January 25, 2023
“What’s your Body Battery today?” That’s a question Antti Luukkanen, CEO of Liikkuva Suomi, hears a lot at team meetings. Providing innovative coaching programs to employers and employees throughout Europe, Finland-based Liikkuva Suomi uses Garmin’s Body Battery™ and other metrics to help establish lasting improvement in health and well-being at the individual and communal levels.
The Importance of Well-being in Business
A healthy and happy workforce is a vital asset for any business. Together with Liikkuva Suomi, organizations like Siemens Osakeyhtiö in Finland and the Baltic countries, have embarked on a strategic well-being journey where long-term results and a healthy workforce are built on positive choices in life and in work.
“We believe that only healthy and well-balanced professionals can support our customers in major projects, and also meet the challenges of today’s society,” says Janne Öhman, CEO of Siemens Osakeyhtiö, about the importance of well-being in business. Siemens HR Director Heidi Moilanen stresses that the time for magic tricks is over. “We want to support the long-term well-being of our people. This is not just a single project, but a core value related to our corporate culture that permeates everything we do.”
Liikkuva Suomi coaches supervisors within a business using webinars every 1-2 months, giving instructions on different topics and how to host a weekly session with their own team. Employees receive 5-minute weekly sessions with headlines, tasks, explanations and 2-3 minute videos, along with a Garmin fitness tracker of their own.
Understanding Health through Fitness Tracker Technology
The use of intelligent technology plays a key role in Liikkuva Suomi’s coaching – combining data insights with a people-focused approach. This means that individual feelings and feedback are combined with data-driven Garmin metrics to continuously improve each program. In addition, feedback from strategic corporate development is also incorporated, as wellbeing should be developed together with all levels of the company.
At Siemens Osakeyhtiö, the Garmin vívosmart® 4 was used to capture data, including:
- Daily activity time
- Sleeping time
- Body Battery
This information, delivered via the Garmin Health API to the HeiaHeia social application, helps staff members to track their data and exercise, and motivate one another. This sensible data is protected by highest security standards, according to EU regulations and not accessible publicly. So everyone can decide individually if they want to share their data to their working colleagues.
“Garmin’s Body Battery helps you understand where you are at, mentally and physically. When you wake up in the morning, your Body Battery can be anything between 5-100%. In the same way as you recharge your mobile phone overnight, you need to remember to recharge yourself for the following day,” says Luukkanen, “and technology, connected to step-by-step coaching, helps you to manage load, stress and recovery better.”
Liikkuva Suomi chose Garmin wearables for its employee coaching programmes because of their full suite of 24/7 health monitoring features. The company’s commitment to serving its customers through constant innovation lines up well with the physical and mental well-being services Liikkuva Suomi provides.
Creating Lasting Change
Liikkuva Suomi engages and motivates organizations to move, rest, and eat healthier, and to feel better with the support of professional coaches and a people-focused, technology-aided approach. Their various collaborations have seen up to 100% employee participation, sick leave reduced to zero, and companies rated as the best place to work by their own respective employees. The future goal is to further promote the use of coaching programs and Garmin technology as part of strategic, long-term plans to generate a significant competitive advantage for organizations across Europe and the US.