How tech can help the wellbeing of homeworkers

Richard Lucas, founder of GoVox explains how the platform is helping those working from home.

How does GoVox work?

GoVox is an easy-to-use wellbeing platform that continuously monitors individual employee wellbeing, emotional health, happiness and wellbeing through weekly or monthly check ins. 

The platform measures check in feedback against happiness performance indicators, meaning management teams can proactively pinpoint at-risk individuals and provide effective, targeted support to the right people at the right time.

GoVox work with a broad range of organisations and businesses across many sectors, including sport, education and corporate, it’s aim is to engender a culture in workplaces built upon openness and acceptance for all. 

Some of their main and most established customers are sports teams, owing to their CEO, Richard Lucas’s prior experience in community and grassroots clubs. 

Richard established GoVox after personally experiencing the effects of not monitoring mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. In late 2018 the local rugby community, which Richard volunteers in, sadly saw a number of suicides. At the same time he had a number of ‘near miss’ incidents linked to teams at work. 

When GoVox was first established, Richard and his team got together with a number of leaders across sports and industry along with representatives from MIND and other mental health services providers. Initially the team wanted to understand if these were isolated cases, unfortunately they quickly found out they were more widespread than imagined. 

Richard made it his mission to support these individuals and find a way of making sure wellbeing was properly recognised in workplaces and in community organisations.

How is GoVox helping homeworkers? 

GoVox has been particularly valuable to its partners during lockdown as it has empowered management and teams to stay better connected with people who are spread across different working locations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown many UK employees into uncharted waters. Most are now expected to work from home for the foreseeable future – some of which have no experience of remote team working. Despite lockdown guidelines easing, it is unlikely workplaces won’t return to normal within 2020. 

GoVox has also been taken up by many companies who want to better support their employees returning to work from furlough and adapt to the new normal. 

Since lockdown began, GoVox has created 1,165,124 ‘touch points’ between organisations and their people and identified 81,421 moments of concern that leaders have been able to act on and support their people. 

These numbers alone show the incredible impact the platform is having. 

How are the wellbeing questions for GoVox check ins formulated? 

GoVox has a growing set of base check in questions, these have been developed with the support of psychological experts and advisors from MIND. As the product has evolved the questions have been shaped and improved through use.

GoVox shares these with each new organisation but tweak and amend them so the questions  resemble a perfect fit to their communication style and cultural communications delivery style.

The offering is very much bespoke and geared towards supporting everyone, at all levels in an organisation. 

What do these questions uncover about wellbeing? 

GoVox is able to gather broad data sets that map ‘Happiness’ as a key indicator, this is driven across a range of questions. Check ins can map this based on internal and external factors. The recent COVID-19 pandemic is an key example of this with key indicators (Trust, Positivity, Loneliness) tracking in line with CV19 guidance.

Examining wellbeing, GoVox can also map how anxiety can impact sleep and positivity and how ‘happiness’ is clearly impacted directly by wider decisions in the business or organisation.

Do you use any AI, machine learning or other interesting technology as part of this process?

AI is on GoVox’s roadmap to explore. The company wants to balance the simplicity of the check in process with maximising the insights and data reported.

So far, Richard and his team have experimented with some technology to identify key words of concern across the verbatim comments and continue to look for ways that AI can play a role.

Any use of technology will be used carefully, the powerful element of GoVox is the increased level of human interaction between teams. 

What difference has GoVox made to the organisations and their employees?

There a few key differences GoVox makes...

High engagement: GoVox engages teams to be more connected and creates a culture of openness, honesty and team collaboration. Teams are better when they talk. 

Help prevent personal crisis moments: GoVox pinpoints at risk individuals that could be in a crisis situation. At this point leadership can ensure the individual receives a call or some kind of communication which supports them at the right time. 

Enables leaders to lead and employees to gain support: GoVox empowers leaders to lead a more connected team where there is an honest view of each individual’s happiness and wellbeing. It also helps team members who may feel like they can’t come forward speak out about any issues.