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What Is Wellness Program?
A employee wellness program is a set of initiatives designed to promote employee health and well-being, usually in cooperation with an organization’s human resources department. The employee wellness program benefits are that it enhances the attractiveness of an employer in the marketplace, improves workflow, increases creativity and productivity, boosts morale, reduces absenteeism or presenteeism, improves employee retention rates, and lowers healthcare costs. There is a way to establish and design a wellness program.
What Does Establishing and Designing Mean?
Establishing and designing a wellness program takes planning and foresight. Determine why you want or need to establish a wellness program for your company. You should know what the benefits are, how it can help employees, and what steps you should take when putting together your plan. Establishing a successful workplace wellness program is just like any other initiative – it takes collaboration between employees across departments! By building momentum early on through positive reinforcement you’ll have an energized team that’s ready to see this through. Keep in mind that once everyone has bought into the idea, maintaining its success requires consistency so make sure to think about these issues if you want to see your wellness program through.
How To Design Wellness Program?
There are many ways to design your own workplace wellness challenge. The steps depend on what you’re looking for.
- If you want to increase the level of physical activity in your workplace environment, try setting up walking meetings or provide opportunities for employees to take part in organized athletic activities.
- You can promote healthy eating habits at work, start making healthy snacks more accessible in the office.
- If you want to promote mental well-being at work, make sure your employees are getting enough sleep and look into what might be causing anxiety in individuals or stress in the workplace.
Steps To Establish And Design Wellness Program
These are the steps to establish and design a wellness program:
Conduct Assessments
The first step to establishing a wellness program is to understand your employees. Take the time to ask them questions, find out what they’re interested in. The assessment will tell you what areas of improvement they feel are most important for their work-life balance, and more. Then take the information you gather and use it to construct goals that will make sense for your team as a whole. Try breaking goals down into small steps so people can see progress easily (like losing 10 pounds by cutting soda from your diet) and help those who need it by setting up a meeting with your company’s health and wellness professional.
Engage Leadership
This is the second step to establish and design a wellness program. Once you’ve assessed the people around you and come up with a plan for your program, you’ll need to inform leadership about what you’re doing and why. Make sure they all know the benefits of having a workforce that is engaged and healthy. Provide them with evidence that these programs work (like reports from other companies) so that they understand it’s worth their time and effort to provide support. You probably can’t do this alone – collaborate with others in the office to get things rolling.
Make Wellness Committee
You need to make a commitment that will work to achieve the goals you’ve set for your wellness program. It’s a good idea to include at least one person from leadership, or maybe they could join as a committee member later on! Try including people who are knowledgeable about certain topics. For example, if your employer is a cookbook author, they might be perfect for planning healthy food options in the office. You’ll also need someone to take care of administrative tasks, like scheduling meetings and reminding participants of their events. Assign roles based on what everyone is interested in doing and what they can contribute.
Introduce What You Are Doing
This is the fourth step to establish and design a wellness program. Now that everyone knows what’s going on, it’s time to bring your plan to life. Work with your leadership team to make it official, hold a meeting where you explain what you’re doing and how it’s going to benefit everyone in the office! Then introduce your wellness program by sending out emails or holding town hall meetings. People are most excited when they know what’s coming. You should let them know about all of the fun rewards that are coming their way. Start with small steps instead of trying to change everything overnight (it could be too much for people).
Set Targets And Objective
You have to set a timeline and objectives to make a wellness program a success in your organization. It might take some time to see results. But you’ll need a plan if you want people to stick with it. Start out with something simple that can be achieved quickly, then work from there. For example, the goals could include running a 5K race or participating in a charity walk.
Launch Your Campaign
Now that everything has been established and everyone knows about the campaign, it’s time to get started! You have plenty of options for promoting your wellness program – set up social media profiles so employees can follow its progress, send out newsletters so people stay updated on what’s going on, hold events throughout the year where participants will receive benefits (like discounted prices), and remind people to take care of themselves by eating healthy food and exercising.
