How To Create Your Own Corporate Wellness Program

Employee wellness is finally getting the attention it deserves. Events in the past two years — like the Great Resignation — have emphasized how vital wellness is to achieving positive business outcomes. If you wish to enhance employee wellness in your organization, clinician Tanner Bergman recommends starting with workplace culture.

“The focus has to shift over to a human level,” Bergman told HRMorning in June 2022. “We must look at our processes and the impact they have on the humans who are performing them.”

Bergman adds that instead of achieving a work-life balance, businesses should focus on nurturing a work-life connection. Incorporating wellness into work itself — where employees spend most of their time — is a sound strategy. You can do so with a corporate wellness program. And here’s how you can create your own.  

Build your foundations

Every organization is different — so your corporate wellness program needs to be unique and fit your needs. To determine these needs, the CDC recommends using employee surveys and site visits conducted by assessors with a background in law and healthcare. These are just a couple of methods you can use to gauge and address workplace wellness concerns. From here, you can create an employee-led wellness committee to spearhead your wellness program.

This committee will establish a budget for the program. Possible sources of funding include employees willing to pay for the program and your company’s health insurance premiums. The committee should also set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals to achieve for the program. For example, you may want to reduce sick leaves by 25% in six months or have 5% of smoking employees quit within a certain quarter.

Design your program

Begin choosing the program’s components based on employee needs. Stress management sessions can help with mental wellness. You can cater to financially insecure employees by hiring counselors to work with them. Talent management expert LHH adds that simply holding meaningful career conversations with your team can be another crucial step toward promoting a culture of wellbeing at work. Taking the time to ask how each person is doing and how you can support them can pay off in the long run.

There are also a variety of exercise programs for physical wellness — and you can spice them up by partnering with sports organizations to create team events like runs, hikes, and wellness walks. This can help break up the 9-5 grind, challenge employees to do their best, and deepen bonds among coworkers. This can also improve workplace culture and employee wellness. These exercise programs can thus help you and your team benefit from a sports-focused business acumen that can improve the overall outcome of your wellness program.

Offer incentives and rewards

Incentives and rewards can help motivate employees to participate in your wellness program, see it to completion, and ensure they stick to the healthier behaviors they learn in the future. Some rewards you can offer include monetary prizes, gift certificates, and free office supplies or gadgets. However, it’s usually best to choose incentives that are proportionate to the effort it takes to participate in your program. For example, it’s easier to attend a stress management session than quit smoking, so the rewards for the two should be different.

At the same time, you shouldn't overlook the power of simple employee recognition. This helps each employee feel secure in the fact that they bring value to the company. It also solidifies their engagement and performance in both the wellness program and at work. Workplace wellness site Mental Health America says you can try an informal recognition program — where you take 5 minutes to congratulate employees for a job well done — or a more formal one where both employees and managers can nominate individuals for recognition. Either way, it's another valuable incentive you can offer employees in your wellness program.  

Track your employees' progress

It's important to track your employees’ activity to make sure they’re participating in the program. Employees can self-report or submit screenshots of apps or fitness trackers they use to measure their activity. This can be time-consuming for the program manager, especially when considering the various devices and apps available.

You can automate the process of keeping track of your program’s components. Pantheon has developed an app for corporate wellness that aggregates fitness data from across all major fitness trackers and apps. All you have to do is log into the Pantheon dashboard to see whether employees are hitting their goals.

The modern business world is placing more emphasis on employee wellness than ever before, and you can adopt this practice by creating your own corporate wellness program. Hopefully, these tips will help you to develop a program that sees benefits like increased productivity, job satisfaction, and employee retention rates — and ultimately assists your organization to reach new and exciting heights.

Written for pnthn.com by: Reverie Joan