Corporate wellness programs have become the trending employee benefits. Post-pandemic, every employer now is offering some kind of corporate wellness programs to support employee health and wellness.
Employee wellness programs use web-based tools to deliver the modules and their associated wellness activities. These web-based tools and systems are referred to by many terms like wellness program platforms, digital wellness platforms, health and wellness platforms, and likewise.
What are Digital Wellness Platforms?
Unlike earlier times, employee wellness programs have evolved to meet the employee expectations of workplace benefits and perks. While previously it was mostly 401(K) plans, insurance, and employer-sponsored healthcare costs, they now include holistic wellness programs, wellness challenges, health coaching, and more. To make sure the employee wellness programs are delivered right, they need well-designed wellness platforms.
Corporate wellness programs are one of the essential and valuable employee benefits, and they play a huge role in employee wellness and workplace productivity. To make sure these employee benefits are organized and administered well, employers can use digital wellness platforms.
Ideally, a good corporate wellness platform should be able to accomplish the 4 key objectives for the employee wellness program to be a success –
- Create awareness
- Motivate
- Teach
- Encourage
Most corporate wellness programs claim to use an employee wellness portal. However, they differ from the digital wellness platforms as the wellness portals have a cookie-cutter design and the wellness platforms have a more scalable and flexible design.
Features of Corporate Wellness Platforms
Having an employee health and wellness platform can provide many benefits to the online wellness programs. A good corporate wellness platform should be configured to meet all the health and wellness needs of the company and must be compliant with the employee wellness program strategies.
A typical corporate wellness platform must possess all the tools and resources to support the wellness program features and modules. The corporate wellness software must be capable of implementing and managing strategies to –
- Boost employee engagement
- Promote employee health and wellness
- Improve workplace productivity
- Reduce healthcare costs
- Prevent chronic disease risks
Here are the top features that digital wellness platforms with the right corporate wellness software must include for a successful employee wellness program –
1. Conduct Health Risk Assessment
Health risk assessments are evidence-based questionnaire that gives an insight into the health and wellness status of the employees. The outcomes of the HRA and biometric screenings help in collecting all the needed information needed to shape the strategy of the corporate wellness programs. They also create awareness of the different wellness aspects that must be improved. The wellness platform must be capable of assessing the individual employee data to suggest and motivate employees to choose the right wellness challenges and programs.
2. Flexible and Customizable
Personalizing the employee wellness platform is an effective employee engagement strategy. When the wellness platform carries the company’s logo, brand colors, and familiar features, it makes the employees feel like a part of their company. Also, each employee has a different health and wellness requirement. The employee wellness platform must be flexible and scalable with easily configurable strategies to meet the unique health and wellness needs of the entire workforce. In addition to the flexibility and adaptibility, it must be ensured that the wellness platform provider protects all the employee data.
3. Corporate wellness challenges
Health and wellness challenges are an integral and important part of corporate wellness programs. They are effective employee engagement strategies and play a major role in building healthy habits. Apart from offering holistic wellness challenges ideas, they should also be fun and effective to ensure maximum employee engagement. Also, since the individual health and wellness requirements are different, the wellness challenges cannot be approached with the one-size-fits-all strategy. They must be customizable and flexible so the employees can choose the best-suited wellness challenges for their health and wellness.
4. Wearable and Apps Integration
Self-reported data, especially for step count and activity is mostly flawed, which does not lead the employees in the right direction to their wellness goals. Employee wellness platforms must be supported with the right corporate wellness software to allow easy integration with popular fitness devices and tracking apps. This corporate wellness technology integration makes it easy for the employees to log their activities and track them to ensure they are achieving their daily wellness goals. Apart from keeping the data accurate, real-time data integration from tracking devices and apps can engage participants.
5. Reporting and Tracking
Almost every process and wellness activity needs to be analyzed with the data and outcomes to know the progress and evaluate the success. Having real-time reports, and analytics gives all the needed data and also saves a lot of time. The corporate wellness software must be able to gather all the employee activity and wellness data to generate instant reports for quick organizing and interpretations. The workplace wellness platform must also support automatic tracking tools that provide aggregate and individual activity data for the administrators to analyze the progress and make any needed changes to their wellness strategy.
6. Communication and Event Scheduler
Studies show most employees are not aware that their company offers a corporate wellness program, and the ones who knew about the existence of the program were not aware of how it worked for their wellness benefits. This proves that communication is important to create awareness about the corporate wellness program and to motivate them to participate and engage in it. Creating targeted communications from the corporate wellness platform reduces confusion and delivers the right message to the employees. And so, the wellness platform must be equipped with the right tools and templates to make sure sending out notifications and other communication materials is as easy as possible.
Likewise, having an events scheduler on the corporate wellness platform is also very convenient. It can help in creating and scheduling wellness events like annual flu shots, biometric screenings, or outdoor team challenges, and with the right communication, the information can be passed over to all the eligible employees at the right time.
7. Rewards Management System
Rewards and incentives are one of the best employee engagement strategies. Employers can offer rewards and incentives to boost wellness program participation and encourage employees to achieve their wellness goals. The employee wellness platform must support an incredible rewards management strategy that makes it easy for the employees to earn the reward points, track, and redeem them with the incentives of their choice. The corporate wellness software must be capable of automating the entire rewards program strategy including administering, validating, tracking, and executing the wellness program rewards and incentives. When a good digital wellness platform automatically allows employees to track and redeem their incentives, it becomes easier for them to stay consistent through their wellness program and also enjoy the entire journey.
8. Educational Resources
One of the key features of a corporate wellness program that must be supported by the health and wellness platforms is to offer educational resources. The right digital health education content can be a wealth of knowledge to the employees to learn and understand their health issues and to educate themselves about managing them. The wellness program platform can offer various educational resources like webinars, video content, ebooks, forums, quizzes, and more to educate employees. The wellness platform can also have discussions and groups where employees can share health tips, recipes, their wellness journey experiences, and other feedback to help individuals understand and adopt a healthy lifestyle.
9. Health Coaching Tools
While offering educational resources can be very helpful to educate and create awareness about employee health and wellness, having a more personalized touch boosts the chances of higher employee engagement and commitment to the wellness program. Holistic health coaching programs must have corporate wellness platforms that allow health professionals to study the employee health data, understand their lifestyle habits, evaluate the health risks, and recommend the best ways to improve their health. Most corporate wellness programs, like that from Wellness360, have an exclusive wellness program platform for the coaches to track employee progress, access coaching data, and carry out all their health coaching activities.
10. Responsive Mobile App
High employee engagement is the key to the success of corporate wellness programs, and so, the employee wellness platform must be capable of supporting and managing all the required employee engagement strategies. Having a responsive mobile corporate wellness app version of the digital wellness platform is one effective way of boosting and making engagement easy. A wellness program platform that is responsive and can be accessed from the smartphone, tablet, or desktop makes it easier for employees to carry out their wellness program activities. The mobile app must be a responsive replica of the web version of the digital wellness platform. It must be equipped with all the needed corporate wellness software to allow employees to carry out their wellness activities, including taking the health assessments, participating in wellness challenges, logging their wellness activities, tracking progress, tracking rewards, connecting their fitness device or app, view real-time analytics, accessing educational resources, and everything from the wellness program.
A slick employee wellness platform is what can make a huge difference in the success and failure of the corporate wellness program. With the right approach to designing and managing the employee wellness platform, employers can offer intrinsic motivation to the employees to engage in the corporate wellness program and get healthy.