Well-Being Analytics Unleashed: MindFi’s Journey to Redefine Workplace Wellness

In this episode, Bjorn Lee, founder of MindFi, discusses their $2 million seed funding and how it fuels AI-driven product development for holistic well-being analytics. The conversation delves into MindFi’s market expansion plans in the Asia Pacific, emphasizing localized approaches. Addressing HR challenges, MindFi aims to combat talent retention issues by aligning personal and organizational values. Bjorn also sheds light on why organizations hesitate to invest in mental health and the trends driving its workplace adoption. The discussion concludes with insights on encouraging HR teams to be data-driven and tech-savvy in the evolving digital landscape.

Discussion Topics: Well-Being Analytics Unleashed

• Introducing, Bjorn Lee, founder and CEO of MindFi
• $2 Million Seed Funding Round
• Market Expansion Plans
• Business and Talent Challenges
• Hesitation in Investing in Employee Health
• Trends Driving Adoption of Mental Wellness
• Assisting HR Teams for Leadership Buy-In
• Encouraging HR Teams to be Data-Driven
• Advice for Enterprises Starting Digital HR Journey

Transcript: Well-Being Analytics Unleashed

Sriram Iyer: Hrtech’s Talks focuses on engaging with HR and HR Tech subject matter experts to unearth trends and insights in the realm of HR technology. In this edition, we talk to Bjorn Lee, founder and CEO, MindFi. Bjorn is a serial entrepreneur and technology executive with experience in Asia and Silicon Valley. His mission for MindFi is to empower everyone to proactively manage all aspects of their well-being, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and social. Welcome to the show Bjorn Lee.

Sriram Iyer: Can you share more information about the 2 million seed funding round? In what areas is this investment being utilized?

Bjorn Lee: Well, they are mostly spent on product development and ecosystem development, product development specifically. We are investing deeply in AI in order to actually analyze the physical and mental health data that we are collecting from our users. And then spin it up into analytics for employers to make better HR decisions, right? So that’s really investing a lot in engineering and product on our research partnerships as well. 

The second is really ecosystem development. Unlike traditional EAP providers, which really just provide therapists for one-on-one booking, we actually spend a lot of time building communities among the therapists and coaches across Asia as well.

Outside of a one on one booking session, this is a lot of value that is actually lost to the community and society at large. We are working with them to co create content, and testing new features with them as well. And this is where we are spending most of the funding.

Sriram Iyer: What Is MindFi’s plan for market expansion?

Bjorn Lee: We are focused on the Asia Pacific region. And in terms of the Asia Pacific region, we are focused on Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia. Despite the headquarters being in each of these three different markets, they actually have their workforces spread out across 16 different locations.

What we do is that we make sure that our providers and our programs are localized to each of these 16 different markets. And we want to really ace it first because the Asia Pacific region is very unique. Unlike most of the American or Western players in mental health, you cannot have a copy and paste approach from the West over to Asia.

You have mostly majority countries and markets. You have different markets like East Asia and Korea and Japan. They need a more localized approach, right? We don’t just do translation. We just want to make sure that we develop the content and actually that’s something that requires time, not just money in order to innovate. And that’s the market that we actually want to emphasize on.

Sriram Iyer: Fantastic, So when clients ask us, we want to expand in Southeast Asia, we tell them it’s not just one region, but it’s actually 10 different countries. So a lot more effort needs to go into customizing for each of these 10 countries.

Bjorn Lee: Exactly. I always like to talk with my investors as well, or even some of my curious clients. They ask me, “What’s your business strategy? And I tell them, let’s look at Uber versus Grab. Uber lost in this region, whereas Grab – I remember going to Bali and the approach that the Grab team actually did in the Indonesian market, specifically Bali, was around how they dealt with taxi networks.

When I traveled to Vietnam, it sounded like a long time ago because we haven’t been traveling for a while. I understood how the Grab marketing for drivers was actually very different. The value proposition was different in terms of payment, in terms of building an ecosystem and communicating to the drivers, versus how they do it in Singapore and Malaysia. That, I think, is the secret sauce. You cannot approach, adopt a one size fits approach. We’ve got to understand the region and how to build a better product and solution around it.

Sriram Iyer: What business and talent challenges are MindFi’s clients facing?

Bjorn Lee: I like to answer that question with the double A. One is apathy and the other one is alignment. The key business challenge right now with employers is that their workforces have been working so hard, pulling such long shifts at home. Suddenly they tell them to go back to the office. And that’s where the misalignment happens. Between their own personal values and their organizational values.

They ask themselves, does this company care enough for me to stay here long term? It is a talent retention issue. When your best people do well and perform well, and they are asked to work more, you run the risk of burnout. You run the risk of that spreading like a contagion, right?

It is also the contagion of disillusionment, of apathy. I’m working so hard and then I have to work even harder. And then I go to even more long hours. And then there are some people who don’t work hard and then I have to carry the company or the team on my own.

