Companies today are willing to pay up to $10,000 a year for something you might not believe – a platform for employee exercise breaks! 😉 But there’s a good reason for it. This is another whimsical twist in the trend of the demand for platforms for employee retention. Moreover, the main feature here isn’t the exercise itself, but the principle of ‘micro-engagement,’ the essence of which is as follows.
The Essence of the Project
Bright Breaks is a platform that allows companies to organize daily 7-minute exercise breaks for their employees.
Essentially, it’s similar to “breaks” when employees allow themselves a short pause in work to rejuvenate, stretch, clear their minds, and then return to their duties re-energized.
During these breaks, employees can engage in exercises – stretching stiff muscles, straightening the spine, stretching, or breathing. Alternatively, they can learn a new cooking recipe, memorize a few foreign words, discover something new on an interesting topic, or simply jump around and have fun.
Each week, the startup’s instructors conduct over 300 live online breaks, evenly distributed throughout working hours, so each employee can join a session at a convenient time.
If desired, an employee can turn on their phone or computer camera and see the screens of colleagues participating in the current session.
Additional motivation to participate in the exercises comes from the fact that employees have a chance to win prizes from the platform. The chances of winning a prize depend not only on luck but also on the regularity of activity.
All sessions are recorded, and the platform accumulates a catalog of recordings, any of which employees can play just for themselves, to stretch during overtime work or take a break from sitting on the couch 😉
The startup sells access to the platform only to companies, convincing them that short workouts during work reduce employees’ stress levels, the likelihood of burnout, refresh their concentration on work duties, help maintain physical fitness, reducing absenteeism due to illness and medical insurance payments. Moreover, it also contributes to team cohesion, as employees gather together during these breaks – even if only on computer and phone screens.
Upon signing a contract, companies only need to upload a list of employees with their contacts to the platform. After that, the platform itself reaches out to each employee and offers them to choose activities of interest.
Employee engagement in these activities can be seen by company administration on special dashboards, which display all current activity indicators, their categorization, and the dynamics of their change.
The startup claims that employees of client companies improve their overall well-being by 97%, feel 44% more connected with colleagues, believe their productivity increases by 75%, and are 63% more confident that the company has improved its attitude towards them.
The startup does not shy away from pricing its services – the subscription cost for a company starts from $9,995 per year.
Despite this, the startup has real clients, among which are Hyundai, Air Canada, and the charitable Salvation Army.
Bright Breaks was founded in 2017 in Canada and attracted only small investments all this time. However, last fall, it raised 1.5 million Canadian dollars, and now, a year later, another 2.5 million (1.83 million US dollars). Judging by this, their growth dynamics has sharply improved.
What’s Interesting
Bright Breaks calls its platform “remote-first,” meaning a platform created primarily for companies with many remote employees.
This is a good term, similar to the “mobile-first” concept – where the design of user experience and service interfaces should start, keeping in mind primarily phone users, and only then adapt for computer users. Although many developers still do the opposite – first designing desktop interfaces and then adapting them for phones. Which is fundamentally wrong, considering that 57% of internet traffic nowadays is on phones, not computers.
The concept of “mobile-first” appeared back in 2009 when mobile traffic accounted for only about 5% – but there were already assumptions that in the foreseeable future, the phone would become the primary device for accessing the internet.
The percentage of Americans, for example, working remotely at least once a week is already 27%! And this suggests to us that the concept of “remote-first” has long been overdue to be used more actively.
Especially since companies essentially agree with this. The graph above shows the change in the number of job vacancies published on the internet by companies, explicitly stating the possibility of entirely remote or hybrid (home plus office) work.
Well, companies whose employees have started working remotely have faced a new problem, which I have already written about more than once – they need platforms for constant communication between employees and with the parent company. Without this, connections begin to thin and break, which ultimately leads to resignations – forcing companies to spend more and more money on hiring and training new employees. As a result, it becomes cheaper for companies to start paying for anything that makes employees less likely to quit 😉
Joint fitness activities, in which both office and remote employees can participate, are one of the options companies have already started paying for. Besides today’s Bright Breaks, another example is GoJoe. They created a platform where companies can hold fitness competitions among their employees. This startup raised 1.3 million British pounds.
However, not all employees engage in fitness at all or regularly enough to participate in such competitions. And spending 7 minutes of work time on a workout is something everyone can do.
But for this to actually happen, Bright Breaks has implemented a cool feature on their platform. A special robot on the platform automatically analyzes employees’ work calendars in Google Calendar or Outlook to insert participation in a live workout into their schedule – combining employee interests, workout schedules, and trying to increase the number of colleagues participating in the workout.
Where to Run
The general direction of movement is the creation of platforms for maintaining “human” connections between remote employees with each other and the parent company. The relevance of this direction is explained by the growing popularity of remote work, in which the presence of such “crutches” in companies becomes increasingly mandatory.
There can be many different options for this. Some startups offer companies to organize online team-building in the form of joint beer, wine, and whiskey tastings, cooking classes, contests, quizzes, and board game competitions. Among them are, for example, Confetti, which raised $6.3 million (new investments they received after my review) or Teamraderie, which raised $9 million.
rready, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, approached the matter more seriously, starting to offer companies to develop the entrepreneurial initiative of their employees. Although, in my opinion, this startup can also be classified as a platform for increasing employee engagement. This startup raised $6.3 million in investments.
However, joint team-building is separate events that require effort and time to participate in. Fitness competitions are only for those who engage in fitness and also have a competitive spirit. Entrepreneurship may be something only a small percentage of people want to deal with, and it requires even more effort.
In this sense, the overall concept of Bright Breaks is more convincing. Their activities can be participated in by everyone. These activities do not need to be specially planned or prepared for, as the robot will automatically insert them into your schedule. And you can spend working time on these activities 😉
Moreover, each activity requires only 7 minutes. And this reminds us of another concept – “microlearning,” which has started gaining popularity in online education, where the learning program is divided into short lessons lasting no more than 5-7 minutes. By analogy, today’s Bright Breaks concept can be called “micro-engagement” – in which employee engagement is carried out in small pieces, but regularly. Which, logically, should lead to even better results than long, but rare corporate parties, team-building, and other events.
So, the stated direction of movement can be refined – creating platforms for maintaining “human” connections between remote employees with each other and the parent company, based on the principle of micro-engagement, that is, short but regular activities.
And it’s interesting – what other types of activities, besides “industrial gymnastics,” can there be? What else comes to your mind?
About the Company
Bright Breaks
Website: brightbreaks.com
Last Round: $1.83M, November 14, 2023
Total Investments: $4.1M, Rounds: 6