How Sprout Wellness is helping companies address burnout and mental health in the workplace

Neer Sharma, CEO of Sprout Wellness, joined Yahoo Finance Live today to discuss how the company is helping to address burnout and mental help in the workplace.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Let's turn our attention to something else, though, especially as we emerge from the pandemic, which is the wellbeing of not only yourself, but your fellow colleagues, your employees. Neer Sharma is the CEO of Sprout Wellness. And we bring her in now to the stream to discuss-- excuse me, bring him in now into the stream to discuss how Sprout Wellness is helping people move forward. Can you tell us more about how Sprout deals with burnout? And welcome to Yahoo Finance Live.

NEER SHARMA: Yeah, thanks for having me, Adam. First, I want to talk a little bit about the pandemic, and then I'll get into your question. Let's say the pandemic has really changed the focus on well-being across the world. Pre-pandemic, well-being was a nice to have and not a priority in many organizations. There's now clear evidence that organizations have changed their view and now say wellness is a must have. The toll of mental and physical well-being over the last 14 months has revealed that you need to support your employees and customers in a different manner.

Basically from my perspective, customers have hit a pandemic wall. Burnout has increased by 33% in 2021. And there's been 400 million lost days in the USA for lost workdays, which contributes to almost $300 billion in employee stress costs. These facts alone bring health and wellness to the forefront of most industries. So that's where Sprout comes in. This is what we do. Simply stated, we empower organizations to embrace well-being through two platforms. Both technologies educate, engage, and inspire healthy behaviors, and both are powered by data science and backed by 25 years of academic research.

First, our Sprout at Work platform is designed for employers and employee relationships. It is an end-to-end solution that is targeted at corporate wellness. And we've just introduced our new platform, which is called the Sprout Open Health API. It's designed for consumer brands and customer relationships. It includes all the goodness of the core features that we use with our Sprout at Work platform, but it uses a customer-facing app instead.

So what we used was the pandemic, for us, it was a perfect time to strategize and launch a new product that serves more than just workplace wellness because we've seen the market expand. And the Sprout Open Health API is a vertical agnostic product. In our opinion, it is the future of well-being efforts with global consumer brands who are looking to improve customer loyalty or accelerate user engagement or increased personalization through data enrichment capabilities, all accomplished by capturing and using health data.

SEANA SMITH: Well, and Neer, let's talk a little bit more about that. Because when we talk about who is using your service right now, throughout the-- I guess, which industry is most likely to adapt something like this? Is it Silicon Valley? Is it Wall Street? Where are you seeing the most traction?

NEER SHARMA: Well, what's really interesting about it-- and I mentioned it very briefly-- it's vertical agnostic. So we're seeing it all over the place. We're seeing a lot of traction right now in retail with pharmacy, grocery. We're seeing traction in the financial sector and in loyalty, especially. Right now, that's where we're seeing the most traction. Just imagine from a retail perspective, if a retailer, a sports retailer, for example, knew that I took two million steps over the last six months, for example, then wouldn't it be a great opportunity for them to send me an offer or a discount on some running shoes?

Or imagine the connection to a grocer in that same scenario, where they know I'm physically active, and they may try to give me healthy food options or recommendations based on my activity level. This just all just makes that relationship much more relevant between retailers and consumers. And really, it just kind of layers on a whole level of data that is beyond what they have today that helps them create that personalization and create more meaningful, lasting bonds with their customers.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Does the year that we've all been through globally, though, skew that kind of information that one of your clients or customers may want, given how we changed our behaviors and may change them again emerging from the pandemic?

NEER SHARMA: Well, actually, you know, the year we've just had has actually accelerated things beyond my belief. What we're seeing with our corporate clients is-- what I've always called them is a bit of early adopters. As I mentioned earlier, I've always thought that loyalty-- or sorry, that well-being in the past has been a bit of a nice to have. And now it's a must have. The pandemic has just accelerated this. We know that from a corporate wellness standpoint, the market is forecasted by McKinsey to grow to $97 billion by 2027. And what we've seen in our own business is, we've doubled our revenues over the last fiscal. And that's in a pandemic year.

So everything that's happening out there has just accelerated what has been known by, I'll call it the early adopters and some of our clients that have been around for the last 10 years, managing this for their employees. And we're just taking it to a new level. We feel that we can service clients across the world from a consumer perspective, as well for those corporate brands that want to deepen their relationships. And the pandemic has just given us that opportunity to do so. It's really terrible to say that something terrible like a pandemic has changed the business opportunity. But to me, it's changed the ability for people to live happy, healthy lives, whether you're a consumer for a [INAUDIBLE] or whether you're an employee.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Neer Sharma is the CEO of Sprout Wellness. We wish everybody on your team the best--