these things and offering them one-by-one just isn’t feasible.

As the working world continues to move towards a more personalised experience, businesses would do well to take inspiration from the consumer landscape. In our personal lives “one stop shops” have become the norm. Be that the likes of Netflix, Spotify or YouTube.  Or aggregator sites for holidays, insurance and utilities.

Marketplace platforms will allow companies to easily provide the necessary range of resources all whilst allowing individual users to access truly personalised support.