Making wellness work in the workplace

A new survey from HealthFitness has revealed 79% of wellness program participants were “extremely satisfied” with their wellness programs and signalled they’d be more likely to stay with their current employer or refer someone else to the company because of them. That’s striking.

Plus, 70% of participants also said their wellness program was a signal that their employer “cares about them”. The survey shows an appetite is there. 60% of nonparticipants noted that they wanted to be involved with wellness, but for whatever reason couldn’t. A majority of nonparticipants (69%) simply “weren’t aware” of their employer’s wellness programs, but 53% felt barriers to participating were in place, including a lack of support from the employer.

We wanted to understand what the trends are for employer-led wellness in 2017 and how to make wellness successful in any organisation.

Here are the top 5 pointers from Caroline Sidell- Corporate Health & Wellbeing Company Director at Via Vita Health Ltd, Director and Owner Fit4ltd, National Wellbeing Lead for all PiXL Schools and Sunday Times PE Teacher of the Year.

Get company buy in

Create a wellbeing committee of key influencers from across your organisation to feed into your wellbeing strategy from HSE, HR, L&D, internal marketing, rewards etc and always make sure you have an executive sponsor in place. Having a cross functional team not only creates organisational buy in, but will garner different view points and ideas from across the business and may even open up additional resource and budgets to help deliver the strategy and the project.
Conduct a current state analysis

Look at the data and key trends within your organisation from absence figures to staff retention, to occupational health data to accidents to understand the key issues associated from poor employee health. This will enable you to set key objectives and KPIs around the performance of your health and wellness strategy. Look also at what health and wellness initiatives you have in place and evaluate their performance and see where the gaps are.
Employee consultation

Make sure to include your employees in the dialogue of creating your health and wellness programme through focus groups and surveys and even include them as part of your wellbeing committee. Aligning your strategy to meet both your organisation’s needs and the needs and wants of your employees is key to your strategy’s success.
Engagement, engagement, engagement

Creating the perfect strategy is one thing, but if no one knows about it, you aren’t going to reach people and deliver impact. Make sure you create an engagement plan to suit the structure of your organisation, key tips here are to create a network of wellbeing champions throughout your organisation and make sure that you create space within your internal communications strategy to get the message out to your employees whether they be based at head office or out in field.

Analysis, adjust, repeat

Make sure that your strategy is delivering against your set objectives and meeting the KPIs you have set for the programme. Monitor this each month and each quarter, looking at what’s working and what’s not, then adjust your strategy where necessary, and repeat. Aim for continuous improvement, innovation and authenticity- be true to the core reasons why as an organisation you are doing this and be as transparent with your stakeholders as possible.