AI for Employee Wellness: Benefits, Applications, and Best Practices

AI is one of the most critical advancements of this century. At a 2016 conference, Google CEO Sundar Pichai called it more profound than electricity or fire . Billionaire Mark Cuban predicted that the first trillionaire would likely be an AI entrepreneur.

No wonder the stakes are high for AI's impact on business and humanity. In the workplace, AI has already boosted efficiency and productivity. In healthcare, it can diagnose diseases with precision and create personalized treatment plans.

AI is set to make incredible strides in employee wellness. The transformation of modern workplaces through AI is happening now. One key area is how AI can complement traditional wellness programs. It makes them more flexible, relevant, and motivating to meet individual needs.

IBM and Microsoft are leading the way in integrating AI into employee wellness. Microsoft's new service, 'Skills,' is AI-powered. It helps organizations understand workforce skills, gaps, and deliver personalized, skills-based experiences.

IBM's Watson, on the other hand, translates knowledge into actionable insights. It delivers these insights to employees at the time and place they need them most.

Traditional employee wellness programs often have three common issues: lack of personalization, inflexible incentives, and failure to base decisions on measurable outcomes.

Any expert in the wellness sector would appreciate how companies like IBM and Microsoft have embraced AI. They are doing well, especially as the world moves at lightning speed. This blog covers topics that would shed light on the following:

1. How AI is revolutionizing employee wellness

2. Key uses in wellness programs

3. The best practices for adopting AI-driven solutions effectively

4. Ethical considerations

How AI is Changing the Game for Employee Wellness?

Below, I present five key opportunities that your employee wellness program brings to the table.

1. Hyper-Personalized Wellness Plans

A wellness program that delivers you just what you need. With the right AI tools, an HR can analyze individual health data, preferences, and habits to create tailored programs.

For instance, an AI tool recommends yoga for Anna and a high-protein diet for Susan. It can do this by analyzing their monthly or quarterly biometrics, which encompasses their sleep schedules, food intake, and heart health.

Can you imagine getting this personalized insight from a traditional wellness program?

2. Proactive Health Interventions

In 2021, data says 18 million people died from Non-Communicable Disease before age 70 years. Most of such deaths were preventable. As per WHO, lifestyle factors played extensively here.

As per Siemens Healthineers, predictive models that leverage AI technology could help identify areas of concern more likely before any noticeable physical symptoms appear.

Here, AI for employee wellness is, hands down, a lifesaver.

For instance, wearables integrated with AI alert employees about irregular sleep patterns and suggest corrective measures.

3. Enhanced Engagement Through Gamification

Keeping note of engagement scores for each of your employees, even with the most advanced technical tool, could take a toll on any HR department. But today AI led gamification of activities for employee engagement is no longer gate kept. AI-powered challenges, leaderboards, and rewards drive participation and motivation.

Employees compete in step challenges tracked by AI, boosting camaraderie and activity levels.

4. Real-Time Health Monitoring

Wearables with AI are game changers, offering ongoing insights that help us build healthier habits. Apps like HealthifyMe, Fitelo, and Fitterfly have used AI to make fitness and nutrition smarter.

As Dr. Arbinder Singal, CEO and co-founder of Fitterfly, pointed out, companies are also creating AI-powered chatbots to handle queries, and fitness pros are turning to tools like ChatGPT to craft personalized diet and exercise plans.

It's exciting to see how AI is shaping the future of wellness!

AI-powered apps like Stand Up! The Work Break Timer, Stretchly, and Healthie are excellent ways to remind employees to take short breaks or walk after prolonged sitting periods.

5. Streamlined HR Operations

HR professionals equipped with AI-enabled resources can attract, manage, and retain talent that can be game changers. AI tools like Anodot, Obviously AI, and HR Signal offer insights into strategic hiring and employee retention. They predict turnover and suggest retention strategies.

AI also automates feedback analysis, wellness surveys, and participation tracking, saving time and resources.

Make no mistake, the AI era is firmly delivering on its promise to free up employees for higher-level work and showcasing compelling returns on AI.
— Prakash Ramamurthy, Chief Product Officer, Freshworks

5 Arenas that AI Can Empower HRs to Implement Employee Wellness

1. Personalized Wellness Programs

Today, personalized wellness is at an employer's fingertips for even a workplace with hundreds of employees. Consumers and employees alike want personalized guidance and connections from the brands/companies they purchase from and work for. This is where AI can powerfully nurture relationships.

Dr. Theresa Haskins, an expert in workforce wellness, has been a strong advocate for using data and AI to create personalized employee wellness programs.

2. Early Detection of Health Risks

Diagnostics has traditionally been one of the key areas of AI in medicine. Today, companies have the privilege of straightforward disposal of early detection of health risks. What I mean is through AI in healthcare, regular employee health screenings, with due collaboration with leaders in healthcare like AdventHealth, could mean lifesaving for your employees.

By integrating AI with genetic and medical data, AdventHealth, for instance, evaluates breast cancer risks, enabling early interventions such as breast MRIs or genetic testing for high-risk patients.

3. Mental Health Support

Companies, too, tend to overlook mental health just as we as individuals do unless matters become pressing. With AI, employers can better diagnose, support, and evaluate mental health symptoms like consistent fatigue, insomnia, and a drop in work performance.

Today, there are AI-based apps that offer revolutionary technology and never-before-seen features. These apps utilize chatbots and other AI-driven tools for mental health care. By providing accessible, flexible, and sometimes anonymous support, they break down barriers and offer many a lifeline.

Below are three such apps:

Woebot

Woebot is an AI-driven chatbot that offers cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-based support. It provides support in a conversational dialogue style with 24*7 availability.

