INNOVATEBIG AND

BY DAN CAFARO, WORLDATWORK

Virgin Pulse Lives and Breathes Well-Being

DREAM

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Motivations come in many shapes and sizes. Some are intrinsic and rooted in nature, such as the adrenaline surge a hiker gets from gazing at the breathtaking beauty and immensity of the Grand Canyon. Other motivations are extrinsic, such as receiving a large cash bonus from your employer after an extraordinary accomplishment. Still other motivations are symbolic. They may be physically small and monetarily worth peanuts, but they’re immeasurable in the difference they can make in an employee’s morale.

Challenge coins are a centuries-old American military tradition. They are meant to instill pride in service members, inspire devotion and reward excellence. When a leader presents a subordinate with a coin, it’s consid-ered a high honor and recognition for outstanding work and dedication.

David Osborne has been CEO at Virgin Pulse since June 2017. When he first took the reins of the world’s largest digital health and well-being provider, he rolled out a tried-and-true concept — the touchstone coin — to publicly recognize high-performing employees who go above and beyond the call of duty.

In its own unlikely way, the coin has begun to symbolize and drive a hardworking, fun-loving culture. To illustrate the coin’s growing legend: Each of Osborne’s team of eight executives always must have the coin on them. If an exec is caught without it by employees, say, at a public event, the oversight comes at a price: The exec is on the hook for a dinner bill or bar tab and they’re not allowed to expense it.

Free drinks and spot challenges aside, Osborne said he’s surprised by how much of a hit the coin has become with employees. “It’s just one of those things that’s become very coveted,” he said.

Wendy Werve, chief marketing officer at Virgin Pulse, said when Osborne first introduced the concept, people weren’t sure what to make of it. Employees now are fully on board.

“They literally love this coin,” Werve said. “It’s helped create just a really nice culture.”

The Virgin Pulse Touchstone CoinOne side of the Virgin Pulse touchstone coin has the company logo in the center, with the values engraved along the perimeter: One Team One Dream, We Deliver and Live It, Breathe It. The other side of the coin has Virgin Pulse’s key performance indicators (KPIs) — growth, retention, adoption, change lives and profit — and the virtues it seeks when hiring new members: hungry, humble and smart.

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Company VisionaryCEO David Osborne joined Virgin Pulse as the chief operating officer in 2016, following the company’s acquisitions of Global Corporate Challenge (GCC) and ShapeUp. Since becoming CEO, he has accelerated the company’s growth and expansion with several mergers and acquisitions: Preventure, RedBrick Health, SimplyWell, and, most recently, Blue Mesa Health and Yaro, all aimed at simplifying and improving health and well-being.

desk because, as Osborne said, “sitting is the new smoking.” They also have stationary bikes with laptop surfaces plus charging stations, ping-pong tables, yoga instructors, trainers, super-healthy snacks and an auditorium that triples as a town hall/learning center/basketball court.

“We try and drink our own Kool-Aid and stay as active and healthy as we can,” Osborne said.

While Osborne, a former NCAA Division 1 golfer, doesn’t shy away from physical challenges, he’s quick to point out that it’s not just about activity. Some employees prefer a sustainability challenge, a sleep challenge or a challenge on how many glasses of water they’re drinking a day.

“Everybody is on their own separate well-being journey,” he said.

Virgin Pulse’s primary mission must make filling open positions a whole lot easier for its recruiters. After all, many job hunters today deeply care about a company’s core purpose. And it’s not like Virgin Pulse is in the business of, say, educating oil companies on where they should drill next.

“A lot of people who join our company join for the reason of health and well-being,” Osborne said. “What we do is important. We’re trying to change the world and change lives for the better.”

The Virgin BrandWhen the founder of your company is Sir Richard Branson, a famous billionaire who is known for publicity stunts, commercial space travel (Virgin Galactic), and setting records in powerboat racing and hot-air ballooning, it’s safe to say that Virgin Pulse takes pride in its ability to dream big and innovate.

“We’re making the world a healthier and happier place, in addition to helping people navigate the complexity of the health-care industry,” Osborne said. “I often say that this is an industry that’s broken. It’s not fixable. So, our job is to innovate around it versus trying to fix it.”

