The year 2020 will certainly be remembered for its challenges. The challenges were also felt at HeiaHeia, but as the sum of many factors, the year ended up being very positive for us. This special year was marked by the following highlights:
- Successful acquisition of the platform and business by Habito Health, into the hands of an experienced technology team and a new CEO
- Strong growth in demand, multiplying our corporate customer base
- Our customers’ success with HeiaHeia – we achieved the highest customer satisfaction in HeiaHeia’s history (NPS 64)
- New customers from 10+ countries, many with offices and staff in several regions.
- New large customers in both public and private sectors
- New partnerships with leading players in our industry
- Entering a new business area: public health – an extensive agreement with a leading ICT partner of the municipal sector spanning 4 million people, and the first city-wide implementation of our platform
- New co-workers
- Perhaps most importantly, a lot of improvements to the product. According to a customer: ”Over the last 6 months, the service has improved more than in many years.“
In particular, we are grateful that a significant part of the growth has been based on referrals by our customers and users – The HeiaHeia team thanks for your trust!
HeiaHeia became part of Habito Group
In the spring of 2020, the technology company Habito Health acquired the HeiaHeia platform and business, and immediately started developing the business, product and customer processes.
Habito Health provides motivating technology for evidence-based health promotion and prevention of disease at scale. The market of preventive healthcare is growing fast: in Germany, for example, the legislation has recently been updated so that health applications can be reimbursed from health insurance. Habito has several customers and strategic partnerships in multiple countries, especially Germany and the Nordics.
HeiaHeia & COVID-19
Shortly after the business acquisition, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a threat to both health and business in general. The immediate effect was the transition to remote working, both at HeiaHeia as well as at most of our customer organizations. The rapid and partly permanent change in working life has been reflected in a growing demand for HeiaHeia’s services. Working communities are looking for new ways to nurture team spirit outside of work as well. HeiaHeia has responded to this need.
“The shift to remote work as a result of the coronavirus has created new challenges for well-being at work, with less movement during working days and less normal face-to-face interaction. A sense of community is one of Hilti’s strengths, which we want to maintain even at special times. In addition to our daily team-specific Teams encounters, we wanted to bring something different, more informal, into everyday life.”
Hilti’s HR Director Tiina Hildén describes the situation in HeiaHeia blog
Strong business growth, hundreds of HeiaHeia challenges and new business areas
To build this next chapter in growth, Olli Iso-Mustajärvi took over as the CEO of HeiaHeia. Previously, Olli has been in charge of e.g. the platform business of Hintsa Performance in Finland. Olli has more than 10 years of experience in numerous large-scale deployments of employee wellbeing solutions, e.g. with insurance companies and large multinational corporations.
During 2020, several investments were made in growth and the results were seen almost immediately. Driven by the increased demand from employers, the number of companies using HeiaHeia has multiplied and we have updated our recruitment plans accordingly.
As a new area, we expanded our operations to the municipal sector and started a groundbreaking partnership with the city of Kemi. As part of its wellbeing and health promotion services, Kemi offers its citizens various wellbeing solutions based on the HeiaHeia platform. HeiaHeia has been well received in Kemi: more than 10% of the city’s residents are already benefiting from the service, and the service has achieved a solid return on investment already during its first year of operation. We will post a larger story about Kemi’s experiences on our blog soon – stay tuned!
Municipalities have a growing need to provide effective, accessible and cost-effective wellbeing and health services. HeiaHeia has been selected as the supplier of a digital wellbeing solution for Kuntien Tiera, Finland’s leading ICT partner for the municipal sector, with a footprint of 4 million people.
Change into a higher gear in product development
Thanks to the new owner and a growing business, it has been possible to invest more in HeiaHeia’s product development than in many years. For example, in 2020, we launched a completely renewed program library (with the themes body, mind and a better workday), tools to effectively support active breaks during workdays, self-assessment of one’s overall wellbeing with recommendations for actions based on the assessment, as well as tools for setting up new group challenges and targets.
HeiaHeia combines personalization and group support, and is an easy, logical service package for companies of virtually any size or industry. HeiaHeia is proven to motivate its users regardless of their starting level, and to promote team spirit in the work community at the same time. HeiaHeia also seamlessly complements the services of other key operators in the domain of employee wellbeing.
For example, the customers of Mehiläinen, a leading private and corporate health provider, can access a special Mehiläinen content package within their HeiaHeia platform. Programs made by experts are easily available to all personnel as part of HeiaHeia’s service.
What next?
Based on the steadily growing demand and the positive development in 2020, the future of HeiaHeia looks bright – we believe that the strong positive development will continue. We will continue investing in our product development, meaning a better service for all of its users and more value for our customers. In particular, we will focus on features for activating communities. These features can be used by HR professionals and leaders in customer organisations to promote and maintain the wellbeing of their personnel.
Remote working has come to stay
COVID 19 will likely (and hopefully) be over in the near future. However, it will leave a lasting imprint on the work culture in both a positive and a negative sense.
Saving time in commuting enables more efficient use of working time and increases free time. For example at HeiaHeia, our team will probably gather at the office 1-2 times a week in the future. For us, remote working has improved our efficiency, for example our sales team has reported being able to manage significantly larger amounts of customer contacts as time spent travelling has been minimal. These are all positive things.
On the other hand, the work community should work well together as a team for the company to succeed. In a remote work setting, getting to know co-workers and building a sense of community will be even more challenging, as teams will have less social time and interaction together. In this respect we are facing new challenges.
Also in this new world, HeiaHeia will serve work organizations by creating a virtual wellness community that helps co-workers to get to know each other and to build team spirit based on positive everyday healthy actions. At the same time, the wellbeing of individuals is also improving, which is essential for productivity and for preventing health problems.
