How do you bust stress in the corporate world? Paradoxically, stress is often a result of poor lifestyle choices. That fitness and wellness can be embedded through the fun and indulgence of gamification was realised by young IT entrepreneur, Avinash Saurabh, CEO and Founder of Zoojoo.be, who has developed an online platform where an employee can get motivated to play the game of health and win over bad lifestyle. Corporate giants like GE, Mindtree, Crisil, Mphasis, Hewlett Packard and other 5,000 plus employee companies are using his gamification modules to leverage the health of their employees. Corporate Citizen caught up with this young entrepreneur who believes health is wealth in the true sense of the word and one that would boost the economics of your company too!
With three lakh active users of Zoojoo.be, its founder and CEO, Avinash Saurabh is bringing about a revolution in organisational wellness, by making organisations rethink employee wellness as not just a personal benefit but as a growth strategy. Zoojoo.be is a cloud based social wellness platform which uses gamification to unite the workforce to form healthier habits which in turn will up their performance. An employee is directed to form a good habit of, let’s say walking, or any other exercise which is then tabulated by him online and like in a fun game, makes him compete with the performance of such ‘good habits’ by his colleagues. Steadily, it becomes a lifestyle, and enhances not only his personal health but augments his professional performance as well.
After graduating from college, Avinash joined Bosch Engineering Solutions Ltd as Embedded System Designer and thereafter worked as a senior engineer for Continental. After a break for a year, he created Zoojoo.be that was incubated in the prestigious IIM-Bangalore Incubation Programme. His theme of creating high performing, healthier and engaged workforce touched the pulse of several leading companies, who are his clients.
Avinash Saurabh: It is an organisational wellness company, which makes organisations rethink employee wellness as not just a benefit but a growth strategy. It is a cloud based social wellness platform, which uses gamification to unite the workforce to form healthier habits. The platform leverages on the tremendous power of the social network at the workplace to encourage and motivate employees to cultivate healthy habits. Zoojoo.be is a tool that gives a scientific way, through algorithms, to reach a goal or instil a good habit because social motivation has only a momentary effect on us. With users having a 120% login rate (as good as Facebook) who engage collaboratively by forming teams of average size of seven, we have delivered organisational engagement of over 70% for our customers which is leaps and bounds ahead of 4-6% engagement of traditional wellness solutions. Powerful game mechanisms convert the healthy habit formation journey into a fun game played with friends at work.
I actually did not find happiness in the work I was doing at Bosch and Continental. So, sometime in 2007-2008, I ended up asking myself two questions. One, what is the purpose of education —which to a large extent, is to get a job. The second question was, what is its worth? So, I decided to quit. When I quit, I had no idea what I wanted to do, I spent six to seven months blogging, with the intent of engaging with other entrepreneurs and CEOs, trying to get a sense of what they were doing. The idea of the conversation was to get a sense of how to do what I wanted to do. That is how I started—slowly this idea of doing something related to the health of corporate employees developed simultaneously, and then came a time where I said, it is better to start doing and stop interviewing.
Our mission is very clear—‘to measurably improve happiness in the world’. That is what we want to pursue. The technology or any other aspects are just enablers and at the end of the day, all these things need to enable a larger sense of mission or purpose and that sense of mission or purpose is to measurably increase happiness in the world. That is what drives us.
We are a behavioural science company. We are trying to synthesise the research in the area of human behaviour and change and translate that into technology. Can you think of a system, which was more efficient ten years ago? We can’t —everything evolves and over a period of time keeps on becoming more efficient. However, when it comes to habit formation or behaviour change—people used to rely on motivation and guilt or a carrot and stick policy, but these traditional mechanisms of behaviour change, motivation and guilt don’t work all the time. Within academics, a lot of research has been done in identifying models in behaviour change and how people react in various circumstances and how you can facilitate, or amplify their ability to change a behaviour. What we are doing is, we are taking that research, synthesising that and building technology which then can be consumed by people so that they can use it to bring about behaviour changes or habit formation, in the areas that they want. At this point of time, we are focusing on healthier habits to start with, because that is the central thread of everyone’s life. Everyone wants to be healthy. Let us focus on this behaviour change technology towards that and gradually we will keep on expanding.
