The term “wellness” is usually linked with gym memberships or green smoothies, restricting its use to only physical health. In truth, happiness is the consequence of intricate interactions among numerous characteristics that, when cultivated harmoniously, improve health and quality of life. Employee survey examples show that 80 percent of employees of companies with thorough employee wellness programs feel engaged and cared for by their employers.
Effective wellness programs target and promote holistic aspects of health. The secret to a successful workplace wellness program is to promote general health while keeping it enjoyable. If you can’t get your staff involved, your wellness program ideas will fizzle out soon. So, make your efforts enjoyable, experiment with new ideas, and discover what your team loves the most.
What is the Definition of a Wellness Program?
Employers use employee wellness programs to enhance employee health and aid individual employees in overcoming specific health-related challenges. The company can give mandatory employee training, staff seminars, or even collaborate with a third-party supplier that provides a range of wellness initiatives. The program enables your company or plans to provide you with premium discounts, cash prizes, gym memberships, and other incentives in exchange for your participation.
Employees are essential assets to any organization, and ensuring their good mental and physical health puts them in a superior position to perform successfully. Employee health and happiness typically have a direct impact on a company’s productivity and revenues. Many businesses see this and are willing to invest in such initiatives.
Business wellness programs are not the same as employee wellness programs. Apart from boosting employee health, these programs also serve other goals, including as :
- Boost employee engagement
- Reduce absenteeism
- Enhance employee retention
- Boost employee morale
- It breaks up the monotony.
- Reduce the expense of staff healthcare.
- Increases adaptability
- Maintains staff motivation and productivity
- Guaranteed Return on Investment
- Enhances work-life balance
There are 05 phases to Launching an Employee Wellness Programs
A workplace wellness program consistently changes. As a result, there is no need to begin construction on an all-inclusive wellness facility right away. Begin small and progressively encourage workers to adopt healthy lifestyle choices such as exercising, eating well, and eliminating bad habits. Here are five steps to creating a corporate wellness program that your workers will like.
Employee Polling-
Ask employees anonymously what services they would value the most. Make sure to ask if they want site resources, referrals, or payment for alternative sources.
Determine Program Sponsors-
Find employees that are enthusiastic about wellness and devoted to motivating their coworkers. Effective employee wellness programs require executive support. Sponsors help by modeling healthy behavior and taking part in wellness activities. Finally, this will stimulate other employees to consider their health.
Form a Wellness Committee-
Select a group of employees who are committed to improving the profitability of your business. Form a group and assign them the role of change champions to design a program that best benefits your workers. This group is in charge of evaluating survey results, selecting popular initiatives, establishing challenges, and more.
Check out our other latest blogs-
How To Build an Effective Workload Management System For Your Organization?How EmpMonitor Manages Workflow Efficiently in 2021?
Optimizing Tech To Boost Workplace Performance
Define your Objectives-
Determine your program’s objectives in collaboration with your sponsors and committee members. Assume your workers desire to enhance their physical health. You might establish one goal for how many employees pass an initial wellness exam and another for how many employees participate in a challenge, setting goals for all of your program’s health initiatives to track your success.
Find the Proper Wellness Resources-
Once you’ve decided on the services you need, go to different suppliers to look into solutions that might include in your health program. There is no need to pick a single supplier and implement every endeavor they offer because it contains a package.
Smoking cessation, for example, may not be a program you want to include in your wellness benefits if smoking is not widespread in your office. In the meanwhile, you could wish to provide more robust resources for healthy nutrition. Concentrate on the resources that will be most beneficial to your staff rather than those that will influence the costs of your business health plan.
07 Employee Wellness Programs Ideas
The seven easy dimensions of health to address through a employee wellness programs are listed below.
Fitness-
It’s difficult to overestimate the value of fitness. A healthy lifestyle benefits you in all aspects of your life, including your job. And, regardless of your organization’s budget, there are several strategies to promote fitness.
Offering an on-site fitness facility or sports area is a fantastic bonus that will undoubtedly increase employee fitness, but it will necessitate a considerable commitment of resources. Starting fitness clubs at your company based on activities your team members love may be just as successful as offering or paying for fitness courses. And reimbursing workers for gym or health club membership fees is a straightforward, measurable method to demonstrate your support in their fitness.
Yoga Sessions-
Sometimes organizations provide their team members with yoga lessons twice a week, transferred to their rooftop, having beautiful views of coasts and mountains. The most crucial prerequisite for practicing yoga is a dedicated location, and many businesses utilize conference or break rooms to host yoga courses for team members throughout the workday.
Yoga and meditation are great ways to de-stress. Startup and public relations team members typically work under pressure and on weekends. Yoga is an excellent approach to incorporate self-care into the workplace so that team members do not feel guilty about taking time away from work.
Provide Mental Health Support-
Working from home can alleviate many typical stressors. For example, you no longer have to sit in traffic every day or worry about being late for work. However, some mental health issues come with remote employment.
Surprisingly, remote workers are more likely to struggle to obtain a good night’s sleep. That’s an issue for more than 40% of remote workers. The specific causes of this, however, are uncertain. It’s also worth mentioning that managers and HR professionals are concerned about their employees’ mental health for several reasons. It would not, however, qualify you as a therapist. As a result, it is not your obligation to ‘fix’ any issues that arise here.
