Introduction
Saundra spent most of her career working for one of the largest and most respected financial services organizations in the world. This journey began as a teller soon after graduating from college and continued through one merger after another until she landed her dream job: managing 30,000 employees in 3,000 bank branches across the United States. However, after 35 years in financial services, Saundra left to pursue her current passion: helping organizations create a positive, healthy organization by creating a digital engagement platform that provides content and tools to help leaders at all levels engage with a geographically and culturally diverse workforce.
Innovation Story
After leaving the financial services industry, Saundra became very interested in the practice of mindfulness as a means of personal development. As her practice deepened, she began to wonder why these practices were not used in the workplace. Her “a-ha” moment came in 2013 when she had the opportunity to co-facilitate a mindful leadership program at ASU.
By working with bright, eager students, she began to see the challenges of introducing mindfulness into the workplace. Practices needed to be practical, brief, and able to be integrated into the normal course of the day without adding any more time to an already overburdened schedule.
Over the next couple of years, she had the opportunity to refine these practices by working with executives across the country.
While it was rewarding working with executives one-on-one, the program was not scalable and was limited to an executive level delivery. She realized that if her program was going to make a real difference, it needed to be available to everyone regardless of their role in an organization.
That’s when she and her husband, Jeff, began working with Tallwave, a local organization who works with startups and larger organizations to help them develop and implement digital solutions.
One of the first steps, before any design or development work began, was to conduct a market and competitive analysis. This analysis indicated that there was a large and growing market for a workplace-centered mindfulness program.
The competitive analysis also revealed that if an organization was currently offering a program, it was in-person and was delivered in only one or two locations, limiting the number of people who could participate.
Armed with both industry and consumer research, Saundra and Jeff set out to create a digital engagement platform that was accessible to everyone 24/7. Their design features included bite-sized content based on principles of mobile learning, utilization of gamification such as leaderboards, stickers, and badges to support behavioral change, and a robust administrative and communication portal to make it easy for organizations to manage and monitor use.
While the platform was designed to be used for many types of bite-sized content, they believed that mindfulness-based content would be the ideal choice to help organizations begin the journey of creating a positive and healthy culture.
That choice seems to be on target. They have found that most organizations are struggling with the same concerns – a stressed-out, time-starved, distracted, and unhealthy employee base. This translates to issues of low engagement, high job turnover, inability to recruit top talent, and the need to develop leaders at all levels. Organizations are also looking for innovative ways to engage all of their employees regardless of location or position.
Levelhead provides organizations with a flexible, accessible, and affordable means to address many of the challenges of the 21st-century workplace. Today, enlightened leaders and organizations understand that addressing the psychological and physical well-being of their employees is not a “nice to have” or an employee benefit, but may be the difference between thriving or possible extinction of their business.
They understand that addressing the whole person will lead the organization to improve performance, be more innovative, and build strong leaders at all levels. To do this, programs like Levelhead, need to be incorporated into the fabric of the organization. It works best when it is part of an overall strategy and is supported and endorsed from the top.
Because of that understanding, Levelhead works with organizations to develop a business plan and ongoing measures to assess progress. Levelhead is so much more than just an app and platform. They take the success of their clients seriously by helping them customize communications, deliver bite-sized educational materials, and provide ongoing consulting on a variety of topics.
After all, Levelhead was built by business people whose purpose is to help other business people achieve new heights by addressing the unique needs of their organization.
Why Phoenix?
Phoenix has a wide variety of resources for a new company like ours. Within Phoenix, there is a large community of people who are willing to provide feedback, direction, and introductions to people who can be of help. What sets Phoenix apart is the richness of resources and an environment of openness and sharing of expertise and resources not available anywhere else.
Advice & Best Practices
Clearly understand what problem you are solving and keep refining as you work with real customers and users. You are never done. There is always a better way to deliver on a client’s problem or need. Each step you take makes the next step even clearer. You will never know all the steps ahead. They are revealed one step at a time.
