produce a sense of well-being. “If you have an endless series of attaboys, you have a sense of steady progress, and people like knowing that they can make progress. The game never gives you negative feedback.”
On top of that, the six-member teams are small enough that everybody’s contribution counts, which brings peer pressure into the equation. And companies don’t force employees to join—rather, they seed the contests by getting human resources employees and key influencers on board first. As Bosworth puts it, “Who are you going to listen to more, some strange company you’ve never heard of before, or one of your senior coworkers?”
While Bosworth’s original concept for a Mint-style health dashboard may still sound enticing to the geeks of the world, including adherents of the so-called Quantified Self movement, Keas has completely abandoned the idea. In fact, not a single line of the company’s original code remains in the new game-centered product. For the most part, Bosworth says, the idea of continuous self-measurement only appeals to people who are fit already, or who have an analytical bent.
“Mint for health may sound cool to you and to Esther Dyson and to every doctor,” he says. “Unfortunately it’s just fundamentally flawed in terms of basic psychology.” At the companies where Keas is engaged, Bosworth says, the average employee has a body-mass index of around 28—well into overweight territory. “If you have a population like that, it’s hard to argue for the Mint model, because there is nothing you can tell these people that is good news … most people who have Type 2 diabetes have it because they didn’t want to think about this stuff.”
Based on the success of its pilot tests in 2010 and early 2011, Keas has attracted new customers like Delta Dental, Novartis, Progress Software, and Salesforce.com, and is now rolling out its program to 90,000 employees per quarter, Bosworth says. The starting price for the program is around $30 per employee per year.
For companies, the financial incentives should be obvious: statistics show that employees with a body-mass index above 28 cost their employers an extra $2,000 per year in healthcare expenses. But even if employees don’t lose weight, they report lower absenteeism and heightened feelings of well-being after participating in a Keas contest, Bosworth says. “We don’t have data yet on how much we are going to save these companies,” he says. “But the good news is that we can be a Salesforce.com-sized business just in terms of [producing] happier, more productive employees.”
To supplement Chris York, Bosworth says, Keas recently hired another young game designer. Bosworth says he doubts the company could have pulled off its pivot without the help of these representatives of the Facebook generation. “We are betting on the kids,” he says. “George and I can try to retrospectively educate ourselves, but our sensibilities and our experiences are not competitive advantages here.”
That said, Bosworth hasn’t given up his old quantitative ways. He says he still runs plenty of queries against Keas’s customer records, checking the company’s progress and scanning for patterns. “I am very good at looking at the data, and occasionally one of these kids will assert something to be true that isn’t. I will quickly discover that, and an animated debate will ensue. My job is to trust but verify. I may know how to build Lego blocks for adults—but the point is that that has nothing to do with Keas’s survival. Luckily, I also know how to build teams of good people, and how to listen to customers.”