Instead, it is an employer’s responsibility to provide mental health assistance, including making it easy for employees to get treatment from certified experts if necessary. You may use the following framework to accomplish this:
- Create innominate health questionnaires – You should send these out regularly, such as once a quarter. You aim to see if there is a pattern of workers suffering from some issues, such as loneliness, weariness, low motivation, or stress. When you notice an order, you may have ample discussion about what you can do to help.
- Treat mental health like you would physical health – If you wish to create a welcoming environment, Setting a good example is frequently required. You should also make your employees feel at peace with taking time off for stress, just as they would for back pain or a dental visit.
- It is necessary to highlight resources – As with dental or eye care, a rising number of organizations provide access to online therapy or counseling as an employee perk.
Getting your employees to take their mental health seriously is frequently half the battle. As a culture, we often celebrate unhealthy and demanding job behaviors. This problem may have become worse in the past.
Opportunities to Steer the Ship-
Even technical superstars demand a voice in how their company is going to run. Allow them to join the board of directors, even if it’s just for a short period or one meeting. They will appreciate the opportunity to voice their thoughts and opinions. You’ll be surprised how much this will aid the company’s strategic planning.
Using technologies such as Empmonitor, an employee monitoring program, is one method to assess their performance and help them become leaders.
Here’s how to use Empmonitor to calculate employee productivity based on the number of days in a week.
- Log in to your EmpMonitor dashboard using your login information.
- As the main dashboard appears on the screen, you will notice four elements that will assist you in measuring the productivity of your staff.
- Scroll down and select the “active days” option. That will allow you to calculate productivity based on the days of the week in a pop-up window.
- A graph will emerge, displaying your productivity for each day.
- You can see the different days and the percentage of productivity; if you hover your mouse over the graph, you can see the number of staff present every day.
- You may also pick the length, location, and department for the period above the graph. The graph will automatically adapt based on your selections, whether it is a week or a month.
Career Guidance-
Employee happiness and professional growth go hand in hand. As part of the employee wellness programs, offer to coach to keep remote employees’ skills sharp and their employment flourishing. You may either pay for a certain number of sessions or work with a coaching business to provide employees with a discounted pricing on services. These sessions can help to bridge the gap between virtual one-on-one meetings and, not to mention that they provide employees with a safe place to consider options and a neutral individual to bounce ideas off.
Promoting Good Eating Habits-
Healthy eating habits should be encouraged since we are what we eat. Relying on unhealthy comfort foods may sap employees’ vitality and leave them feeling disconnected and sluggish, so do everything you can to make healthy eating fun and simple for your staff.
Examine all of your alternatives in this regard to determine the match for your team. Initiate ordering nutritious and enjoyable lunches for them regularly to provide healthy snacking options for the entire company. If your staff is scattered, you may mail snacks to them or compensate them for obtaining food from healthy sources, such as local farmers’ markets. It is also beneficial to educate staff on what healthy eating entails, plus eateries in the region that provide healthy options.
Use Subscriptions in Place of In-office Incentives-
Increased awareness of employee well-being has altered the contemporary office over the last several decades. Another cliche, but consider all the Silicon Valley campuses with ping-pong tables and beer fridges.
It has been washed away by the increasing use of remote work. Instead of working on computer campuses, thousands of individuals are now working in modest furnished apartments. Obviously, during the start of the COVID epidemic, nobody’s main priority was how to acquire the free fruit they’re used to at work or to attend their Monday morning yoga class.
However, the supply of these amenities is for a reason: employee well-being. There’s no reason why this isn’t just as important in the realm of remote working. The solution is to provide the same benefits to remote workers. Look at the approaches taken below:
- Subscription services- The use of subscription services in place of the workplace is a perk. It is preferable to replace benefits in a like-for-like fashion. That is, instead of free fruit, subscribe to a fruit of the month subscription. Replace workplace exercise sessions with online alternatives or even credit toward club membership.
- Find equal value benefits- If it is not possible to substitute in-office perks with a similar subscription, it is preferable to provide something similar to your employees. For example, if you regularly have a movie marathon in the office on Friday afternoons, it’s generally wise to let your remote employees go early.
- Allow employees to customize their benefits package – Another excellent idea is to provide remote workers with their benefits budget. You may then equip a variety of rewards from which customers can pick based on their requirements and desires.
The primary thing to remember is that even if your workers may work in their PJs, they still deserve the same advantages and benefits as previously.
Goal Sharing Sessions-
Encouraging workers to discuss their objectives is one method to inspire them and keep morale high. Create a central location for coworkers to publish goals such as cloud documents or collaborative whiteboards. Create a goal tracking spreadsheet and distribute it to participants. Check-in with the team regularly for updates. Throughout the activity, teammates support and advise one another on how to achieve goals.
Encourage workers to respond to and celebrate one another’s announcements and accomplishments. As an added incentive, give the winner a gift such as a free dinner, a virtual party, or a digital badge.
A Win-Win Situation for Everyone
So, why are employee wellness programs beneficial? Well! Employee wellness programs – help employees become happier, healthier, and more active at work by increasing popularity and improving people’s lives. The goal is to encourage better lifestyle choices. Such concepts are successful when a supportive, positive atmosphere of pleasure and camaraderie encourages people to choose or maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Wellness that is enjoyable, effective, and free is a win-win situation! Workplace Wellness initiatives help to create a more happy and productive workplace. Long-term improvements bring long-term advantages for your company. Begin designing your first employee wellness programs right away. Prepare to start altering people’s lives. With little or no effort in developing a corporate challenge, the net effect is a more engaged and productive staff that performs better – everyone wins!
