Why I’m on a mission to create the most simple team wellbeing tool.

Fundamentally I dream about helping leaders lead their teams in a meaningful way. A way in which all employees are seen and heard, and no one’s quality of life suffers due to unhealthy and lousy leadership. 

Why? For so many reasons. But, of course, a huge motivator has been my own experience. For example, in my first job as a 14th-year-old, I had an asshole for a leader. Pardon my french, but that is truly what he was, and he had a very negative impact on my self-esteem. I am very fortunate to have parents who have taught me that I can do anything in life if I set my mind to it, so my self-esteem recovered. Maybe a bit too much, some would say, but that’s another story.😉

However, my experience is secondary to the scary truth of today’s workforce. The official State of the Global Workplace: 2022 Report shows that we, sadly, once again hit a new high score. We’ve reached an all-time high, with 44% of employees experiencing stress a lot the previous day.

Here is a little extract of another alarming results from the report.

“When Gallup looks at our global workplace data through engagement and thriving combined, the results are striking.” 

Are we really accepting that the single thing where we spend the most hours, our job, is an environment where we are not thriving or engaged?

I am definitely not. Time is, in my opinion, the most valuable thing of all, and you’ll never get back the hours spent at work. We must find a way to enjoy it, at least a little bit. And if there is no way to make it enjoyable, it must be possible to at least not hate it, or suffer in your private life because of it, due to stress, for example.

Knowing what I know about stress and how it affects someone’s quality of life, I am highly motivated and passionate about improving work conditions globally. I am genuinely dreading that the “new normal” will become feeling stressed and not thriving at work. The many physical and mental consequences are just too severe.

So, how can we counteract this? It is, of course, a challenging task. And one I don’t take lightly. But I believe the most meaningful impact is made through leadership. Because although not everything is the leader’s fault, it is always the leader’s responsibility. And only leaders have the power to make a significant change in the culture.  

In Successteam, we focus on three main things. 

1. We create unbiased feedback loops and collect feedback anonymously.
2. We analyze and prioritize the feedback, so it’s straightforward for a leader.
3. And we help leaders take action based on the feedback. 

And, here’s why we know it works.

More than three years ago, we started developing Successteam, and then we “fake” launched the platform in April 2021. But why would you “fake” launch, you might ask? Well, it’s pretty simple. We would only get people’s honest reactions and opinions on the platform’s true value if users believed the product was real. 

The feedback we got from focus groups or our friends and network was always excellent, mainly because our overwhelming fondness for our own brilliant ideas persuaded them and excited them equally. 

It’s dangerously compelling when you find passion and meaning in what you do. But that also underlines why feedback, in that sense, can’t be trusted. We needed to do a pretotype; a pretend product that would enable us to get authentic reactions from real customers we didn’t already know. 

Like many others, we initially had a million ideas for fancy features and functionalities. However, feedback taught us that trying to solve everything won’t solve anything. We would end up building a monster of a platform that would overwhelm most users due to a jungle of features and functionalities. But the platform is not intended to solve the problems we think people experience; it’s intended to solve the problems they actually experience. 

Although it was tough, because killing all your own ideas is not very enjoyable (if you know, you know), we came to terms with it and aligned internally.

Today our goal is not to do it all, but what we do, we’ll do to perfection. 

So, in short, Successteam is built for the many leaders who don’t have the time or resources for a complex and time-consuming tool. 

It’s Team feedback, the simple way! Nothing more, and nothing less, just that.

And thankfully, I have a fantastic team of much smarter people than me, who are helping me realize this dream, and with the launch we had on the 16th of November, it’s not only a dream anymore but a reality.