Zenefits and Thrive Global Partner to Bring Wellness to Small and Midsize Businesses


New Zenefits app, Well-being in partnership with Thrive Global, aims to tackle one of the nation’s toughest challenges — the stress epidemic

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 18, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Zenefits and Thrive Global announced Zenefits Well-being in partnership with Thrive, an application integrated into the Zenefits platform that will enable a completely new approach to wellness for small businesses. With behavior-based recommendations, this app will deliver curated content, tips and tools from Thrive to individual employees at appropriate moments in time, based on potentially stress-inducing life events that are captured in the Zenefits platform. Business owners can also leverage the app to measure and track workforce well-being.

According to the Center for Disease Control, 78 percent of companies already identify stress as a top workforce health risk, but until now, small business owners have not had a meaningful way to help employees fight the stress epidemic. While the majority of wellness initiatives currently available focus on weight loss or physical fitness offerings, the partnership between Zenefits and Thrive targets the underlying causes of stress. The Well-being app provides employees with science-based, actionable strategies and tools that encourage sustainable behavior change as well as improved productivity.

Providing Well-being resources to Zenefits customers is one way that the company is levelling the playing field between small-to-midsize businesses and large enterprises. According to a recent study by Willis Towers Watson, 82 percent of employers said they will focus on employee well-being initiatives in the next three years to help control costs and improve workers' performance.1 Access to tools that can teach individuals how to fight the stress epidemic is a crucial component to ensuring small and midsize businesses are set up for long-term success.

“Our mission at Zenefits is to help the nation’s emerging businesses take better care of their workforce. Wellness–whether physical, emotional or financial–is a major piece in solving this puzzle,” said Jay Fulcher, CEO and Chairman at Zenefits. “We are excited to partner with Thrive Global to bring these valuable resources to our Zenefits customers that inspire personal and cultural change.”

“We are thrilled to partner with Zenefits on this truly unique app,” said Arianna Huffington, Founder and CEO of Thrive Global. “It’s an amazing opportunity to have an impact by bringing our behavior change expertise directly to companies, on the Zenefits platform their employees use every day at work. Employees will be able to take our Thrive Pulse surveys to find out exactly which key areas they need to improve, from sleep and relationship with technology to setting priorities and leading with compassionate directness. Based on their results, they’ll get relevant content, the latest science, advice from new role models, and actionable microsteps to help them unlock their greatest potential and move from surviving to thriving.”

Well-Being App to Build Behavioral Changes
Zenefits Well-being in partnership with Thrive helps create behavioral change by connecting well-being context across multiple touchpoints in an employee’s experience. For example, when a business leader promotes an employee to a manager-level role, that promotion and salary raise is reflected through Zenefits Payroll in the employee’s account. Because of its seamless integration with the Zenefits People Platform, this change would trigger the Well-being app to share specific Thrive content and tools for managing people and maintaining balance. Furthermore, the business leader can measure the impact of the new manager on her team by tracking the team’s input across indicators such as levels of stress, sleep and engagement.

The new product contains multiple elements to ensure employees are receiving meaningful, timely content, and business owners have insight into how the tool is impacting the overall organization:

  • Personalized Content: Individual employees are delivered curated resources from Thrive based on a behavior-based recommendation engine from Zenefits, ensuring information that can improve well-being and performance is delivered at the time of need. The Thrive content includes the latest science and storytelling from the world's leading scientists and experts in health and well-being, helping employees move from knowing what to do to actually doing it.
  • Measure, Monitor and Benchmark Well-Being: The pre-built, proprietary assessment templates, validated by Industrial-Organizational Psychologists, allow employees to measure, monitor and understand their well-being mindsets and behaviors in order to take action for positive change.
  • Tracking & Reporting: Businesses can measure the progress in well-being behavior and attitudes at either the company or department level. This insight can inform decision-makers about changes that would impact an organization’s overall well-being and business performance.

“Up until now, finding the wellness tools to offer my employees was nearly impossible without tapping into a dozen different sources, and I wasn’t sure which would be the right fit for our people,” said Monica Singh Haley, Head of HR and Recruiting, Blur Studios. “Zenefits’ new app is a compelling approach that I could offer to our team. It also provides more value to our business as it is all in one place, and tied directly into our Zenefits HR and benefits platform.”

Zenefits Well-being, in partnership with Thrive, is expected to be available by Q1, 2019. For more information, check out www.zenefits.com/hr/well-being.

About Zenefits
Zenefits helps more than 11,000 small and midsize companies empower their modern workforce, manage change and stay compliant. Zenefits' People Platform delivers the most comprehensive, mobile HR experience in the market. Its HR, Benefits, Payroll, Well-being and Performance apps combine with advisory services and tightly integrated partner apps to radically simplify HR administration – reducing paperwork and complexity so companies can focus on starting, running and growing their businesses.

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About Thrive Global
Founded and led by Arianna Huffington, Thrive Global is a behavior change media and technology company helping individuals, companies and communities improve their well-being and performance. Thrive Global is headquartered in New York and launched in the fall of 2016. For more information, visit www.thriveglobal.com.

Media Contacts

Zenefits
Didi D’Errico
VP, Communications
dderrico@zenefits.com

Thrive Global
Monica Lee
Head of Communications
monica@thriveglobal.com

1 23rd Annual Willis Towers Watson Best Practices in Health Care Employer Survey (September 2018)