LaaS

Today, employers have realised that employee wellness is not just about physical well-being, but also other elements that impact the health and well-functioning of individuals or employees. However, in pursuit of transforming employee wellness, a majority of organisations are trying to support employees by the old ways in the new environment. They are using traditional tools like well-being surveys, which often fail to bring out the best outcome in the modern agile way of working.

Having recognised the challenges and understanding the need in the employee wellbeing space, LaaS, a digital workplace solution provider, set out to help organisations by creating an employee-driven HR platform based on Leadership as a Service mindset. With the LaaS platform, individuals and teams can lead their well-being holistically by utilizing the data, insights and concrete AI based action and service proposals. “We transform the leadership model into a product with a mission to make working life more meaningful, sensible, and productive for everyone,” states says Johanna Pystynen, CEO at LaaS.

The company helps its customers gradually replace outdated methods and models with modern tools that ensure holistic employee wellbeing. Initially developed for an internal purpose, the company’s model leverages employee data to drive the creation of wellbeing initiatives that support individual personnel. Subsequently, when LaaS recognised the significant enhancement of wellbeing and operational efficiencies caused by its model, the company moved to commercialise its model to help other firms mitigate the issues in their wellbeing programs. “Modern-day workforces comprise employees hailing from a multitude of different academic and professional backgrounds, making the ‘one-shoe-fits-all’ approach to wellbeing obsolete. And therefore, our LaaS model supports people individually and assists them in getting the help they need to succeed in their organisation in the best way,” asserts Johanna.

The Leadership as a Service (LaaS) platform provides a platform to visualize, offer, and analyse services based on the needs of an employee. It has over 100 services in its arsenal, including internal support functions for HR departments and others, alongside more specialised offerings that are curated ‘by employees for employees.’According to Johanna, unlike conventional wellbeing operations where HR departments have to create a plan for employees across an organisation, LaaS analyses employee datasets to identify the services that will bring about the most impactful changes in their wellbeing and performance.

We transform the leadership model into a product with a mission to make working life more meaningful, sensible, and productive for everyone

Following this, the company evaluates which offerings work better for workforces based on their age group and time with the company. “With user feedback, we understand employee wellbeing on a deeper level, which drives better resource allocation and changes the paradigm of wellbeing across a company,” adds Johanna.

At the heart of the LaaS platform is its emphasis on continuous peer learning, which the company drives by gathering information on special skills that an employee might have and matching that with an employee who is looking to learn the skill to be better at their job. Whether users have technology skills or customer support skills, LaaS’ platform enables them to conceptualise their skillsets into services that their peers can leverage. This capability was a great boon for LaaS success through the pandemic as workforces across the globe were looking for support in transitioning their jobs from traditional office-going to remote working. The platform’s flexibility also played a vital role as the company quickly switched to the remote mode when the outbreak began in March 2020, helping thousands of users get the help they need in a timely manner. “Our platform helps clients enhance their organisational culture through sharing skillsets, helping employees understand how to conceptualise their competencies, and facilitating others to utilise them,” explains Johanna.

With such unmatched capabilities, LaaS has ignited several success stories since its inception in 2017. In one instance, the company helped a school procure training services that resolved one of their most prevalent challenges. Initially, the young teachers at the school were quite exhausted to attend conflict resolution meetings with parents where they had to express their grievances with a child’s behaviour. This challenge led to a significant decrease in employee wellbeing at the educational institution. This is when LaaS connected the school teachers with mentors at the daycare centre situated in the same building, who understood parent-teacher meetings as they were spending a lot of their time expressing their insights to parents. Finally, the daycare employees offered coaching to the school teachers on handling discussions with parents, helping them get better at their jobs and improving their overall wellbeing.

Moving forward, LaaS aims to expand the horizons of employee wellbeing by exploring additional areas such as leadership, business culture, and team performance trends, among others. By bringing this data together, the company wants to evaluate the correlations among them and recognise the hindrances to holistic employee wellbeing. “Our platform is perfectly poised to help businesses analyse their employee data, build correlations, and utilise the insights to eliminate the root causes stopping holistic employee wellbeing,” concludes Johanna.