SAP SE and Ariana Huffington’s Thrive Won’t Rest Until Employees Do

“I launched The Huffington Post in 2005 and then two years later I collapsed from burnout, exhaustion, and sleep deprivation,” Ariana Huffington told attendees at the recent SAP conference in Orlando, Florida. 
 
It was in August of 2016 that she stepped down from her leadership position at The Huffington Post to found a start-up called Thrive, which focuses on health and wellness issues, particularly those related to sleep.
 
“I became more and more passionate about this issue,” she explained. “I looked around and I realized that while we claim to be data driven, both as companies and individuals, we are living our lives and leading our work places in ways that simply are not data driven. All the latest science proves unequivocally that when you prioritize your health and well-being you are more productive, you are more effective, and it has a direct impact on health care costs, retention recruitment, and attrition.”
 
In addition to starting Thrive, Huffington has written two books on the subject, Thrive, published in 2014, and The Sleep Revolution which was released last year.
 
“If you have healthier happier employees you’re going to see better results,” she added. “There’s no question that this is an inflection point and a lot of changes are happening, and I wanted to launch a company that would move beyond me simply writing and speaking about these things, to providing pathways for behavior change.”
 
As passionate as she was about The Huffington Post, which she called her third child, Huffington felt even more passionate about the principles behind Thrive. When you see her on talk and cable news shows these days, she’s much more likely to be talking about proper sleep habits than politics.
 
Huffington soon found that many people from the corporate world to athletes and entertainers were interested in what she had to say about health and wellness. In November of last year, SAP SE became a founding partner in Thrive. The move allowed SAP’s North American employees as well as the 45 million users of the firms SuccessFactors to gain access to Thrive content in order to improve their overall health, well-being, and productivity.
 
The SAP/Thrive partnership offers new resources and solutions to achieving lower stress and reducing burnout. SAP feels this drives greater job satisfaction, engagement, and productivity within the organization. The integration of content from Thrive SAP SuccessFactors solutions allows organizations to leverage complementary resources to create a balanced, supportive work environment, which in turn lead to positive business outcomes.
 
“The reason I’m so excited about the partnership with SAP,” Huffington said, “is because we have the ability to combine the amazing machine learning that exists at SAP with our own allowed behavior change. Bringing the two together means we can go upstream in the life of an employee and offer them pathways and micro-steps to change before the stress kickers become symptomatic.”
 
This will help greatly reduce or even prevent things such as hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, smoking depression, anxiety, alcohol abuse--- any of the problems that are an inevitable result of leaving unaddressed the stress triggers in an employee’s life according to Huffington. She also noted that 75 percent of health care costs are derived from preventable conditions.
 
“They are lifestyle related and stress related,” Huffington said, “so our goal with SAP is really ambitious. “It’s to really create pathways based on the information we have from SAP machine learning across multiple entry points in an employee’s life from hire to retire.”
 
Those are now linked to Thrive’s media platform so employees can share their stories as well as access the stories of people like Amazon CEO and Jeff Bezoz or The Golden State Warriors’ Andre Iguodala who talk about how they’re prioritizing their well-being.  
 
However, it’s more than just content creation. “The focus of this partnership is moving beyond integration,” Huffington stated. “It’s truly about behavior change, understanding, knowledge, and expertise.”
 
One initiative being rolled is the Five Pulse Survey. “If we’re going to understand what behaviors need to change to improve productivity, we need to understand what’s wrong,” Huffington said.
 
The Five Pulse survey will help develop a targeted pathway. “The first we are going to launch,” she continued, “is around unplug and recharge. It’s about all the devices people are glued to every day that they can’t put down.” Sleeping with a phone or other screen nearby, multiple studies have shown, can adversely affect one’s sleep.  
 
The program will also offer progress tracking and the ability to monitor behavior so the employee can gauge how they are doing. “It is our understanding, our expertise, and our pathways with the capabilities in the data side and the science side and the technology side from SAP,” Huffington added.
 
One of the challenges, though, is getting people to engage. People know they need to lead healthier lives, but getting them to take the necessary steps can be difficult. “That is at the heart of what we are doing,” Huffington said. “How do we increase engagement? You can offer people all best the policies and learnings on behavior change but if they don’t engage, it’s going to have no impact.”
 
The solution for Thrive is centered on making offers that are desirable. “Instead of simply presenting them with ‘eat your broccoli, it’s good for you,’ we are showing them that learning to disconnect from their devices and learning to reconnect with themselves is very important for their physical health, their mental health, and their productivity,” said Huffington. “So, we have Selena Gomez telling us why she goes on a regular digital detox.”
 
It’s about presenting the science but in a more appealing way. “We can show them the science about getting enough sleep, but we’re also going to show them Katy Perry, and we have this on my Instagram, showing how she goes to sleep with a little pillow I sent her that says ‘sleep your way to the top.’”
 
For the more business minded there is an article by Jeff Bezos in which he explains why getting eight hours of sleep is good for Amazon shareholders.  “The behavior change and micro-steps serve them based on SAP’s machine learning,” Huffington explained, “which shows us what this individual needs the most at this particular time in their lives.”
 
That is in turn, integrated with their interest in pop culture, or their interest in executives who are successful, or sport figures that Andre Iguodala. The latter is featured in a Thrive video that shows his stats and how they improved when he started getting more sleep and recharging during the day. “So, by integrating into their lives, we get amazing engagements and we see them staying on the program.”

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