LifeWorks builds new wellbeing apps inspired by workplace shift to Microsoft Teams

Aligning to improve lives

However you define wellbeing, most agree it requires a certain level of discipline, which includes both conscious actions and regular reinforcement. Any obstacles, such as time constraints and fragmented access, increase the complexity of your journey to improve and maintain personal wellbeing. Add to this COVID-19 shutdowns that have changed access to gyms, doctors, colleagues, friends, and family, and you can understand why frictionless access to health and wellbeing support is more important than ever.

So, what do you do if your business revolves around wellness? If you’re a global leader in wellbeing like LifeWorks, you make an app for that—first in Microsoft Teams and then later in the newly launched Microsoft Viva Connections—that links people to varied programs across mental, physical, social, and financial improvement.

“We see Microsoft being very much aligned to our values at LifeWorks. Paired with our wellbeing expertise, Microsoft can help us deliver accessible and effective digital mental health and wellbeing resources within the flow of work,” says Kaytek Przybylski, Chief Data and Technology Officer and Executive Vice President at LifeWorks. “We bring deep, global, and total wellbeing expertise, and Microsoft brings a global cloud-based technology ecosystem. As subject matter experts, the integration of our services will uniquely position us to create evergreen technology for good.”

Teams first

As might be expected of a company specializing in providing in-person and digital solutions, LifeWorks already had strong support for telecommuting, with 25 to 35 percent of staff working remotely at any given time. Overnight, however, COVID-19 drove the company to adopt a nearly 100 percent work-from-home model. The solution? Switch from Skype and other disparate tools to Microsoft Teams for its enterprise-class capabilities such as telephony and community features.

“It’s a very different challenge to drive connections when you no longer have the luxury of holding ‘lunch and learns’ or putting up posters and displaying images on TVs in the workplace,” notes Przybylski. But LifeWorks was able to use Teams for more than just bridging the gap—it created new opportunities. “Moving to Teams at LifeWorks was among the most successful change management exercises we can recall in recent years,” he adds.

Seeing the security, accessibility, and productivity benefits being reaped from its own Teams experience, the LifeWorks product group partnered with Microsoft to quickly enhance LifeWorks core functionality into a Teams app, making it available for employees and customers alike on AppSource. “We recognized in our own data that customers—participants in our various solutions—were also struggling to find digital resources,” says Bradley Miller, Senior Director of Product Management at LifeWorks. “We quickly saw that our employees were achieving greater productivity collaboration in Teams. This sparked an ‘aha’ moment: imagine the potential of putting our LifeWorks app in Teams.”

Traditionally, LifeWorks core customers have been HR buyers who manage health, safety, and wellbeing at an organization. The move to Teams has helped LifeWorks expand attention for its products through the Teams app store and Azure Marketplace, where customers might see LifeWorks through the IT lens that’s used to select and implement new features to support employees.

Within a month of launch, the LifeWorks Teams app already had 2,000 users, making it one of the fastest growing apps in Canada. LifeWorks also took advantage of the ISV Success program and its resources to help it the app be more scalable, responsive, and accessible. By working through the commercial marketplace, LifeWorks is able to reach and access customers while streamlining the procurement process.

Making connections

While developing its Teams app, LifeWorks became aware of another opportunity within the up-and-coming product Microsoft Viva—in particular, Viva Connections, which delivers content in Teams via a fully realized employee experience platform. Viva Connections proved “a great way to continue leveling up and offering more experiences and product capabilities in the ecosystem,” says Miller.

While the LifeWorks Teams app provides a sidebar for customers in Teams, LifeWorks functionality in Viva Connections is delivered in one spot as part of a hub for all the things you care about. Organizations that adopt Viva Connections can push updates for specific initiatives or events—for example, World Mental Health Day on October 10—and they're shared via Teams adaptive cards (text with pictures linking to resources) on any device.

The project kicked off in June 2021 and was made available just four months later. “With Viva Connections, we provide even more personalized and meaningful recommendations that can reduce the cognitive noise and strain that people are feeling,” says Miller. “Viva pulls out information from the existing LifeWorks Teams app to deliver information, support, and guidance—the nudges that we all need. We remove the noise to offer insights focused on you.“

Sharing is caring

LifeWorks offers a range of solutions—a personalized continuum of care for mental health and total wellbeing composed of integrated health solutions such as self-service wellness tools, clinical counseling, absence management, telemedicine, and others. Until recently, these offerings were sometimes fragmented and required different sign-ins and access methods.

Tapping into Microsoft’s extensive suite of security solutions provided LifeWorks with more business agility, stronger user experiences, and the protections needed for its quickly evolving digital reality—all while maintaining control over data, transparency with customers, and ongoing compliance with laws, regulations, and key international standards. “In some cases, people didn’t know how or where to access those solutions in the moment,” notes Przybylski. “We can now make intelligent recommendations from our other services to say, ‘Because you’re a part of this company, you have access to this service that can help you.’ In the past, we couldn’t do that because the different services didn’t share that information.”

The accelerated digital shift has led to a new approach of unifying entitlement and identity so that a user of multiple solutions can sign in once and receive a continuum of care. The company also recognizes new opportunities around machine learning and AI.

“Gone are the days where LifeWorks stands alone, is added on, or is yet another solution. It needs to be a modular plug-and-play option that can adapt to various markets or ecosystems,” says Przybylski. “With Microsoft, we deliver that.”

Find out more about LifeWorks on LinkedIn.