"An employee is directed to form a good habit of, let’s say walking, or any other exercise which is then tabulated by him online and like in a fun game, makes him compete with the performance of such ‘good habits’ by his colleagues. Steadily, it becomes a lifestyle, and enhances not only his personal health but augments his professional performance as well”
There are multiple aspects to the technology that we are building—gamification is one part of it. The central idea of what we are trying to do is through habit formation and understanding the science behind it, so we put the layer of gamification on top of it. Gamification is the technology that is used to build it, or a wrapper that you put around it. When you buy a gift, you will wrap it up with nice beautiful things and people will want to see it and get excited about it. If you give it in a boring form of technology to people, they will not engage. You need to wrap it properly. So, gamification is just a gift wrapper on the technology.
Our platform is used by 50 organisations, globally. We don’t just sell in India, but worldwide. Our clients include Mindtree, HP, Crisil, ITC, Sapinet, Siemens and so on. We generally sell to companies which have more than 5000 employees. So, close to three lakh employees are using our platform.
The answer lies in the process maturity of the organisation. For a smaller company of let’s say 300 employees, they are still growing; HR processes are not set; they are not benchmarking against the industry, and so the benefits of these tend to be driven by the leadership. And that is the reason why we deliberately sell to 5000 plus employees because such companies are big enough to set a bar saying that we will have a budget on something like this for the employees. Also, as a startup, I don’t have the bandwidth to convince HRs of small companies. I would rather go to people who are already convinced and show them that this is the better way of doing it. The answer is split—with the larger audience there is some maturity, they want to do it, and they want budgets allocated for it. For smaller organisations, I think it is still leadership driven.
"Gamification is the technology that is used to build it, or a wrapper that you put around it. When you buy a gift, you will wrap it up with nice beautiful things and people will want to see it and get excited about it. If you give it in a boring form of technology to people, they will not engage. You need to wrap it properly. So, gamification is just a gift wrapper on the technology”
Because we are a behavioural science company, it is important to look at data, which is replicable as well as validated. We are engaged in multiple research at this point of time. We have completed one study, which we did with the Society for Human Research Management (SHRM) which was released at their conference last year. It highlighted the impact on certain kinds of behaviour change, such as coping better with stress levels, increased job satisfaction and commitment towards the organisation. We are doing another study with Georgia State University, which is getting published in peer review journals which looks at the impact of certain kinds of behaviour changes on employee’ creativity. To a large extent what we are talking is new, and therefore it is important for us to start putting data out. It is important to focus on research, data, and draw conclusions that make sense and are meaningful for organisations. We have an MoU with the IIM-Bangalore behaviour lab to work with researchers there and they work with us.
We engage with HR teams very extensively to constantly refer our programme. In fact, we are very proud of what we think is a record, that till date any company that has on-boarded our platform has not left us. Any company which has completed the first year of subscription has now signed a multi-year contract; the reason for this is we engage very extensively and collaboratively with the HR team—constantly listening to them, trying to understand what needs to be done in order to facilitate engagement in their organisation.
The concept of habit is very relevant within the educational institute, because there is a lot of focus on discipline, focus on having the right set of habits that can help you succeed. Our definition of well-being is very expansive; we just don’t limit to healthy living and fitter living. It extends to mindfulness, it extends to relationship, to productivity, to time management and so on. All these things contribute to who you are. So I am pretty sure that a lot of this is relevant within the context of an institution, such as a school or college. We would like to explore the opportunity, but given the size we are, how young we are, it is important to focus on one market, establish ourselves and then subsequently grow from there.
The central point is that beyond engagement, what gamification does is that it starts generating data points for you which otherwise you would never have. When someone engages on our platform, he or she picks up a challenge, invites friends, engages with them, competes on the data board and posts stuff.