Make Budget of Wellness Program
This is the fifth step to establish and design a wellness program. You need to prepare wellness program budget. You need to include enough features so everyone is engaged and feels like they are part of the program. Your budget will depend on how big your office is – bigger companies likely have more money to spend because there are more people working there. The company should cover things like equipment, prizes, swag, and food that participants can enjoy throughout the year. You need to consider the cost of each activity before committing to it.
Design Wellness Program
The next step is to design a wellness program. Think about the activities you want people to do, the rewards you want to give them, and how you will keep everyone motivated throughout the year. Activities need to be fun and engaging so people are excited about taking part in them! It’s also a good idea to include writing prompts for daily activities that can be posted on social media – it’s a great way for employees to connect with each other outside of work. Rewards should be given out towards achieving certain goals or milestones. You want it to feel like a competition, but still allow everyone a chance at winning something special if they put effort into the campaign.
Create Incentives
The next step is to get people excited and motivated about the changes they’ll be making. Set up incentives – both big and small – that will bring people together and get them excited about improving their lives! Think about what interests your employees most. If they’re all fitness enthusiasts, host a 5K race to push them all to work harder! If you have people who are into cooking, go for protein-rich snacks instead of cupcakes at the next office party. Try rewarding smaller milestones too – offering free gym memberships is one way to do this, but try Groupon discounts too (you could save money and get active at the same time).
Maintain Results
Finally, it’s time to make sure you keep your employees engaged!. Once everyone starts seeing results it will be easy for them to lose motivation (and slip back into old habits). Try providing positive feedback using fitness trackers like Fitbits or Jawbones so that people can see their progress and feel good about it. Make sure you instill healthy habits – like coming to meetings with a salad instead of fast food – and give your employees plenty of support.
Communicate Plan To Employees
This is the ninth step to establish and design a wellness program. The employee wellness program should be well-communicated to all employees. It is important for people to understand the goals and objectives of a wellness program. You can tell all employees about company wellness on your website or through newsletters. Social media is also a good way to get the message out there. It is important to create social media pages that are ready for employees. For example, you might have an Instagram account where people can upload pictures of their progress throughout the program.
Be Proactive
Once employees have signed up for your wellness program, it is important to be proactive in order to help them succeed. You need to check in with employees about what they are doing and ask if they have any problems or concerns along the way. You can provide rewards along the way too – this will help keep them motivated!
Encourage The Employes
One way includes encouraging participants to set goals or milestones for their wellness programs so that they can monitor their progress. This can help them stick with the goals and feel proud about achieving them. The employer may also offer incentives as encouragement such as discounts on gym memberships, free healthy snacks, etc.
It is worth noting that companies may have trouble establishing and designing a wellness plan because people might not believe in its benefits or just simply say no because there is so much on their plate already, but this program saves time and money overall. To help your employees take up healthier habits you can create “Wellness Awards” where the winner gets to take the day off work. Also, people like free stuff so create incentives that make sense for your business and what customers would want.
Tips To Maintain Wellness Program
Tips for maintaining the success of your workplace wellness plan after implementation include making sure everyone is on board with it, including leadership, supervisors, and front line employees; nagging employees about their lack of physical activity isn’t going to motivate them; get activity tracking devices out to get people moving; think outside the box when it comes to incentives, don’t just offer time off but try free gym memberships or something like Groupon discounts instead; give positive reinforcement using fitness trackers so that people can see how far they’ve come; you need to make sure there is a consistent type of incentives f. If you are changing them too often, people will stop responding.
It’s worth noting that implementing a program may be hard because you’ll have to convince people it will work. To convince your employees to join your wellness program, you should create incentives. These incentives should be relevant to their interests and needs. If they enjoy cooking, offer them cookbooks or kitchen supplies. If they like interacting with others, give them access to a club of volunteers who share the same passion as they do.
A Word From Mantra Care
Building a company-wide wellness program is no easy task. But it’s worth the effort if you want your employees to be happier, healthier, more productive. Make sure you have everyone involved in this project by providing them with information about its benefits, hold seminars on health and wellness topics, create an active culture through incentives that are relevant for their interests and needs. It takes time to implement but once you do it makes an impact overall so keep trying until it becomes successful.
Do you want to keep your employees happy, healthy, and productive? Join our employee assistance program and get a healthier workplace.
