Should you buy wearables for all your employees?
Wearables and fitness watches are the trend nowadays. Although it’s early stages, the adoption is on the rise and many of us have already adjusted to one or the other. Of course the percentage is skewed towards those who are yet to buy one.
Some decision makers/leaders get lured by the need to “gift” wearables to all of their employees but the results are not so favourable. Given that good quality wearables aren’t very cost-efficient, the ROI is negative — the fraction of people who adopt the new device “gifted” to them is in single digits. The ones that already have wearables either give it to their family members/friends or simple don’t use them. The others who never owned one, get excited, use it for a month or so and then put it away in the drawer.
Another emerging trend is employers providing wearables to employees as a data-gathering tool(mainly in the west).
According to this article http://www.pwc.co.uk/data-analytics/discover-the-possibilities-of-wearable-technology-in-the-workplace.html, “people are still reluctant to take a device from their employer and share their data. A lack of trust was cited as the number 1 reason for this.”
I recently came across an organization that gifted each of their employees a wearable and spent a bomb on that.
Such initiatives are truly appreciative as it’s a very good gesture to bother about your employees’ wellbeing — but wait — what if you get that at a fraction of the cost and enable them to use the wearables they already have — their smartphones?
I guess one factor that plays on leader’s/decision maker’s minds is the higher perceived value of something physical, no matter if the usage is only initial. But the actual value may not match up in most cases.
One exception in my mind to the point I am trying to make — A wearable called Lumo Lift that helps you maintain your body posture while standing/sitting and also tracks steps. Many of us who work desk jobs have backache problems primarily because of bad posture — and Lumo Lift tries to fix that.
As a wellness platform, we at FeetApart have integrated with a variety of wearables and “free” mobile apps. We use this integration to help run various competitions and challenges in organisations and personalise the experience both for the employee and the employer. The benefit of this is that people have options to choose from — if they were already using a wearable before they can choose that or they could use one of the free mobile apps as well. Our platform acts as an aggregator and ensures seamless syncing.
We as a team are big fans of wellbeing and wearables ourselves and keep experimenting with many of them — but we wan’t you to get value for the money you spend on your employees’ wellbeing.
Hope this post helps you choose wisely in case you are looking to invest in employee wellbeing.
