Mental Wellness For Teams
Case Study

Executive Summary

From March to June 2022 Founders First and VentureXpert Advisors conducted a randomized, controlled test with twenty-two sales development representatives (SDRs) who used the Founders First mental wellness app and participated in group accountability sessions led by a trained facilitator.

Group accountability sessions utilized the Peak Ability format created and licensed by Founders First and all sessions were led by a trained facilitator at VentureXpert Advisors. The app-only group was given access to the Founders First mental wellness app but was not given the opportunity to attend Peak Ability sessions. The Peak Ability group was given access to the app and was asked to attend one Peak Ability session each week.

All SDRs in the test and control groups were new hires who were trained and began sales development efforts during the ninety-day test period. Participants in the Peak Ability group saw 78% engagement with self-awareness and self-care practices and participants in the app-only group saw 29% engagement with self-awareness and self-care practices.

The Peak Ability group experienced 200% more emotional improvement, 300% more self-awareness, and completed 19 times more self-care activities than the app-only group during the test period.
Job retention rates were 30% higher in the Peak Ability group than the app-only group and quota-attainment rates were 85% higher in the Peak Ability group than the app-only group. Job retention and quota-attainment rates in both the app-only and Peak Ability groups were higher than the same rates in recent cohorts of new SDR hires at the same organization.

About Both Companies

VentureXpert Advisors is focused on taking a 360 holistic approach when working with clients. That includes paying attention to all facets of a business such as, growth trajectory, retention and wellness, productivity metrics, burn & churn, etc. The world is more complex than ever before. Employers are struggling with performance and retention while their employees are struggling with burn out symptoms (stressed, overwhelmed, etc). VentureXpert Advisors prides itself on being able to spot bottlenecks by finding the root cause of an issue. Once we identify a sticking point, we are able to make the change necessary within an organization and harness it to create explosive growth.
VentureXpert Advisors is an executive consulting firm that specializes in high growth strategy. We offer personal service and best-in-class consulting with an all-star team of subject-matter experts and entrepreneurs who've already built and scaled their own ventures.

 

Founders First uses the power of psychology-based behavior change to improve the retention and performance of corporate team members. Our mental wellness app and facilitated weekly sessions increase team retention by 30% and raise the performance of team members by 85%.
Corporate teams are experiencing burnout, depression and anxiety at the highest rates they’ve ever seen while productivity and job retention rates are falling. Passive learning tools like Headspace fail to help 90% of team members and workshops and trainings aren’t scalable. Founders First is different because each team member experiences an emotional support program tailored to their greatest opportunities for growth, enabling self-awareness and self-care, in an automated platform at scale.



 

What is a Peak Ability Group?

Peak Ability groups are small groups of team members that meet for thirty minutes each week to practice self-awareness and self-care together. The process works on top of the Founders First mental wellness app and drives engagement as high as 78% across teams. Each Peak Ability session is led by a trained facilitator.

Peak Ability has been shown to increase team members’: Emotional improvement by 200%Self-awareness by 300%Self-care by 1,900%

 

Some Screenshots from the App

 

Give your entire team the support they need to double their performance and stay in their jobs longer.

Key Takeaways

Over a ninety-day period Founders First and VentureXpert Advisors demonstrated that the combination of a mental wellness app plus group accountability sessions were able to produce significant improvements in job retention and job performance in the study group of 22 sales development representatives (SDRs) as compared to the control group.

The randomized, controlled study is the first of its kind to show that mental wellness practices can deliver the high level of behavior-change required to support corporate objectives.

Corporate team members are experiencing burnout, depression, and anxiety at the highest rates we’ve ever seen across the workforce.

Corporate team members are delivering lower productivity and are resigning from their jobs at higher rates than ever before.

Statistics

Founders First has been shown to improve job retention by 30%

Founders First has been shown to improve job performance by 85%

 

Peak Ability delivers the highest levels of mental wellness app engagement (78%) across corporate teams.

Peak Ability has been shown to increase emotional improvement by 200%, self-awareness by 300%, and self-care by 1,900% when compared to app-only mental wellness tools.

Testimonials and Statements

  • "Being a manager and participant of the program, I have had the opportunity to interact with a group of employees that I wouldn't typically be able to connect with in our normal workflow. We created a bond and support system that I know we will carry throughout our careers. When looking at the statistics, it is very clear that those who participated in the program are not only sticking around longer but they are producing more outcomes. The Founders First app and Peak Ability program allowed us to take a deeper dive into our individual needs and gave us a level of self-understanding that is sometimes hard to find."
    - Chelsea Overbey (Director of HR)

  • "The Founders First app has become an important tool for me in my daily work life. Having the app aided me to start my day with self-reflection, so I can acknowledge where I am mentally, and create a plan to how to best approach the day. It's helped me to understand where I should prioritize my energy which has helped in easing the anxieties that come up in my day-to-day life as an employee. I really enjoyed the collaborative approach of our Monday morning meetings in our Peak Ability group. Being able to reflect with my co-workers as we started the week together gave us the chance to share our strategies on how we were going to achieve our goals, and built a space for us to talk about our struggles, celebrate our achievements, and focus on areas of improvement. It was also an awesome way to get to know and collaborate with our remote co-workers!"
    - Kalese Warfield (Sales Development Representative)

  • “As stress and anxiety are at all time highs across the workforce ineffective coping mechanisms are driving chronic burnout and plummeting personal performance. Changing behaviors is hard and until now psychology-based behavior change has been the realm of executive managers only. With this study we’ve demonstrated that the Founders First mental wellness app and Peak Ability sessions can deliver higher job retention and outstanding improvements in job performance at scale in just ninety-days. This is the moment where mediocre companies will continue backfilling and training teams full of low performers, and great companies will accelerate past them by supporting their entire teams with high-engagement mental wellness tools that drive significant business results.”
    - Aaron Houghton, Founder and CEO, Founders First