Employee well-being is the biggest challenge for HR managers in 2023. Since 2019, stress levels are already rising steadily due to increasing workloads, and COVID-19 has only reinforced this trend. Today, more than 3.8% of Belgian workers are on long-term sick leave due to burnout or stress-related factors. These factors are also responsible for more than a third of absenteeism in the workplace. This absenteeism is estimated to cost our society some 155 million euros a year.

BloomUp aims to address these issues in a preventive manner, with a thorough expansion of its mental wellness platform based on three pillars.

The first pillar is the hyper-personalisation of existing growth trajectories using artificial intelligence. Each employee will receive a fully customised pathway based on his or her specific needs. The topics and steps will also adapt dynamically as the path progresses, growing with the users. Moreover, users remain in full control at all times - including over their privacy, because at each step they can choose which data can be shared with whom.

“With BloomUp, we want to become the most data-driven mental wellbeing platform, fitting each employee's specific needs and evolving with them as they move through the journey.”

• Clovis Six, co-founder BloomUp

A second pillar focuses on gaining the right insights for HR managers. The anonymous data collected in the dashboards give managers the right insights and recommendations on how to better engage with mental wellbeing in the workplace. Among other things, they will learn which topics are most prevalent within their organisation and therefore where it is best to actively communicate with their employees. Finally, the platform will allow them to predict the hidden costs around mental wellbeing within an organisation. HR managers will also be able to calculate the Return on Investment in terms of absenteeism, attendance and turnover after investing in mental well-being in the workplace.

To integrate AI into the platform, BloomUp is working with Omina Technologies, a Belgian company specialising in privacy-respecting, ethical and trustworthy artificial intelligence.

“Artificial intelligence can greatly improve mental well-being and health in our society. Provided that any privacy and compliance risks are proactively managed. Hyper-personalised growth trajectories will therefore be generated by Justifai's privacy-by-design recommender system. This proactively complies with privacy legislation and gives each user control over which and how much personal data may be used.”

• Mattias De Groe, Global Chief Commercial Officer Omina Technologies

BloomUp aims to provide employers with the right tools to take preventive action on their employees' mental well-being using online video consultations and guided growth pathways. The consultations allow employees to quickly and easily find their way to a psychologist or psychotherapist, within the comfort of their own home. With the growth pathways, they can follow a pathway around common themes via an app to work on themselves in a preventive way.

By 2024, BloomUp aims to become the partner of choice for Belgian companies working preventively on mental wellbeing. With the help of Venture Campus, BloomUp was recently awarded a development project by the Flemish Agency for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (VLAIO), worth 450,000 euros.

“Working with BloomUp has given us even more insight into the social importance of technology. The way they have tackled a very topical issue has inspired us tremendously. We are therefore proud that we were able to contribute to the social change that BloomUp aims for”

• Philippe Delfs, Venture Campus