Establishing Nigeria's Inaugural Labor Threat Assessment Tool: Insights from Real-World Experience

When creating WellNewMe, the initial inclination was to label it a "wellness platform", a term that easily garners support, as the notion that healthier employees are more productive is widely accepted. However, a pivotal decision was made early on that has since defined the platform's trajectory: WellNewMe would not be merely a wellness app, but rather a workforce health-risk intelligence platform, akin to a credit reference agency, providing actionable insights for employers, brokers, and insurers.

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This distinction is more significant than it may seem, as a wellness app primarily focuses on individual metrics, such as step count, whereas a risk-intelligence platform delivers valuable information on workforce risk concentration, trends, and implications for underwriting, benefits, and costs. This fundamental difference in approach targets a distinct set of buyers, requiring discipline to maintain the platform's direction and resist drifting towards the more familiar "wellness" category.

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One of the most challenging architectural lessons learned is that workforce risk intelligence is not a single-user issue, as WellNewMe caters to four distinct groups: employees, employers and HR teams, brokers, and insurers, each requiring a unique view of the same underlying data. An employee needs a trustworthy and actionable personal risk picture, while an HR director requires an aggregated and anonymized view of organizational risk.

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A broker, on the other hand, needs renewal-pipeline intelligence, and an insurer requires a portfolio-level heat map and company risk profiles to underwrite against, all of which must be built on a shared data foundation across over eleven assessment domains. This has necessitated resisting the urge to over-engineer, and some features, including parts of the original quote-management workflow, were deliberately simplified to avoid adding unnecessary complexity.

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Given the platform's handling of health data, extreme caution has been exercised in determining what information to request and how to present it, such as replacing a clinically loaded mental-health assessment with the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale, a validated and less stigmatizing instrument, for which a formal commercial license is being pursued. This type of decision, although not typically highlighted in pitch decks, is crucial for earning the trust of HR directors and employees, as trust is essentially the product being offered.

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WellNewMe operates simultaneously in the UK and Nigeria, presenting its own set of challenges, as the two markets differ significantly in terms of regulatory environment, payment landscape, and vocabulary for discussing workplace health. In Nigeria, considerations such as NDPR compliance, integrating local payment systems, and geo-detecting and localizing content to ensure relevance have been necessary.

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A 2019 survey of over 6,800 Nigerian employees on workplace mental health, conducted with Dennis Ashley Medical Clinic, has been utilized as market evidence to demonstrate the lack of visibility into workforce health risk among Nigerian employers, highlighting the need to address this gap. This survey has been repurposed to support the case for the importance of workforce health-risk intelligence in Nigeria.

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The process of building WellNewMe has been highly instructive, with lessons learned from unglamorous tasks such as auditing websites and addressing issues like canonical-URL errors and inconsistent brand voice, as well as recognizing the need to strengthen credibility signals. These experiences have underscored the importance of prioritizing credibility, data integrity, and market specificity as core product features.

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Ultimately, establishing a workforce-risk-intelligence category in Nigeria requires focusing on the unglamorous aspects first and trusting that the market will follow the evidence, a sentiment echoed by Dr. Igbokwe, the founder of WellNewMe, a workforce health-risk intelligence platform.