JoyBoost

Most corporate wellness programmes are a poster in a kitchen and a gym discount nobody claims. They fail in the same way every time: the effort of taking part falls entirely on the employee, the reward is abstract, and nobody — least of all the company paying for it — can tell whether any of it is working.

The organisations running these programmes are not short of good intentions. They are short of a mechanism. Something has to notice that someone went to the gym, turn that into a reason to keep going, and give the people funding it a picture of whether the whole thing is worth continuing.

A platform that makes wellness a game with a scoreboard. Employees log real activities — a gym visit, a nutrition entry, volunteering, a course completed — attach proof, and earn points once an administrator confirms it. Proof and approval matter more than they sound: a points system anyone can claim their way to the top of is a leaderboard nobody trusts twice.

Points feed everything else. Challenges run individually or as teams, for a fixed window, either across the whole platform or privately inside one company. Leaderboards exist at both levels, so an employee competes with their colleagues without being measured against thousands of strangers. Progress moves people through tiers, from bronze up to diamond, and earns badges and recognition like employee of the month.

Points are also spendable. A reward catalogue lets them be exchanged for something real, drawn either from a platform-wide list or from a company's own, with every redemption recorded end to end.

The hardest part of the design was not the game — it was that four different people need four genuinely different products out of it.

An individual joining on their own wants public challenges and a global ranking. An employee wants their own company's challenges and to be measured against colleagues. A company administrator needs to approve staff, create challenges, configure rewards and see whether engagement is real. A platform administrator sits above all of it, across every organisation.

Rather than four apps, it is one platform where the same features change shape depending on who is holding it — which is why a company can be added without anything being rebuilt for them.

It runs as a web app and a mobile app, sharing one account and one set of points, because logging a gym visit happens at the gym and reviewing a quarter's engagement happens at a desk. Notifications arrive in-app, by email, or on a phone, and each person chooses which.

The platform is currently being rebuilt on newer foundations. The product below is the shape it takes; the rebuild is about how well it will hold up as organisations are added to it.