Amazon introduces mental health support
Amazon Care will be expanding its wellbeing offering with a variety of mental health services.
Why You Should Care
Wellbeing initiatives have become essential for employers to keep staff.
Discover how Amazon Care plans to help its employees and users with a new offering.
In recent years, e-commerce goliath Amazon has expanded its employee benefits offering as it aims to become the “Earth’s best employer“.
The company has invested in a range of initiatives from bolstering education programs to giving parents more work flexibility.
Now the company is focused on wellbeing. Amazon’s healthcare service, Amazon Care, will now have a behavioral health element that helps employees with their mental health.
The company’s website explained: “Amazon Care makes behavioral health a priority for your workplace. Our primary care providers treat a range of common behavioral health concerns.
The statement continued: “We’ve also teamed up with Ginger, an on-demand mental healthcare platform, as an optional add-on to Amazon Care.”
Amazon Care does not only help employees within the organization, but it is also available to external companies as a service.
Improving wellbeing at Amazon
Amazon Care has not yet launched its collaboration with Ginger, but continues to offer vaccinations, health checks, and preventative measures for ailments.
Ginger enables users to book video-based therapy sessions at any time and any place. Ginger recently merged with Headspace to create Headspace Health. On the back of this, the company has a value of $3 billion and supports 2,700 enterprises.
This experience of dealing with a large customer base will be useful, as the deal with Amazon Care will undoubtedly boost Ginger’s user base.
Amazon Care promises a streamline service and the company has said: “Employees get mental and physical health care in one place. With the behavioral health add-on, we’ll handle coordination between Care teams and Ginger therapists and psychiatrists.”
Given Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy recent public backing of Ginger, it is perhaps unsurprising that this deal has been made. Jassy previously described Ginger as a “significant disruptor”, according to Insider.
The company is also investing in its overall healthcare business including a prescription service called Amazon Pharmacy.
There is no doubt that employee wellbeing is increasingly important to employers. Amid the ‘Great Resignation‘ employees have requested greater benefits that help with their work-life balance and employers have struggled to keep staff.
Tools like Ginger can help companies improve the wellbeing of employees, but it goes without saying that workplace culture and workloads also have to be addressed when reaching for a quality working environment.
UNLEASH has reached out to Amazon and Ginger about the deal, but is yet to receive a response.
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Senior Journalist
Dan combines his first-hand experience alongside the latest news and opinions in the HR Technology space.
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