We are also collecting data, which helps in prediction. To give you an example, a study at Stanford showed that you can predict peoples’ level of intelligence by just the posts they like. There is no causality in this, by the way, only co-relation. We say that engagement by itself doesn’t lead to any impact unless and until you define engagement for what. So as an organisation, you have to articulate what impact you want to see, what is that core change that you want to see. It is very difficult for me as a provider to know what the things you want measured. But once you are able to do that, you can design programmes and facilitate those kind of outcomes.
I will give two examples of what we did. One is a recent study, which we just completed along with SHRM, we released at a conference, which talked about the impact of certain kinds of behaviour change or stress levels of people and the subsequent impact on reduction of those stress levels or their commitment towards the organisation and their increased job satisfaction. They were very specific about the point that stress was a big concern for them. They asked us, can you design programmes that are facilitating people to bring out their stress levels and help them form stress alleviating habits, and subsequently can you measure multiple outcomes based on that.
Another example is the case of HP Philippines, where they came to us with the problem saying that they would like to bring down their insurance levels. Year on year the risk of hypertension was increasing. They wanted us to design a programme that addresses the hypertension issue for them as an organisation. We said we can’t. So, while the outcome is clear, it is also important that you design the engagements so that it leads to that outcome. That is what gamification facilitates, and in our case, we had that framework where we said, instead of focusing on hypertension, we will focus on other factors that are clinically linked with the reduction of risk of hypertension. And we promote those habits. People may not be interested in the risk of hypertension but they might be interested in going out for a walk, they might be interested in doing five-minute breathing exercises. So, for this Philippines company, we involved a local hospital to identify such habits which are clinically linked with the risk of hypertension. We created, engagement campaigns around that. People used the platform to form those habits. The programme is still not complete but the point I am trying to make here is the articulation of the impact that they wanted to make as an organisation was very clear and the moment the articulation is clear you design the engagement towards that.
An unhealthy workforce with bad lifestyle and low motivation is leading to increased stress levels among employees, necessitating higher investment on health and insurance. You need tremendous willpower to motivate yourself to stay healthy and fit. Young IT entrepreneur Avinash Saurabh formed Zoojoo.be, along with friends Anandraj K.S. and Moovendan, to solve this problem and engage employees to adopt healthy habits and stick to them. The company was incubated at the N. S. Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) at IIM-Bangalore.
Zoojoo.be is a cloud-based workplace wellness platform that uses gamification to help people form healthy habits. The habits could be related to health and fitness or even anger management! Habits are set up as challenges and played like games between colleagues and co-workers. These could be as simple as drinking x glasses of water a day, or using the stairs instead of the elevator for a week. Users earn points for completing the challenges. They can compete with their teammates, earn virtual badges and share it with everyone on their social network. At a time when stress and high workload at office are driving employees to make poor lifestyle choices and compromise on their wellbeing, the onus has shifted on companies to keep their workforce healthy. The usual methods of calling doctors and dieticians, creating awareness campaigns etc., do not work because the problem is no longer about the lack of access to resources or awareness. The real problem is lack of motivation. And that is where Zoojoo.be's platform makes a difference. It uses peer-to-peer motivation and draws upon transformational HR methods like gamification, social collaboration and analytics to unite the workforce and drive wellness outcomes.
It is a method that takes learnings from games and applies it to non-game scenarios to drive the desired behaviours. Gamification has been successfully applied in diverse areas like sales and marketing to electricity and water conservation. The power of gamification lies in its ability to leverage on our intrinsic motivators – play, challenge, win! It is this power that Avinash Saurabh, CEO of Zoojoo.be decided to leverage in making health and wellness goals fun and fail-safe to achieve, for its users. Ramakrishna N.K., CEO of Range De, says that before his company started using Zoojoo.be’s platform he never thought wellness could be so much fun. “Truly innovative and engaging platform. It has positively impacted the energy levels at my organisation,” says Ramakrishna.
