Health and FitnessServices

Follow This To Improve Employee Wellness Programs

What Are the Benefits of a Wellness Program for Employers and Employees?

The most evident advantage of employee wellness programs is the first one. Your employees will be healthier if your wellness programme is successful. Employees save money on medical expenses as their health improves.

This decrease in healthcare expenses also helps employees feel better financially, which lessens their financial stress. And many of your employees are probably suffering from this financial hardship. According to the Financial Fitness Group, stress affects more than 80% of workers.

Both of the benefits to employees also benefit employers. Your company’s overall healthcare expenditure lowers as a result of your employees paying less for healthcare. Similar to this, any notable decrease in employees’ financial stress has an influence. Financial stress costs American firms close to $300 billion annually in lost productivity, unscheduled absenteeism, and employee turnover.

Programs for employee wellbeing also aid in coordinating the values of the company and the workforce. A wellness programme shows that your company is concerned about the health of its employees. Hopefully, the people share this feeling of contentment. Your employees are more likely to be content and effective in their roles if they experience a strong sense of alignment with their employer.

Additionally, participation in a wellness programme increases loyalty, which can help to raise productivity and the bottom line. Even staff members who work for a company with a wellness programme but don’t participate are more inclined to suggest their workplace.

A 2019 Optum study found that 29% of these workers would recommend their employer as a place to work. Only 18% of workers who receive zero programme offers would recommend working for their firm. Therefore, even if they don’t always use it, offering a wellness programme aids in keeping talent.

9 Guidelines for Creating a Successful Employee Wellness Program

1. Create a comprehensive programme.

Making your wellness programme holistic is the first piece of advice. Every aspect of well-being—physical, mental, emotional, financial, and social—must be covered in your strategy. In fact, more than 60% of workers believe that companies’ wellness programmes should promote overall well-being, according to BenefitsPro. So make sure your wellness programme addresses the health of your employees from a holistic perspective.

2. Make use of technology

Your business can use technology to give employees access to real-time, current information and wellness updates. Employees will participate in their wellness plan to a greater extent if you present them with pertinent information more effectively and quickly. Additionally, your business can make use of technology to collect important data during the wellness process.

Wearable fitness trackers are one such piece of technology that is crucial for wellness initiatives. These fitness trackers both gather useful personal information about the health of the users and act as a visual reminder for workers to maintain good health. This information can be used by your business to track the overall success of the well being programs for employee.

Mobile devices, gamification, and virtual reality are some examples of technology that might increase participation in your health programme. Your wellness programme is more enjoyable, simpler to use, and allows for greater focus thanks to technology. To increase employee engagement, include technology into your wellness strategy.

3. Make Your Program Personalized

Attempting to tailor your plan as much as you can is another suggestion for enhancing your employee wellness programme. Employees of today demand that their benefits, including your wellness programme, be unique and pertinent to their lives.

For instance, using advanced analytics you can find care gaps for your staff members and gain a better understanding of them. Wellness coaches can then offer the most effective resources and help as a result of this identification.

4. Measure Plan Participation

The next suggestion for improving your employee wellness programme is to gauge participation in the programme. Your company must clearly explain what engagement means to you and how you plan to measure it. Additionally, to guarantee that these statistics remain consistent from person to person, your company needs to standardise its engagement metrics.

There are two distinct levels of interaction that your business must understand. A participant’s administrative involvement, such as signing up for a programme, tracks how frequently they communicate with their wellness coach. The level of interaction necessary to achieve important health, behavioural, or financial results is known as value-based engagement.

5. Encourage Health Literacy

The ability to treat and prevent disease is known as health literacy. Health literacy in America has fallen to unprecedented lows. Only 12% of adults have proficient health literacy, according to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. Your employees need to be as health-savvy as possible in order for your wellness programme to be as effective as feasible.

Increasing employee health literacy is essential since it is a sign of better patient outcomes and higher patient involvement. Contrarily, poor treatment compliance, fewer utilisation of preventative treatments, and an increase in ER visits, hospital stays, and readmissions result in high health expenses.

6. Social Acceptance

To increase the effectiveness of your health programme, use social recognition. Social recognition can boost teamwork among employees and motivate them to give their best work. Social interactions such as posting, sharing, commenting, and others foster a sense of group support and rivalry, which motivates workers. This type of interpersonal connection can also increase intra-team rivalry, which enhances the effectiveness of your health programme.

7. Request employee opinions.

Securing your employees’ feedback is essential to the success of your employee health programme. However, most employers omit this important step. Only 30% of employees, according to a LightSource survey, said their employer sought their advice before launching a health programme.

Getting employee feedback also enables your company to more effectively customise its wellness programme, the significance of which we’ve already covered. This information can also be utilised to better understand the reasons why employees aren’t taking part in wellness initiatives. Increase employee engagement early and frequently to significantly enhance the outcomes of your wellness programme.

8. Present various plans

Employees care about how many various wellness programmes you provide at work. According to the aforementioned Optum survey, 53% of workers stated they would recommend their employer if it offered seven to eight wellness initiatives. As the number of plans decreases, these percentages decrease considerably. Only 30% of employers with four to six programmes received employee referrals.

9. Boost Interaction

Better communication is the final suggestion for enhancing your employee wellness programme. Although it is often said that communication keeps relationships intact, wellness initiatives are never mentioned. In order for your wellness plan to be successful, it is essential to educate your staff on its advantages. Your business must explain to employees the value of good health, the benefits of your wellness programme, and the necessity of employee participation.

Employees are most interested in one-on-one contacts to assist them understand their benefits, according to MetLife’s Employee Benefits Trends Study. Through a mobile app, which was the second-most popular choice. The best course of action is to integrate and apply several forms of communication. More employees will participate in your wellness plan the more effectively you communicate with them.

To Sum It Up:

You’ll have a strong foundation for your company’s well being programs for employee if you adhere to these nine suggestions. Additionally, more than just contented workers are the outcome of a successful wellness programme. Three Harvard professors conducted research, and they discovered that for every dollar spent on wellness initiatives, overall medical expenditures decrease by $3.27. In a similar vein, lost productivity costs around $2.73 for every dollar.

Article released by Infopostings.com 

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button