In November 2017, Osborne and his team moved their global headquarters from Framingham, Mass., to Providence, R.I. Following two expansions in two years, they’ve grown from 65 employees to 350 people reporting to corporate HQ. Overall, the company has 1,580 employees worldwide, across 12 offices scattered throughout Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The Virgin Pulse mantra is everything health and well-being. To wit, the Providence office space has an indoor walking track on the top floor, and every employee’s desk is a standing or treadmill

About Virgin PulseVirgin Pulse is the world’s largest digital health, well-being and engagement company. Founded in 2004 as part of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, the company is focused on engaging users every day in building and sustaining healthy lifestyles and driving measurable outcomes for employees, employers and health plans and their members.

Virgin Pulse fuses high-tech with high-touch to deliver what Osborne’s marketing team calls “the industry’s only integrated

digital platform with benefits navigation, claims analysis and live coaching to support clients and members across the entire health, well-being and benefits lifecycle — from screening and assessment to activation, behavior change and the adoption of sustainable, healthy habits to condition management support and close gaps in care.”

Virgin Pulse supports 7.5 million members in 20 languages across more than 4,000 organizations in 190 countries.

We try and drink our own Kool-Aid and stay as active

and healthy as we can.”

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Homebase for HealthWe’ve all been there. A health issue appears out of nowhere and you’re suddenly in a pickle: Where do you go to find the care you need? How do you find an in-network doctor or a specialist? How do you know the amount of available funds in your health savings account (HSA)? What are the true costs of treatment and how much will your health-care plan cover?

With the recent launch of Virgin Pulse Navigate, Osborne said that employees and health plan members now have an easier way to access the right information, at the right time, to make the right decisions about their health. It’s a rather crucial societal need given that 60% of the compa-ny’s plan members have at least one chronic health condition, and the health-care ecosystem is so fragmented.

“Literacy of health and benefits is so low right now,” Osborne said. “Employees are not taking advantage of their health benefits … Getting them to understand their benefits, that is, fixing the literacy component, and providing them better access are absolutely key.”

The Virgin Pulse solution is building toward integrated Homebase for Health, where employees can do all things related to health and well-being — from tracking activities or creating better nutrition and sleep habits to accessing digital therapeutics like diabetes prevention programs, to launching specific solutions like meditation, mental resilience and financial wellness programs and health-care management, including provider search and cost transparency.

The secret sauce? Usage.Statistically speaking, from a social media

standpoint, business analysts largely measure the success of Facebook and LinkedIn by the percentage of people that return to those plat-forms every day. As a B2B company, Virgin Pulse is more than holding its own with about 55% of its users visiting the platform daily. That would make it No. 2 behind Facebook, which comes in at 66%, according to Osborne.

The secret sauce? Usage.”

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“Usage of our platform is oxygen,” Osborne said. “Big Bang change is not ideal. Small, incremental changes in your activities or routines turn into daily habits and that sort of personalization drives people back to the platform on an ongoing basis.”

Driving Positive ChangeLike many companies in the HR space, Virgin Pulse is trying to “meet employees where they are.” Once members have shared their individual goals and interests, AI-driven software analyzes the data and figures out the best matches of new content or programs to help end users meet their desired objectives.

The health and well-being industry is changing behaviors by driving people to regularly use plat-forms like Virgin Pulse. The data collection helps gamify the system so that employers can encourage year-round participation with extrinsic motivations,

The main idea is to encourage employees to do small things

every day to build healthy habits and lifestyles.”

such as points and incentives, HSA contributions or a discount on premiums.

The main idea is to encourage employees to do small things every day to build healthy habits and lifestyles.

“This is where the industry has changed,” Osborne said. “It used to be, ‘Hey, do your health assessment or do your biometric screening and get $500.’ Now it’s, ‘Jump on the Virgin Pulse platform, be part of the gamification of it over the course of a year, and we will incent you to some degree’.

“Extrinsic motivation coupled with intrinsic motivation drives people back to the plat-form,” he added.

And that daily usage, for Virgin Pulse, is oxygen. Coin or no coin. ###Dan Cafaro is the WorldatWork director of publications and editor-in-chief of Workspan and #evolve magazines. He can be reached at dan.cafaro@worldatwork.org.

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