Getting incubated at the N. S. Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) at IIM-Bangalore has helped Zoojoo.be improve its visibility and credibility in the ecosystem and stay focused on their core strengths. Zoojoo.be was facing tough times typical of young startups when they applied for incubation at NSRCEL and got selected. Sanjay Anandram, member of NSRCEL incubation screening committee, says, “It was the team’s passion that clinched Zoojoo.be the incubation berth. The team is focused on delivering value to corporate clients and make it work for them.”
The name, says Saurabh, was inspired from Rajinikanth’s famous dialogue, ‘Yena, raskalla, jujube.’ Zoojoo.be is a variant of the original word ‘jujube’ whose colloquial meaning is ‘it’s easy’. Rajnikanth says this dialogue to indicate how easy it was for him to defeat the villain. We wanted our users to feel the same and easily overcome wellness challenges.”
Shruti and Avinash Saurabh, both engineers, are very much a part of the IT city of Bengaluru. Avinash, co-founder of startup Zoojoo.be, and Shruti, a former senior technical engineer with KPIT who has taken a sabbatical to write a book, speak to Corporate Citizen about what makes them click; how their generation sees the institution of marriage, and how marital relationships today depend more on a one-to-one connection with the spouse than with the entire family
Shruti: This happened in 2012. It was about two years since I joined my first job and was walking up to meet a friend. I usually walk a lot in the city – that’s the way I think and clear my head. He had alighted out of an auto rickshaw with Rs.100 in his hand, and stopped me to ask for change. I had some change and I gave it to him. Then both of us began walking together. We got talking and I found him interesting. He must have thought so too. He gave me his card. I kept the card in my bag. The next day, I was having a bad day or slow day at work, and so I decided to message him. I messaged him for a date, but I thought I was just meeting an interesting person. I had never met anyone before who had a serious startup and was branching out on his own. The first date went on for hours. We had dinner together.
Avinash: I took an auto but it ran out of gas and stopped right in the middle of the Silk Board signal, a big and famous signal in Bengaluru. It takes you a minimum of 15-20 minutes to cross that signal; it is always busy. The fare was Rs.50. I had Rs.100, but he had no change. There were no shops nearby either, to get change from. This was around 6:30 pm, so it was already dark. I saw this girl walking; I asked if she had any change. She had only Rs.60. I gave Rs.50 to the auto guy and I said, let’s find change for Rs.100 towards the signal. We did end up talking, but got no change. We liked something about each other. She was well read, she talked stuff which I respected and I hoped she found something similar in me. When we reached the signal we both had to part to go to our respective destinations, and I said, ‘The 40 bucks that you have to pay me I will not take in cash. You can buy me a coffee someday,’ and I gave her my card. But the mistake I did was I hadn’t taken her number. I was praying that she messaged me back, and she did. That’s how we met. Since I had just begun my startup, I had spent my savings and I had no money left. However, on the day that I had met her, I was feeling a little rich so I had taken an auto instead of a bus.
Shruti: At that time, I hadn’t met people who had strong opinions. I was on probation and the people I met with were very young who didn’t have opinions; who didn’t know the city that well. Most of the people KPIT hired were from smaller towns. You feel out of place in the city, and I just saw somebody who was completely at home in the city, who knew his way around and he had a goal, a big goal and that attracted me to him. He was not from here, and yet he belonged.
Avinash: We started spending time together in the evenings. What worked was that each of us were very independent people. She wanted to pursue what she is passionate about, that is something I really value. Being with someone who has an independent identity helped the relationship and became the foundation on which we built those independent identities. That was what I found in our relationship—although we both found anchors in each other, we are independent identities and we are happy pursuing that.
Shruti: He was from a different caste, from Patna, Bihar-it took quite some convincing. They had to meet his parents a couple of times to be okay with the whole idea.
