From supporting professional development goals to encouraging charitable giving, employee engagement initiatives can motivate your workforce, boost loyalty, and help you create a happier, healthier team.
Employee wellness programs, in particular, can ensure your staff feel stable, supported, and ready to work. These programs combat the stress and other potential negative health impacts of day-to-day work, helping you retain your current workforce long-term.
To help your business implement a wellness program that speaks to your employees’ unique needs, this guide will explore three best practices for launching a health-focused engagement initiative.
1. Take a holistic approach.
Wellness is a broad term, and your organization will need to decide what types of offerings to prioritize in your new program. While your business can offer targeted programs, employees are more likely to participate if you take a holistic approach that addresses a range of health needs.
When designing your wellness program, consider how you can address both physical and mental health. A few common offerings for physical and mental health include:
- Physical health: Gym memberships, access to step counting and other workout apps, reimbursement for physical health-related purchases, and health-related office challenges, like who can take the most steps in a month
- Mental health: Access to counseling services, meditation and mindfulness apps subscriptions, reimbursement for mental health-related purchases, and mental health-related office challenges, like who logs the most mindfulness hours in a month
When it comes to providing these benefits, Astron Solutions’ guide to employee compensation recommends taking a total rewards approach. This means employees receive all forms of compensation—both direct compensation like salaries and indirect compensation like the ability to participate in your wellness program—in one benefits package.
This approach simplifies compensation, making adding new benefits like a wellness program easy. Plus, while employees obviously work to receive a paycheck, many of them stick around due to the additional perks they receive, whether it’s a gym membership, access to professional counseling services, or a work environment that supports wellness.
2. Leverage intrinsic motivation.
360MatchPro’s guide to employee engagement explains that intrinsic motivation is essential for boosting employee performance, commitment, and creativity. Specifically, it cites competence, autonomy, and relatedness as key elements of intrinsic motivation.
To encourage participation in your wellness program, consider how you can tap into these factors. For example, you might:
- Practice employee appreciation. Encourage employee participation in your wellness program by regularly showing appreciation for their efforts. For instance, if you have a team-wide step challenge, you might shout out the top participants in a team meeting. However, keep in mind that some types of wellness programs, such as mental health-related offerings, may be private in nature. Keep these concerns in mind before reaching out to individual employees.
- Encourage personal goal creation. Wellness is often highly personal. While you can experiment with team-wide goals, consider encouraging employees to tailor their engagement to their specific needs. By allowing employees to access your wellness services in a way that works best for them, you increase the likelihood they will participate.
- Emphasize related organizational values. When launching a wellness initiative, you may struggle to attain employee buy-in if your team isn’t sure how your program relates to their work. For example, employees working in an office environment might know that good physical health is important in general, but not understand how it impacts their careers. Combat this by explaining how your wellness programs align with your corporate values, such as sustainability, creativity, and community.
When designing your wellness program incentive plans, consider how you can encourage employees to take a personal investment in their health. By doing so, more employees will engage with your organization’s unique benefits, ensuring the return on investment for your program is worth the effort.
3. Track program results.
Employers should monitor the results of all employee engagement programs, including wellness initiatives. This helps you understand whether your program is having the desired impact and identify opportunities for improvement.
A few data points to track include:
- Participation. Maintain records of which wellness programs are most popular. Track both initial and continued participation to see whether employees continue to engage with your initiatives long-term. Reduced participation over time might be a sign that you need to promote your wellness program more regularly or even adjust its offerings.
- Employee performance. Make note of metrics related to employee performance before and after implementing your wellness program, so you can see your program’s impact on day-to-day work. For example, you might track employee absenteeism, retention, work quality, and productivity.
- Employee feedback. For wellness initiatives, qualitative feedback is essential for understanding how employees are engaging with your offerings. When employees participate in a wellness offering, send them a survey asking about their experience. Target your questions to the feedback most relevant to your goals, such as asking how easy it was to engage with the program, whether the employee had a positive experience, or whether the employee plans to continue participating in the program.
Collecting data on your wellness program not only helps you continually improve it over time, but also provides the information you need to prove its value to your organization’s leadership. For example, if you can demonstrate a link between your wellness program and increased employee retention, you will be more likely to attain buy-in from decision makers.
From encouraging mindfulness to hosting office step challenges, wellness initiatives improve your employees’ health, in turn improving their productivity, engagement, and loyalty.
To start investing in your employees’ wellbeing, launch a comprehensive wellness program that lets employees take control of their own health journeys. Ensure you support your employees with thoughtful program guidelines and user-friendly software solutions that facilitate their participation.
