hug

In 2017, while conversing with his peers, Richard C Doig realised that employees’ mental, physical, and financial stresses across several industries were progressively worsening. This trend adversely influenced the workforce’s personal and professional lives and their performance in the workplace. Doig also observed that the traditional approach to ensure a business’s sustainable growth and higher workforce productivity was based on a one-off singular employee survey that did not necessarily highlight the critical challenges faced by employees. Doig, very motivated to move the needle here, founded hug in 2018.

The company is changing the status quo of the global business community, addressing the challenges it faces while trying to ensure employee wellness by innovating a revolutionary multi survey platform of the same name: hug.

hug is built upon behavioural science and psychology principles, providing businesses with invaluable insights into their employee feedback. A multi-analytical and self-help platform, hug, amasses employee surveys. Each survey is interlinked and covers employee productivity, such as engagement within the workplace, mental and financial well-being, physical health, and lifestyle. The prime vision behind developing hug was to create an elementary platform based on a scientific approach and bypass the traditional procedures of conducting surveys. The company’s flagship caters to any business—regardless of size, location, and industry. Employees can go through hug and its micro-surveys within minutes, facilitating a seamless feedback process; the platform is easy to navigate, further encouraging participation.

“hug asks employees a number of questions in a process that takes no more than 10 minutes, with access to real-time and personalised resources for reference,” elaborates Doig.

The holistic HR solutions provider offers customised scoring of employee wellness as well. It scores each employee based on their mental and financial health, lifestyle, and workplace engagement. The results reflect an employee’s wellness, empowering hug to offer personalised support. Owing to its employee-centric feature-sets, hug improves the average survey participation rate to 70 per cent compared to the 10-15 promised by traditional approaches. A critical element of employee feedback for ensuring higher participation in surveys is the participant’s anonymity. hug meets this requirement head-on by offering absolute confidentiality to its employees, ensuring their responses are thoroughly firewalled and their scores anonymised. Importantly, employees are not alone in this employers get scored too.

hug empowers employers to run quarterly, half-yearly, or annual surveys, rendering them absolute control over the process, increasing employee engagement and inciting a cultural change within the organisation. Employers can visualise the scores, progress, and improvements in a single dashboard, tracking how their workforce’s wellbeing changes over time.In the case of employers, the scores are based on the performance of their strategies, implementations, and the benefits and perks they bring to the table. The management gains full visibility into the redundancies of their campaign and identifies the areas that require attention. hug empowers clients to improve on and customise their strategies and retain talent while ensuring everyone’s well-being.

By eliminating the obstacles employees face in progressing in their professional and personal lives, hug empowers businesses to become ‘more attractive’ to their respective workforces. hug helps companies develop a more supportive culture for their employees through its very granular reporting dashboards, regardless of age, gender, industry sector, or location. The company is truly embracing the developments in the global business firmament, rendering a platform that prioritises people first, on all accounts.