Shruti: We are fundamentally similar and we respect each other’s right to be involved together, and that makes things easy. Criticism gets resolved in a very supportive and loving environment. It has been a process of discovery for us. The first few days of our relationship were difficult, though not in a fundamental kind of way. You had to figure out the vagaries of the other person. Past that, it has been quite simple. We ask the question as to whether we want to support each other in what we are doing. The answer is always yes.
Avinash: A marriage, a generation or two ago had a social component about it. You got married into a family. It was not just about the boy, it was about the parents and others who lived in that family. But where people are in nuclear families, there is an intellectual component. It is not just a social marriage; it is marriage of intellect as well, because you have two people who are living together without any external support. It is important that there is some foundation that you can build on, an alignment more than anything else, more than looks and all. It is about that intellectual compatibility, common ground on which you can build on. That component can be different for different people. In our case, what really keeps us together is that we both want to pursue independent goals. Because we want to achieve that, we realise the importance of support, and we are happy to extend that to each other. If I look at my friends who recently got married, I see the same trend. It is no longer about family and other issues that used to be there. There is this single connect at an intellectual level—people understand this is something that is important, and sorted out between the two of us. We are on the same plane.
"It is not just a social marriage; it is marriage of intellect as well, because you have two people who are living together without any external support. It is important that there is some foundation that you can build on, an alignment more than anything else, more than looks and all. It is about that intellectual compatibility, common ground on which you can build on”
—Avinash
Shruti: I have friends who got married and were separated within two to three years. Like Avinash mentioned, you need some common core between two persons or else the way you grow will be too disturbing and too different for the other person. Most of my friends who are separated had arranged marriages, and it makes me wonder why they didn’t learn about the other’s thinking and the way the other one lived before they committed to each other. But the fact that they can break the relationship now unlike earlier when people didn’t have freedom to go to the court is a good thing. Now, they can voice this fear that they might not be right for each other. Just the fact that young people have this option is I think, fair.
Avinash: I agree. One obvious access to option like that is because you are no longer living with your family, and there is no longer that attached stigma, so even if you separate, you do not have people around you to comment. The attached stigma having gone, people are more open to expressing themselves, howsoever it maybe.
Shruti: These are growing pains in the sense that, in the west, there are teenagers trying out relationships. No one believes they will last. They learn a lot about the person they want to be with, and of themselves, and that gives them a low stake situation. We as a society do not welcome such arrangements. So people do not get to know about themselves.
Avinash: About 20-25% marriages don’t succeed. Many girls don’t want to get married…
Shruti: I agree. Before I met him, my parents were making me meet eligible bachelors from our community but I didn’t want to. It made me realise that the men in my community hadn’t evolved the way I would like to see in a mate or share my life with. Women have more to lose in a traditional marriage because they have to take on a bunch of roles, they have to dilute their creative expressions, but many women do not subscribe to that idea anymore.
”Most of my friends who are separated had arranged marriages, and it makes me wonder why they didn’t learn about the other’s thinking and the way the other one lived before they committed to each other. But the fact that they can break the relationship now unlike earlier when people didn’t have freedom to go to the court is a good thing”
—Shruti
Shruti: My goal is to write good Indian fiction. I did my electronics engineering from a local college in Gulbarga and I got a job in KPIT right after college. I worked there for six years. I never considered the idea of writing until last year. I got disillusioned, though it was a good job, I was doing well as a senior technical engineer. But I wanted to do something I couldn’t do in that job. We sat one day and thought, why not quit and learn the craft of writing? So I quit in May 2016.
Avinash: To be honest, when we met, I had just begun this startup. I had already spent all my savings. I used to borrow from my dad on a monthly basis for my expenses. Then Shruti came into my life and after initial dating she supported me for a while. I starting cutting down on the money I was taking from my dad and started taking from her. We grew with that level of comfort. For the first year and half, I didn’t make more than Rs.10,000 per month, the remaining I took from her. She helped me at a time when I needed it, if she hadn’t, it would have been difficult for me. When the time is right for her, I will do whatever it takes. Around the time when we were contemplating about her quitting and starting to write, we had already raised the first round of investment, I was kind of rich. So we said, this is the time, we can do it, so why not.