Replika

While Replika isn't specifically a mental health app, it can provide emotional support and a space to talk, which can be therapeutic.

Youper

Youper incorporates mood tracking and journaling features to help users monitor their emotional well-being over time.

4. Financial Wellness Support

Staying ahead today requires more than basic knowledge. It demands continuous learning and adaptation. This holds true for financial wellness, too. Financial wellness is wise management of income, investments, savings, debt, and expenses. It is the ability to live a healthy financial life and plan for the future.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are revolutionizing how we manage our financial lives.

Three well-known AI-based tools namely: Betterment, Cleo, and Origin—are creating a buzz in the financial wellness sector.

Betterment offers data-driven insights to provide personalized investment advice tailored to each user's financial goals, risk tolerance, and timeline. Now, that's like the power of AI, which customizes the needs of employees based on their income level.

Cleo is widely used in the United States. It is a chatbot-driven AI financial assistant that helps you manage your finances with a conversational interface. The app tracks spending, provides insights into financial habits, and even delivers budgeting tips in a fun and engaging way.

Origin uses artificial intelligence to offer insights and recommendations tailored to the user's financial situation. Its AI-powered planner answers money-related questions in real time and provides immediate support whenever needed.

5. Wellness Program Selection & Navigation

Selecting a suitable wellness program for your company is essential to human resource management. Rest, often, falls into place. Now, with the advent of AI for employee wellness, this task is easier to implement.

Accessible AI solutions, like ChatGPT, today empower HRs to search for the optimal wellness program, saving time sifting through search engines to come across a match.

Furthermore, AI tools like Limeade and Virgin Pulse analyze an employee's health risks and preferences and provide personalized recommendations on the resources that will benefit them the most.

How to select a wellness program with the help of AI. Consider the following:

• Personalization
• Integration
• Adaptability

First, ensure the program offers personalized recommendations based on individual health data, such as activity, sleep, and nutrition. This provides a tailored experience.

Second, choose a program that integrates with existing health devices and apps for real-time data analysis. This provides more accurate insights.

Finally, select a program that continuously learns and adapts to employees' progress. As their health evolves, the AI should adjust recommendations accordingly.

3 Best Practices to Implement AI-Powered Employee Wellness

To make the most out of AI driven employee wellness, let me walk you through 5 proven and utilized best practices. These can maximize impact while ensuring security, relevance, and continuous improvement.

Here are some strategies to implement AI-powered wellness programs successfully:

1. Assess Employee Needs

Before launching any wellness program, it’s crucial to understand what your employees truly need. Two popular tools to do so are surveys and feedback forms. Besides, AI tools like Tableau can help analyze responses and patterns in real-time.

This way you get valuable employee data insights into aspects like what part of wellness initiatives are employees struggling with. With this information, you can tailor your wellness program to address the most pressing needs.

2. Select the Right AI Tools

Next up, it is always wise to assess which tools to utilize keeping in mind what fits best for your company and your employee’s needs. Given this context and depending upon the roles, responsibilities and size of a company, companies need to employee suitable AI tools.

Effy AI is a tool known as one among the best free AI tools for HR performance management to enhance team productivity and engagement. Further, take the case of IBM that has been at the forefront of integrating AI into HR and wellness solution.

With their AI-powered Watson platform, the company focuses heavily on secure data management and ensuring compliance with privacy laws.

3. Run a Pilot Program

A pilot program in any scenario, helps companies to understand metrics such as risk mitigation, identifying and addressing potential issues before a full-scale implementation. What essentially happens here is that pilot programs enable companies to test AI-Driven solutions with a smaller group to refine them in the long run.

For example, Salesforce’s wellness initiative, Salesforce Ohana Culture, focuses on a holistic approach to employee well-being. The company had piloted AI-driven wellness tools like Mindful Tech before the wellness initiative was rolled out. The result was that it was able to get an idea on how well employees shall receive the program.

Ethical Considerations in Using AI for Wellness Solutions

When it comes to AI in wellness, great health technology comes with great responsibility. Therefore, it is crucial to consider ethics from the start.

Privacy

AI must collect health data to be effective, which raises some serious privacy questions. Who's looking at this info, and how's it being used? Clear rules around privacy must be in place to keep employee data safe and ensure it's not misused or leaked.

Bias

AI is only as good as the data it's trained on. If the data has biases, the AI will too. Take ChatGPT, for example. It can sometimes show bias, like assuming someone's gender based on their job title. This happens because it's trained on text from people worldwide, with all the biases that exist in the real world.

Why Choose Vantage Fit for AI-Driven Employee Wellness?

Vantage Fit, essentially an AI-backed wellness platform, has successfully empowered countless organizations and employees to live a fit and healthy life. Vantage Fit leverages AI and Machine Learning to create more intelligent, personalized fitness tracking. Our key features include the following:

1. AI-powered Squat Tracker

The Squat Tracker uses body movement recognition to automatically count reps and analyze squat form with just your phone's camera.

2. AI in our Vehicle Detection system

This feature ensures fair play in fitness challenges by distinguishing between actual workouts and vehicle-assisted activity.

Conclusion

With AI at its core, Vantage Fit provides accurate, engaging, and motivating fitness experiences, redefining digital well-being. Furthermore, the app has a core mantra: gamification of challenges so that employees derive fun and adrenaline while taking care of their fitness and making pro-health behaviour. This results in healthy competition among your employees, ensuring employee engagement and team morale takes that much-needed bungee jump.

HR professionals, stay ahead of the curve by checking out our insightful blogs created by the experts at Vantage Fit.