It’s a talent retention issue for sure, right? The talent retention issue is also one of the reasons why we hear about great resignation, right? Different reports in Asia talk about how the numbers could be as high as 25%, right? And anecdotally, I was at a CEO dinner just two weeks ago in Shangri La around the table.

We just had five of us, right? But we did a quick poll around the 50 people in that ballroom. And like turnover is an issue. Even if they don’t send me that resignation letter one on one during one on ones, you’re hearing people, who just run out of topics to talk about. You wonder what they are thinking, right?

That misalignment must be addressed. I think that the business retention issue is key because if you don’t actually hold on to talent, you then begin to have a business hiring problem. And then we run into a high hiring cost and we become a very costly affair. For all employees.

Sriram Iyer: Why do organizations hesitate to invest in employee health and wellness?

Bjorn Lee:  is a natural skepticism to something new. So overly featured in the media and being bandied around as a panacea, a solution that will cure all the ills in the workplace. So I think it’s important for companies to walk in to adopt mental health solutions.

There’s  a lot of knee jerk employers. We just do what we call checklist buying. Let me get an EAP, check off the box. We’ve got an EAP, right? If employees ask me, do you have a mental health program? Run a few lunchtime talks as well. That tends to be the impulsive reaction but the best employers, our best clients, are those who technically spend more time doing research, evaluating the different providers and understanding the differences. This is why we spend a lot of time articulating our differentiation, which is also mentioned in our funding news. We focus on cultural competence because Asia requires a solution that’s culturally relevant, not one size fits all.

Second thing as well is that mental health is very hard to quantify the ROI. There are a bunch of research articles that they have to learn and read out of Harvard and so on and so forth. A lot of mental health players like ourselves are working hard on having research partnerships.

We’re working hard on shrinking decades of organizational psychology research into bite sized snippets for HR leaders to digest. You are a content provider and creator as well. You know the difficulty that you may take as well to actually get there. And so that’s very important as well, quantifying the ROI.

Third, and last but not least, is regarding the stigma. Employers may wish to promote certain programs. You will rarely hear employees talk about their strong need for mental health as well, right? When typically we see the younger workforces, the younger millennials actually share more openly about how their mental health suffered during this situation.

Whereas the older the millennial, myself and folks older than me as well, they might be more hesitant, right? I’m 40 this year, so I can identify with the conversations on both ends and the hesitance due to the stigma that is prevalent in the workplace.

Sriram Iyer: What market trends are likely to accelerate the adoption of mental wellness in the workplace?

Bjorn Lee: There are two things. One is executive support, and the second is data science or data savviness, to be more accurate. Executive support goes a very long way. We need leaders. who believe in it. They may not be the final decision maker, but if they are supportive, it goes a long way in providing their workforces the moral encouragement and inspiration to be vulnerable.

And it’s also one of the bigger trends in leadership as well. You talk about compassionate leadership, right? MBA schools all around are teaching about, how most, of the best leaders these days are authentic. Piyush Gupta of DBS, the LinkedIn founders and so on, more of them are coming out.

We need more of them to come out to share about their own personal mental health struggles because being a leader is tough. You go through a roller coaster, right? So having executive support is important because it helps to provide enough fuel for HR to actually promote the programs and initiatives otherwise you’ll sound really hollow when you have a leader who actually doesn’t open up and doesn’t endorse the program. 

The second is actually data science. I don’t think you’ve actually gone through a single interview or spoken to a leader who says that data is not important, right? Now, this is where It’s important to actually make the connection between the data inside those HRMS, absenteeism, presenteeism, sick days, productivity levels, and so on. And marry that with mental health. 

This connects to my previous point as well. Do you want to quantify ROI? A good mental health player needs to start thinking like an HR tech player, rather than a healthcare provider because honestly speaking, being a healthcare startup is very different from being an HR tech startup.

In a company, honestly speaking, how many people will be sick To actually require psychiatric help. The levels are quite low. It’s really less than 5 percent as well. When the employees fall sick, you need to provide and support them as well, and nurse them back to health. But then, a lot of mental health providers over index and over emphasize on the healthcare need, such that they ignore some of the bread and butter HR aspects.

I have worked in multiple different countries over the past 17 years as well and I’ve seen the differences in organizational cultures between the US, China, Singapore, or Vietnam. It is important that you know we actually do make sure that we have data science and executive support. Come out more strongly. And I think those are really strong driving forces and game changers to increase employee mental wellness tech adoption. 

I think one other good example, if you don’t mind me, riffing a little bit more on this is that there’s data everywhere.HR practitioners are swimming in data, right? Yes, because there’s so much of this data but then you wonder what are the solutions. Employee engagement surveys. There are so many of those players out there as well, right? a lot of data is being shared, but not enough actually compressed refined into insights and recommendations for mental health players like us as well, like we’re moving in that direction. We are looking at how we can work with that data, how we can work with employees, survey providers out there, how we can work with the HRMS providers out there, right, The systems out there, and then, create this win solution to deliver greater value for the HR leaders.

