Could you tell us a bit about what WeSpire does? Please give a brief description of your company.

WeSpire’s employee experience technology drives positive behavior change at scale and creates workplaces that are great for your people, your financial performance, and for society. At its core, WeSpire is focused on driving employee activation around four key areas: sustainability, inclusive culture, social impact, and wellbeing. Through great content, cutting-edge gamification, social networking, and pro-social rewards, WeSpire motivates employees to see themselves as a key part of their company’s purpose. The WeSpire platform is effective because it is grounded in behavioral science. Our team of behavior change experts have long had an eye on the combination of employee engagement, digital tools, and positive impact. Our technology ensures your engagement programs deliver value to your businesses, employees, and communities. As a result, WeSpire significantly reduces the internal workload and expertise required to best manage employee engagement communications and measure impact.

What sets you apart and makes you unique?

WeSpire is the only technology platform that integrates all four areas of the employee experience: sustainability, inclusive culture, social impact, and wellbeing. Using the power of great content, fun competitions, cutting-edge gamification, social nudges and mobile and pro-social rewards, WeSpire changes employee behavior and provides organizations with unparalleled analytics about the business value of their employee engagement efforts through on demand reports. Our clients have achieved significant retention and performance benefits, driven operational efficiencies and ignited employee purpose and passion as a result.

Our behavioral programs library, for which we’ve won an Edison Innovation Award, contains hundreds of battle-tested campaigns that have been designed to increase an employees ability and motivation to take action across numerous themes and topics. This library is constantly being updated, both by the WeSpire content team and by our customers, who are given the opportunity to share their successful programs so that the strength of the WeSpire platform increases exponentially based on the experiences of our network.

Our cutting edge employee experience software and services are human-centered – always considering the experience of the end user, and rigorously backed by data. WeSpire leverages a high touch, hi-tech hands on approach to customer success has driven long term partnerships with some of the world’s largest companies.

Could you tell us a bit about you and your team?

We are headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, but our team is truly global. We have had a progressive approach to flexible and remote work for many years so it wasn’t challenging to transition during the pandemic. People are passionate about our mission and excited by our progress.

I’ve been in digital media and technology since graduating from The Tuck School of Business in 1998. WeSpire is my second startup but I also spent nine years with The New York Times company in senior marketing executive and general manager for digital roles.

Why is the Japanese market important to you?

With Japan’s commitment to being carbon neutral by 2050, as well as the strong alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals with the Public Private Action for Partnership (PPAP), the Japanese market is primed for WeSpire’s technology solutions. In combination with a population that is very tech savvy and is drawn to games and social networks, WeSpire offers unique opportunities for engaging employees in social impact, wellness, sustainability, and positive workplace culture initiatives. These types of programs have been shown to drive employee retention and satisfaction, as well as a sense of purpose and positive impact, which have been shown to increase performance, business value, and operational efficiency.

What are you looking for to make your next steps?

For us to justify opening our APAC office in Japan, we are looking for a cohort of 3-4 large customers to anchor us in the market. WeSpire has an interesting “network benefit” when it comes to localization of content. When one company starts to create campaigns for their employees, many times they will share them through our library. Therefore, everyone benefits and enables the market to flourish.