Avinash: We got into a relationship with the expectation that chores like cooking and stuff need not be done by your spouse. It is always better to pay someone rather than spend an hour and a half on a daily basis. That time is spent better either sitting together on the terrace or reading books. We had that understanding right from the start.
Shruti: We value certain things and make sure that they are addressed. Cooking was never one of them. We are not foodies, but if we occasionally get cravings, we satisfy ourselves by ordering food. That seems to be working.
Shruti: The cleaning that is required to be done in the house is very limited, we have a maid who comes in and cleans. Since I work from home I can take breaks and finish the stuff.
Avinash: What we value is time spent with each other. We are methodical about the time we spend while we work and the time we get to spend with each other. Whenever there is a question of spending money, which translates into giving us more time, we are more than happy to make that transaction. Luckily, we have the means to do that.
Avinash: I am there on Facebook and LinkedIn but what I very consciously do is spend time on ways, which yield the maximum result. If you look at consumer technology like Facebook or LinkedIn, there are thousands of researchers, figuring out ways for you to spend two more minutes on their platform. They are trying to extract whatever time they can extract from you. I don’t want to give that time; I would use it at a time when I want to use it. For example, my phone doesn’t have notifications, it doesn’t buzz, and I use it when I want to read a message, not when someone sends a message. Similarly, I look at email as someone else’s agenda for my time.
The other aspect of it is much more fundamental and much more distressing—how technology is engaging your brain for shallow work. Today, if we have five minutes, we open WhatsApp, Facebook and things like that. Our brain is being trained to look for quick distractions. Whenever you are doing hard intellectual investment, the moment it gets hard you will open a tab and go to Facebook. We are constantly training our brain to seek novelty. The moment you have to work hard, you automatically try to seek novelty.
"The other aspect of social media is much more fundamental and much more distressing—how technology is engaging your brain for shallow work. Today, if we have five minutes, we open WhatsApp, Facebook and things like that”
—Avinash
Avinash: Hard work is very difficult. You have to focus on something that is intellectually challenging. It is very important that we are methodical about that, so we question whether consumer technologies like Facebook, LinkedIn are appropriate. It is progress in the sense that it connects people, but how frequent is right? Is it every hour or when someone sends you a notification? Or do you need a notification to get connected? I don’t think so. We are sceptical about technology in that way, but we must make conscious choices around that.
Shruti: We are in a privileged position that we can ignore technology. We have someone to go to when the society is not with us. I have seen many single friends who use technology to get them to meet new people. And that is an important thing-to find someone, or not just one person, but friends. That is one legitimate claim these technologies make—that we are getting the world closer, but I am sure they are not encouraging any sort of intellectual connection between people. I don’t think discussions are of the deeper kind. We have online political discussions, but our politics is not getting better because of that. I don’t think we are getting to understand each other better because of technology—we might actually be losing ways to talk to people who disagree with us. As Avinash pointed out, they are capitalist products-in the end their job is to get us to use them—they are addictive.
Avinash: For me, it is the means to pursue what you want to do in life. The moment you go beyond that, then there is no limit for your wants. I am not saying I don’t want to live our lives in a comfortable way, but we want to be very clear as to what that means.
Shruti: There is a study of the reverse U curve, the kind of pleasure you get from having an excess of anything drops after a while, climbs after a while, then there is a plateau and then it drops after a while. The same applies to money. Having beautiful things around you is important. It doesn’t mean that you need them in excess.
Avinash: The way I look at life probably defines what I have been trying to do. It is the pursuit of some meaningful goal. Set a high goal and pursue that and milestones will come; never mind the intermittent failures or achievements. Whatever comes is because of the pursuit.
Shruti: I used to define life as something very curious and trying to understand the world, and that it doesn’t set a mandate for you or actionable things for you. He is the one who showed me how I can think of it as a goal towards something.
By Vinita Deshmukh
