Whether you are the employer, the HR administrator, or the wellness program supervisor – the ultimate goal of the corporate wellness program is to help improve employee engagement, workplace health, and organizational productivity.
Most wellness programs implement employee engagement strategies that help them adopt better habits and make healthier choices to lead a life of holistic wellness in the long run.
And, from the employer’s perspective – these wellness programs reduce healthcare costs, decrease turnover rate, improve employee retention, boost productivity, enhance engagement, and keep the employees happy, active, efficient, and loyal.
A recent study showed that 48% of the employees chose their employer based on the employee benefit plans and perks they offered over a higher salary.
With almost 72% of the organizations improving their employee benefit offerings in the past year, the employee retention rate was at 28% for companies offering the right workplace wellness programs, compared to the lesser 11% for companies that did not offer any employee wellness programs or benefits.
Although offering employee wellness programs have relatively helped many organizations do better, it is not so with all of them to achieve similar accomplishment levels. To attain success with these wellness programs, you need to design it in a way that helps transform your employees and your workplace culture.
Here are the 3 pointers you need to consider primarily while designing a fitting corporate wellness program for your workplace.
Purposing The Wellness Program Outline
Knowing the goals you want to achieve with the program is what helps in designing the entire plan. Most wellness programs focus on improving employee engagement and health, which in the long run helps with better ROI. Align the company’s resources along with the goals to outline the plan while considering vital aspects like –
- Higher employee retention
- Reduced absenteeism rate
- Improved employee engagement
- Better employee productivity
- Reduced healthcare costs
Also, consider the interests of your employees along with their demographical data, health conditions, and more importantly, seek complete support from the administration since employer contribution plays a major role in empowering employees.
Sketching Corporate Wellness Program Ideas
Once you have outlined your goals, it is time to put all the options on the bench to choose the one that best fits your employees and budget. Know what kind of programs and wellness challenges are you willing to offer – the one that focuses on improving employee health, engagement, or ROI.
Understand what tools are needed to derive the best results for your corporate wellbeing program – you may need to get HRAs, biometric screenings, and other medical tests if you are looking for a health-contingent plan. Health coaching, gym memberships, lifestyle & disease management sessions, and preventive care are a few aspects that are gaining momentum in the wellness programs. Also, wellness challenges are an integral part of the program that drives engagement while improving employee health.
Sketch a formula that focuses on helping employees make desirable health and wellness changes, voluntarily. Offer outcome-based incentives or rewards to the users for participating in an event to encourage better participation and engagement.
Launch Your Wellness Programs At Work
Most companies start by getting an in-house wellness program planning, but with time they realize it is a waste of resources. Wellness portals, like Wellness360, are the most conducive way of adding beneficial essence to your wellness programs by giving easy access to necessary data, integration, tracking, and other resources. Also, they allow better communication with the employees and make it easy to review the progress.
Communication plays a major role during the launch and in post-launch shots. Convey the right message about the upcoming challenges, events, or wellness activities to the users via notifications, newsletters, or any suitable way. Provide easily accessible tools to the users to make it easy for them to stay persistent through the program.
At the end of the day, you will know if your efforts to improve workplace health and culture are a success or not only by measuring it. But what do you measure? Depending on the type of wellness program you choose and the activities you execute, you should measure the metrics accordingly by health reports, surveys, etc., and see if they are close to your business goals. Health-contingent and behavior improvement programs take time to show their impact, and so, their financial payback may be a minimum at the beginning.
In the long run, you can measure your ROI, VOI, participation rates, absenteeism rates, employee retention rates, healthcare costs, and other such metrics to know if your wellness program is helping you reach your corporate wellness goals.