There have been many twists and turns in the story of how Naveo Commerce became the Company it is today.
Originally, the Company in Finland was known as Digital Goodie, creating an end-to-end grocery eCommerce platform. In 2019, Maginus, a UK software and services company, and Digital Goodie merged, and almost immediately the Coronavirus pandemic started. Naturally, there were considerable changes in the work environment and the immediate shift to working from home for all staff.
Naveo Commerce were concerned about the impact of losing face-to-face and social interaction with colleagues in both locations. When Auntie contacted Pinja Fernström, an HR Business Partner at Naveo Commerce, she immediately thought that Auntie was the solution!
Employee engagement, the uncertainty brought on by the Coronavirus pandemic, and the challenges arising from the merger have been areas in which Auntie has been able to help.
Initially, the service was taken by Managers, to trial the packages aimed at the challenges the managers were experiencing. Some of the Management Team had been placed in new and uncertain situations of which they had no prior experience. When these Managers gave positive feedback on the service and individual help they received from Auntie, HR decided to roll out the complete Auntie service out to everyone within the company.
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Naturally, Naveo Commerce place high importance on employee engagement and well-being which is why Auntie was introduced to the whole team. From the point of view of work ability, lots of cooperation with occupational health care took place. Pulse surveys are regularly sent to employees and they give information on the current work and home life situation so that they can be reacted to quickly.
For HR, Auntie offers more services in their toolkit. Pinja comments, “Naveo is using a Plus service, and many of the employees who have been to the Check-in sessions it offers have continued into Auntie packages. Some have clearly had work-related issues, but some have also had challenges related to other areas of life that have been addressed in these packages.”
Coming Down with “Spring Fatigue”?
Pinja is concerned about how people will fare when they return to previous ways of working now that we are starting to return to normal after the Coronavirus pandemic. Will “spring fatigue” hit when faced with this change? Many employees are meeting their new co-workers for the first time and the concept of “office working” is now a thing of the past.
Naveo Commerce will be embracing the fact that employees will work part-time at the office, and this continues as part of the employee welfare initiatives that Naveo had in place before the pandemic.
Some kind of hybrid model of working will be introduced, for example, working at the office among teams at agreed times. This style too will pose its own challenges to workplace well-being.
Communication Around Well-being Can Be Difficult
Pinja has experienced that for Auntie to be well received and used by the employees the wording of the internal communication had to be carefully considered. Some people might be taken aback by words such as stress or mental health as people tend to have different associations to what those words mean. Maybe there is still some stigma around the topic of mental health?
In Naveo, Auntie communication has very much centered around the fact that the service provides tools for everyday life rather than just being as a mental well-being service for the mind and health. Stress is not mentioned, we want people to feel that the service is suitable for them.
The feedback from Auntie has been extremely positive from everyone across Naveo. Auntie professionals constantly challenge the perspectives of the clients, teaching them to think differently. Perceptive questions have provided help in many different situations.
Invidualised and Customised Auntie
What surprised Pinja was how intense and personal the Auntie service has been and continues to be. In the Check-in sessions and following meetings, the conversation was straight to the point and bespoke to what matters to the individual. What also surprised Pinja was how much information Auntie’s reports provided about the effectiveness of the service. Through the reports, the expertise of Auntie gets more weight in the conversations about the service within the company.
“The best thing about Auntie is that while the packages seem generic, in practice they are tailored to each person to match individual needs. For HR, the service facilitates their work and the reports on effectiveness are immensely helpful. Auntie is seen as a great partner. It is highly flexible, and you can add employees when you have new starters etc.”
Pinja and the HR Team would recommend the Auntie service to other companies who are considering using it.
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