Akina Automates Onboarding With a Personal Touch

An Innovative App for Personalized Physiotherapy

During his PHD studies at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems in Zurich, Florian Haufe began to question conventional physiotherapy practices. What role could software play in keeping patients connected with their physical therapists? How could it help guide patients with their rehabilitation program between sessions?

These questions sparked the idea for Akina. Together with Michele Xiloyannis, Florian co-founded Akina with the mission of making movement more enjoyable and effective for patients exercising at home. “We saw a lot of great devices for inpatient rehabilitation,” explains CEO and Co-Founder Florian. “But these patients often went home with little more than a paper printout or sometimes a video app. That’s what we are fixing at Akina.”

There are two main components to Akina’s solution. Firstly, there is a web application that uses a webcam to analyze a patient’s movements when they are performing exercises at home. In addition, Akina offers a remote monitoring service that allows therapists to monitor what exercises their patients have been doing at home. This helps the patients to know that they are doing the exercises correctly, while providing a detailed, objective basis for the next therapy session.

How Hybrid Work Sustains Akina’s Company Culture

Besides two office locations in Zurich, Akina employees also have the option to work remotely. This hybrid work model was a conscious decision by the founders. “There’s a very human urge to connect with other people and have face-to-face interactions,” says Florian. “Flexibility is an important benefit of working remotely but, for us, it’s these in-person moments that contribute most to building the culture and a sense of belonging.”

Having employees from Hong Kong, China, Malaysia, and various parts of Europe also helps to enrich the company culture at Akina. “We pride ourselves on being very inclusive and giving respect and appreciation based on merit,” adds Florian. Clear communication and well-defined job roles are two other factors that contribute to Akina’s successful culture.

To efficiently acclimatize new hires to this culture while managing daily HR tasks, Akina turned to flair for support.

A Smooth Transition to the New HR Platform

To support its growing team and improve the onboarding journey, Akina decided to switch to flair. Reflecting on the implementation and user onboarding process, Florian says, “I’d say we had a very efficient onboarding process. I could see the overall progress and we had very focused calls when needed. That worked very well.”

The personal support from flair’s Customer Success team helped ensure success. The team documented every step of the process on a shared Notion board and sent personalized videos to provide additional support where needed.

Starting Small, Thinking Big

As flair includes a wide range of features for recruiting and HR, Akina introduced new features gradually. “We started with the bread-and-butter basics,” says Florian. “For example, we needed to have a trackable system for who will be on vacation at which point in time.” With flair, Akina now has a clear record of all absences and a user-friendly interface where employees can request time off.

A further enhancement is the Slack integration, which Akina uses to instantly receive and respond to absence requests. “If I get a holiday request, it’s really useful,” explains Florian. “It comes as a Slack message, which I can quickly review and approve. I don’t need to search through messages and it doesn’t get lost in my email inbox.”

Akina is now using flair to improve efficiency in other areas too. For example, to save time and ensure that new hires settle in to the company’s inclusive and merit-based culture, Akina has automated parts of its employee onboarding process. “We have different workflow templates that we use to onboard new hires,” says Florian. “We’ve already automated the workflows involving employee data input and file uploads.” This saves Akina time as their business hires more people and grows.

To ensure that the onboarding process remains personal, Akina uses flair’s Loom integration to attach videos to the onboarding workflow. This adds a human touch and a degree of personalization to the process, which Florian says “instills a sense of trust and recognition in incoming candidates from day one.”

Improving Employee Engagement With flair

As Akina grows, Akina is finding new ways to use flair to engage with employees and expand the company culture. “One thing we’re starting to explore right now is flair’s potential for employee engagement and community building,” says Florian. “That’s something I’m quite excited about because I think one of the three core roles of a CEO is to keep the team focused and happy. flair will help me with that.”

If you’re interested in learning more about Akina’s innovations in physiotherapy, visit their website. And if you’d like to see for yourself how flair software can help you with recruitment, onboarding, absence management, and more, book a free demo.