Charlottehaven & Woba

Merkur Cooperative Bank, Denmark’s leading values-based financial institution, has enhanced diversity and well-being in the workplace with the assistance of Woba.io. Discover how Merkur utilized Woba’s platform and guidance to achieve impressive results in the work environment.

Challenge: Diversity and Inclusion at the Organizational Level

Merkur Cooperative Bank has a central goal: to create a workplace characterized by diversity, inclusivity, and equality. They aimed to establish an attractive workplace that could attract new talents while fostering happier and more engaged employees. Employees were to feel that everyone is treated fairly, irrespective of gender, age, ethnic background, sexual orientation, or other differences. Simultaneously, it was crucial for them that diversity and inclusion initiatives were not merely a management focus but were also palpable throughout the organization.

Solution: Valuable Insights to Measure, Understand, and Act

Merkur Cooperative Bank implemented Woba’s platform for their annual well-being assessments and mandatory workplace assessments (APV). With Woba, they acquired the right tools to measure and gain direct insights from employees to understand the diversity in the work environment.

Merkur was particularly pleased with the opportunity to combine quantitative and qualitative insights in their surveys. This not only provided an overall picture of general well-being but also allowed for a deeper understanding by analyzing comments from individual employees.

Lastly, Woba made it easy for them to translate all the collected feedback from employees into concrete action plans in areas where improvement was needed, both at the organizational and departmental levels.

“The platform is intuitive and easy to handle. I have especially been very pleased with the automatic presentation and risk map,” says Katrine Rosengren Norup, HR Manager at Merkur Cooperative Bank.

Energi Viborg is committed to promoting well-being within their organization and collaborates closely with Woba to achieve this goal.

“We prioritize well-being at Energi Viborg,” says Dorte Danielsen, Executive Secretary/HR at Energi Viborg.

Together with Kira, their Customer Success Manager from Woba, we have explored how Energi Viborg has adapted the Woba platform to develop their own approach to well-being work with the aim of increasing response rates and enhancing employee well-being using Woba.

The Challenge: A declining response rate to well-being surveys

At Energi Viborg, they used to conduct well-being surveys every other week, asking 5 questions based on the WHO-5 well-being index. However, they faced a challenge as the response rate had dropped below 50%. There was a need for a system that could delve deeper into work-related well-being.

Through collaboration between management, union representatives, and occupational health and safety representatives, it was decided that they needed a system where they could formulate their own questions, customize them for departments, and allow for comments to be added to each question. This led them to choose Woba, which met their needs.

“Everything aligned perfectly with our desire to prioritize well-being and not just rely on an annual well-being survey,” Dorte says about the choice of Woba.

Companies now know well that when they invest DKK 1 in the working environment, they get DKK 2 back. Despite this fact, no tools have yet been able to measure this effect.

“Woba, on the other hand, gives us access to a comprehensive risk assessment system and thus a long-awaited real-time overview of our customers’ known and unknown risks within the working environment. This helps us to assist with the best possible preventive advice based on current data insights. The Woba system also helps our customers to measure the effect of their implemented action plans on, for example, the level of well-being and sickness absence. In this way, our customers gain new and very concrete knowledge of where their risk areas are, what they should do about them and the effect of their time and efforts”

Lars Christensen, Managing Director Willis Towers Watson DK.

Willis Tower Watson

Willis Towers Watson (WTW) was founded in 1828 and is today a world-leading global advisory and brokerage firm. WTW is driven by a central vision to help their customers identify risks, so that the company can best prevent human losses and at the same time get the best conditions for creating growth and success. In other words – WTW helps clients around the world turn risk into business growth.

The Challenges

In June 2018, WTW first contacted Woba. WTW was looking for a digital tool that could give their customers the opportunity to measure the temperature of their risks in the working environment and at the same time give WTW access to a digital overview of their customers’ risk areas. After many months of negotiation, WTW and Woba suddenly found the key and common thread between the two businesses – and it was the statutory Workplace Assessment (APV) that cracked the code:

“In English, APV is called ‘Health & Safety Risk Assessment’, and it actually describes much better what it is about – namely a risk assessment of companies’ health and safety status. It also paints a much clearer picture of the APV’s real meaning and how WTW can use Woba’s APV as a risk management tool where they can help their customers prevent the loss of key employees before the damage happens‘

says Woba’s CEO, Malene Madsen.

The Solution

In January 2020, WTW and Woba established a co-branding collaboration. WTW chose to buy a license for Woba’s complete APV system, so that in future they can offer their customers a service that enables them to meet the Norwegian Working Environment Authority’s legal requirements for the APV in an easy and efficient way. The strategic collaboration between WTW and Woba was launched on 9 December and is already live in the Danish companies. Søren Egens Petersen talks here about the importance of the solution for their customers today:

“A high level of employee well-being is one of the most important success criteria in any company, and therefore it is absolutely crucial that the management has a good overview of the areas in the company where there is a particular need to make an effort to eliminate dissatisfaction . With Woba, the company not only gets the overview, but also concrete recommendations for what can be done to increase well-being”.

says well-being expert Søren Egens Petersen from Corporate Health at Willis Towers Watson.

Solution – powered by Woba

A 100% complete, legally binding system for completing the APV – completely automatically
Industry-specific Health and Safety Risk Assessment questionnaires from the Danish Working Environment Authority for all industries and sectors.

Option to add customized APV questions

• Automatic creation process, where the customer can create, plan the APV and set it in motion via 5 steps. There is also the option of personal setup if the customer wishes.
• Answering measurements on all devices: PC, tablet and via the Wobas smartphone app.
• Employee access to own personal results, scores, well-being development and e-learning tools to promote well-being and the working environment.
• Manager access to Woba’s analysis tool (dashboard) with automatic results – both reports and comment analyzes can be viewed and downloaded across the entire company.
• Manager access to the real-time Risk Map, where HR and all local managers can identify and act on health and safety risks for sickness absence with a simple login.
• Manager access to automatic recommendations for action measures to prevent the APV’s designated risk areas.
• Manager access to the action plan module, where HR, AMR and the local manager can upload and follow the effect of the action plans across the entire company over time.
• Manager access to Sickness Absence module and Report Injury.
• Gives HR, AMR and local managers the data insights to make targeted decisions to prevent workplace injury and absenteeism risks – instead of relying on outdated data and intuition.
• Made it easy for WTW’s customers to collect, understand and proactively act on APV risks before the damage happens
  Gave WTW access to a holistic and data-driven Risk Assessment System across all their customers in real-time