A growing and successful company doesn’t just hatch ”one beautiful morning”. It evolves based on the choices done by listening customers, following the societal development and hearing the famous little sound in the company employees’ heart.
Movendos was born in December 2012. The word Movendos is latin and means ”to inspire, to shift”, which describes our philosophy in a many sided way. We are part of a market which aims at solving a remarkable problem both from the human and economic perspective. Only in European Union it’s estimated that over nine million sick leave days due to musculoskeletal problems, 2500 young people retiring, 36 000 new cases of diabetes and the presenteeism in work places cause costs of more than 19 billion euros every day. At the same time research results show that even 60 % of the life habit related diseases could be prevented with an individual professional support. In addition to this, the holistic wellness, strengths, life management and motivation of an individual can be supported in many, many ways.
Slowly the pre-school age is coming closer and the start-up years will be left behind. The journey from Autumn 2012 has been rewarding and a huge amount of work has been done with full heart. Part of the team has met hundreds of decision makers, developers and professionals and listened to the daily needs of occupational healthcare providers, companies’ human resource management, public organizations and rehabilitation. At the same time we have managed to combine concrete actions with continuous future oriented aspect. Our team has less than 10 members, but at the moment we have unthinkably good overall understanding of the work life in Finland and the pain points of Finnish healthcare sector from the aspect of both professionals and the end customers – the citizens and employees.
Whether it’s about services for workplace wellness or the digital development of healthcare, the basic value of the daily work among Movendos employees is the will to do work with a meaning – to make individuals’ life better and healthier. The wellness of an individual spreads to other individuals in different societal units like families, workplaces or any other communities where people get together. During these five years the core message has become like this: Movendos is a coaching and technology company increasing individual health and wellbeing.
Behaviour and technology – they both develop step by step
Agile as a word has suffered of inflation, but in a start-up it has to be true every day. The choices and decisions made have to be often brave and the original plans, products and thoughts need constantly be discussed and challenged. The driving force should be the will to make the world a better place and the will to combine this to listening people. The individuals matter here as well, because in the end the individuals make decisions that change the world. A successful and balanced company team is reliable, professional, fast, creative and enthusiastic. When this palette works out, it spreads among the customers and partners which makes the positive flow happen.
Movendos is originally a spin off from the behavioral and health sciences in Tampere University of Technology, Finland. At that time the professionals of wellbeing and healthcare had a clear need to start supporting their customers between meetings to make adopting new daily habits easier and more concrete with tailored support. This is how the first product remote coaching service mCoach was born. It’s still being used, but in different ways than we thought at first.
During the past years people have been enthusiastic of all kinds of devices collecting health data automatically. We have chosen the different road and believed more on individuality and changing habits, so until these days we haven’t emphasized automatic data collection so much. The data has its own role for seeing the needs for change or making the change visible, but the change itself is done by internal individual motivation. This can then be supported with health and wellness data and one’s own experience and feeling of wellness.
We have made some good partnerships with many occupational healthcare providers. It’s all about trust, doing the things promised, being proactive and a bit more. For example in occupational healthcare there was a clear need to develop a vast and high quality health and wellness survey solution, which would serve more the needs today and in the future. We developed our mSurvey service with several occupational healthcare providers during half a year as part of Movendos platform. We got this product to market in January 2017 and until now we have got a remarkable amount of new customers. Based on this experience we started to develop need and symptom based time reservation mBooking, which is very easy to use and saves resources both for professionals and their customers. When we add remote appointments in this service palette, the whole system is simple and offers easy solutions for clear needs along the service path.
Individual health and life management serves the employer as well
We understood years ago that something new is needed to support individual wellbeing of employees. Applications, same coaching content for all, guiding and advice coming from outside just doesn’t work and make those employees commit, who would benefit holistic support most. We believed that by combining individual coaching to remote appointments we could scale up individual support for companies. These thoughts developed further after summer 2016 as we joined our forces with a company called Eliva, which had developed a good and well tested effective model for value and solution based individual coaching – a model where the individual employee gets support at the right time and which doesn’t burden the company management during the process. By bringing together the strengths of these two companies we got a well serving package of individual scalable coaching with reliable prove of efficacy.
The deep understanding of work life and individuals together with the understanding of healthcare gives our team a very vast and deep expertise in the field.
What does the kaleidoscope show?
If we look at the healthcare and workplace wellness sectors and how much they are going to change, we could use kaleidoscope instead of a periscope and a spyglass. A kaleidoscope is perfect for a company almost in a pre-school age: all the elements for development are existing, but by changing the aspect the whole system looks like a different one. We in Movendos believe that the healthcare reform in Finland and the will for taking care of individuals will make this country a better one. And we believe this is going to happen everywhere else in the world as well, with parallel time schedules. We are happy and proud to stay along!
