Humetrical - Fixing the Wellness Industry

My day job typically has a leadership retreat at the end of the year. We listen to a speaker, do activities, converse, etc. Last year we had a wonderful woman come out and talk to us about how we're not doing wellness correctly. I shot my hand up a dozen times with anecdotes, questions, and feedback. From my point of view it was one of the best talks I've heard in a while - the content resonated with me, and how I manage my team.

I took some of her ideas to heart. I started using a "traffic light system" to query how my team was doing across 5 dimensions. Are you red/yellow/green when it comes to:

• Your work stress
• Your work environment
• Your work-load
• Your work-life balance
• Your personal life

As I kept thinking about it, the Software Engineer in me really wanted to build a thing. I spent the last couple months using my evenings and weekends to build a product that I felt would support my team in the fashion Woodrie was indicating the wellness industry should really be headed. (Special thanks to my partner for tolerating my absence night after night).

I built the kind of thing I wanted to see in the world and finally released it last night at 7:30pm into the wild.

https://humetrical.com/

Humetrical embodies this idea that you can't get enough data out of yearly surveys or periodic check-ins. You need to be engaged with your employees before they get burned out, and address issues earlier, rather than wondering how to fix things after an exit interview.

It shows what I call the "perception gap" between leaders and their teams. If each person on my team shows me my team average for where they're at, as a manager I also have to rate how I think my team as a whole is doing. If there's a gap between my own rating and the team's average, that's the perception gap between reality and my view as a manager.

This concept rolls up further. If my entire organization used it, entire business units could view their departmental team health. A CEO could view the entire organization's overall health. Collectively, we could start seeing where there's friction happening and start fixing it before things get ugly.

That's the goal at least. Hopefully it just doesn't sound good in my head.

As I built this, I learned a bit more about this problem. It turns out that 59% of managers overestimate team engagement. 70% of the variance comes from the manager themself! And finally, 46% of employees feel their boss doesn't understand their contributions.

I love my team and want to better support them. I "beta tested" the idea with them verbally. Now they get daily reminders to check in, and I get visual graphs to see how individual and team health is aligning with my own understanding.