EXCLUSIVE: Referral marketing organisation Mention Me has introduced a new life insurance benefit for its 70 employees, to support staff wellbeing and align with its organisational culture.
The benefit, provided by Yulife, has been implemented in order to reflect the start-up’s growing organisational culture, aligning to its core values: strive, balanced and support. The life insurance benefit, which was launched to staff in February 2019, also ties in with Mention Me’s work around creating its own definition of wellbeing, which is being designed to reflect its employees and overall culture.
Valerie Mann, head of people at Mention Me, said: “The business has experienced substantial growth over a short period of time, which has led the team to split across two floors. We are focused on developing initiatives that bring teams together and foster healthier office culture.”
The life insurance is delivered via Yulife’s app, which strives to engage staff daily with their health and wellbeing by rewarding them for completing activities such as walking to work or meditation. Employees can earn internal currency 'yucoin' for doing these activities; this can then be redeemed for rewards like Avios air miles, vouchers, or gift cards for brands such as Amazon, Nike and Asos.
The app also features a leaderboard to further motivate staff to participate. Last month, Mention Me used this to run a competition on how many steps employees could achieve.
Since launching, 90% of Mention Me’s employees have joined Yulife and more than 75% have also joined the leaderboard feature.
The new benefit was communicated to staff during a face-to-face on-boarding session, delivered by the provider. This explained Yulife and introduced the app to employees.
The introduction of Yulife forms part of Mention Me’s wider wellbeing strategy, which also includes free healthy snacks, weekly on-site massages, weekly on-site yoga and Pilates classes, weekly dodgeball games and the launch of an inclusive running club.
The organisation also runs an annual cycling event, Tour de Mention Me. In 2018, the route took the cyclists from Vauxhall to Windsor, while this year’s course will go from Vauxhall to Brighton.
Mention Me also runs away days to encourage staff to leave their desks and engage in physical and mental breaks from work. To date, these have included activities such as a cookery course, participating in the Crystal Maze, paddle boarding on the Thames, ukulele training and terrarium building.
Mann added: “The team embraced the app from the outset. We recently introduced [an organisation] running team and there has been a spike in uptake since we introduced Yulife. As our business is comprised of a diverse range of teams, from sales, to marketing, to engineering and HR, the app has proved to be an engaging way to encourage team interaction through healthy competition.
“It’s been great to see everyone across all departments embrace the app. People are getting off the tube or bus one stop early and making the effort to walk rather than drive short distances to earn as many yucoin as possible. We think it’s already having a huge impact.”
