Sports app Lumin pivots into wellbeing for companies with people working from home

Software that supports the world’s best athletes is undergoing a makeover to support staff working from home.

First created to help elite athletes manage their training, the software is now finding its way into home offices as its South Australian creator launches a new platform for corporations dealing with COVID-19 distancing.

Lumin Wellbeing is a workplace version of the Lumin Sports platform used by Cycling Australia and Australian Football League club Adelaide Crows to track data on athletes’ performances and wellbeing.

Founder and chief executive officer Ben Tripodi said the Adelaide-based company saw an important opportunity to design Lumin Wellbeing so corporations can track how staff are managing while working remotely.

“We are starting with a handful of companies that are part of a three-month early adopter program to get corporations on board to use our system, we’ll be using this time to grow our understanding, we’ll still be building and pushing updates,” Tripodi said.

The platform works with a customised app for staff to record how they are feeling about work and their overall wellbeing.

Corporation chiefs or human resources managers can then monitor the real-time data to track trends around stress, mood, motivation or loneliness for individual staff or teams.

Tripodi said the platform could support corporations in making informed decisions based on the data, and it was especially helpful now with vast numbers of staff working from home.

“Corporations can make better decisions based on real data, this is especially important when you don’t have that face to face contact any more,” he said.

“We want to build a tool employees want to use and then leaders, CEOs and regional managers can have a dashboard and see overall trends of their teams and can make daily decisions based on that.”

Three Australian companies have already signed up to begin using the platform from the start of May with two others overseas companies showing interest.

Tripodi said it was the right time for the company to use its data collection platform to support employers in monitoring wellbeing when the vast majority of their staff worked from home.

He cited research showing workplace loneliness hinders job performances, employee commitment to the organization and ultimately the company’s bottom line.

While other research by Mercer LLC, 2017, showed Australian employees are four times more likely to work with a company that focuses on health and wellbeing.

The software company was started in 2018 through a collaboration with global tech giant Dimension Data and World Tour cycling team NTT Pro Cycling (formerly Team Dimension Data).

Lumin Sports was launched in 2019 to interpret complex technical and non-technical data to deliver the information on a customizable platform in real time; it has multiple dashboards with up to 40 data points.

This is linked to an app that can send recommendations to athletes providing advice like how much water to drink after a competition based on fluid loss data.

Lumin Sports raised $650,000 through private investment to drive commercial expansion this year with an increased focus on the United Kingdom and Europe, including in the Premier League Football and professional cycling.

Tripodi said a company previously approached the business to build a software platform for corporate use but the idea had been on the backburner until new COVID-19 rules came into place.

“The timing is perfect to accelerate our road map,” Tripodi said.

“We used sports psychologists to take aspects of what works in high performance sport and we are now translating that into a corporate setting.”