How chatbots can bolster employee wellness
You can’t replace a therapist or prescribe mental health remedies, but new technologies can help uplift, assist and encourage workers during this stressful season of life.
It’s difficult to have an impact on your employees’ mental health.
Ideally, your organization would be a friendly place to work without undue stress and good wellness programs. Sadly, we know that many companies struggle to get anywhere close to that ideal. It’s also the case that many of the stresses on an employee’s mental health don’t originate in the firm. It’s hard to do much about family, personal issues, political unrest, or pandemics.
This leads us to wonder if a cheap, easily deployed technology can help. We can’t send everyone to a therapist, but perhaps a chatbot can assist in some way.
Task-oriented vs “friend” chatbots
There are a number of inexpensive chatbots like Woebot and Mindshift that use cognitive behavioral therapy tools. From a technology perspective, these are not very sophisticated. They largely involve the chatbot asking something and the user picking an answer from a list. It’s much like going through a cognitive behavioral therapy workbook, with the advantage that many people will find the chatbot interface more engaging than a book.
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