Sriram Iyer: How does MindFi assist client HR teams in obtaining leadership buy-in for investment in mental well being?

Bjorn Lee: This is really tricky and depends from company to company or rather industry to industry as well. Some industries, naturally more open, have more open organizational cultures, more casual, perhaps the technology industry, right? They’re more casual. They are more willing to try new tools as well.

The management is very tech savvy, and they have a very authentic form of leadership. It’s not those button up stiff in the upper lip type of cultures. Those cultures tend to have leaders who are more willing to share. I’m not an organizational psychologist, but organizational psychologists will have the right frameworks and theories to talk about that.

So at a HR manager level, those who are making the decisions, they do have to make a stronger effort to connect with their management stories, right? They have to find the talking points, right? They can either come up with the talking points themselves Because all they can do is try to work with corporate communications to see whether it is something that can improve employer branding as well. These days, I think a company that is very proactive and promotes mental health is actually going to improve the employer branding.

So I think that one idea here is to think of the messaging, think internally, how can you connect with the management and flesh out their story in a way that they are comfortable with. And that really boils down to building relationships with management.

The other thing also is to tie in this kind of relates a little bit to ROI. I don’t want to just start getting very quantitative as well. Big public companies, have sustainability reports, right? These annual sustainability reports really put the owners and the pressure on the C suite to talk about their sustainability efforts. Other than environmental sustainability, which everybody thinks about, people’s sustainability is very important.

We talked earlier about talent retention, and hiring, and all that as well, right? You will see that in these sustainability reports, there’s a lot of sharing about the numbers around absenteeism, presenteeism, and interestingly, About mental health and wellbeing programs as well. So we have been following the sustainability reports over the past few years, and we are noticing an upsurge.

In terms of the mental health programs being shared in such sustainability reports as well, that, I think, ties in a lot with a key priority. For high level management, for executive management, they want to be seen as building a sustainable company. And one core component of that is people’s sustainability.Am I putting the right policies in place? Am I investing the right amounts as well, right? In order to actually make this company sustainable for my shareholders? For my board of directors, for my customers and users.

Sriram Iyer: How can HR teams be encouraged to be more data driven and tech savvy?

Bjorn Lee: I think the first thing first is that the HR professionals we have seen so far are quite tech savvy already. They are doing all their work online, laptops and mobile phones and so on. I think one thing that is important is to help them understand the HR tech landscape.There can be too many tools involved out there, right? I know that you put out an annual map of all the tech players. I think that’s super helpful to actually help them understand how each of them relates to one another, right? Traditionally as well, I think one thing is more certifications actually help the HR professionals understand how to use data in their daily decision making.

Because the whole reason why some of these professionals join the human resource space is because they enjoy that interaction, person to person interaction. They prioritize that. It’s the same thing that we see in psychologists’ reactions to interactions as well. Many psychologists, psychiatrists, coaches. or counselors, they like that one on one format because, like they are trained in that way to deliver one on one support.

So the same thing, they have to be taught about what digital therapy means. Similarly, HR professionals also have to learn how to build these bonds, with their increasingly digital and remote workforces as well, right? As their workforce gets more physically remote, they have and need help, whether digitally, certifications or otherwise, to learn to be less digitally remote.

They need to be able to build that bond. So I think whether it’s professional certification classes, whether it’s university courses as well, more has to be done over there.

Sriram Iyer: What advice would you give to enterprises starting their digital HR journey?

Bjorn Lee: Yeah, for those who haven’t really started that digital HR journey, I would say that the bandwagon is real. And hop on it fast. Because upskilling is the name of the game in the entire workplace. And it’s time for HR professionals to hop on it as well. Not to sound too trite, right? Or simplistic but 10, 15 years ago, none of us were using smartphones. For now, we use everything, right? We have super apps where we deliver our food, see our doctors, and buy all our groceries as well. And it’s time to just replace some of our more manual non-digital processes with digital interview, interviewing tools, HRMS systems, with mental health, physical health systems as well.

Join and hop on the digital bandwagon before it’s too late.

Sriram Iyer: Thank you so much for your time, Bjorn Lee, and for this conversation. Wishing you the best on your journey ahead and achieving more milestones.

Our Guest: Bjorn Lee

Bjorn Lee is a serial entrepreneur and technology executive with experience in Asia and Silicon Valley. Bjorn is currently the founder CEO of MindFi, a B2B mental health & wellbeing platform. He was an ex-product manager at Zendesk (who acquired Zopim Chat) and founder CEO of Stickery, an edu-tech startup funded by AngelPad & Google Ventures. Bjorn is an alumnus of National University of Singapore (NUS) and the NUS Overseas College (NOC) program at Stanford University.