What are the companies…. WHY’s?
The first question you need to ask yourself and the leadership team that will be running the corporate wellness program is ….. WHY?
Why is a Corporate Wellness Program important to you and your team?
Why do you want to implement a Corporate Wellness program into the workplace?
Why do you feel that your employees will benefit from a Corporate Wellness Program?
Asking these small questions is a great place to start when thinking about starting any new wellness journey with your employees. This will give you great direction to create a bespoke program and create some end goals to help you achieve them successfully. If you would like some further information on some of the benefits of employee wellness, feel free to get in touch with the team at Safe Hands and we would be happy to help.
How are you going to build and maximize engagement?
Start with an exciting announcement of the corporate wellness journey, either at a team meeting or at a team-building event. Once you and the leadership team have a plan explain the step of how it will run with all employees and start the hype from the beginning to build engagement from day one. You need to keep the engagement going throughout the journey to maximize and encourage participation not just on day one.
Are you planning on Leading from the top?
Ensure that you have the correct team behind you to carry out the corporate wellness journey.
Heard the old saying ‘’you have led a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink’’ Well, this is very common in corporate wellness. However, if you lead from the front and keep the team excited and engaged you will be sure to have a successful corporate wellness journey with maximum participation and great results.
Therefore, make sure you clarify all details and have clear communication with and from a leadership team so they all know– why this is being done internally and why it should be rolled out to the team.
The next step is to Analyse but don’t make it generic…..
1. What will your team enjoy participating in?
By using a generic global wellness calendar, sometimes it makes it hard to get engagement. While Breast Cancer and Men’s Health awareness months are important, feel free to add this into the corporate wellness calendar but also try to make it bespoke to your team.
Give your employees the chance to speak and make sure you listen……
Start with a wellness survey and ask about the employee’s general health, physical health, diet, nutrition, sleep, and mental health. This will give you a great insight into how your employee rate their health, what areas of their health they would like to improve, how they are feeling, and what activities they like to do and get healthier.
The next step, get a real idea of how healthy your employees are. This can be done using a professional team to hold a Biometric Health screening in the office. 6 core measurements should be taken: heart rate, blood pressure, BMI, oxygen saturation levels, blood glucose, and cholesterol levels. This is a great way to see if any medical measurements stand out overall so the leadership team and the health care professionals that conducted the screening can see what main areas of health need to be improved as a company.
With the data from the questionnaire, Biometric health screening, the leadership team, and health care professionals you are now ready to start planning any relevant challenges, campaigns, educational webinars, and/or workshops.
Just bear in mind that the health results are confidential, and the leadership team should only be provided a corporate health result that is anonymized when planning strategies. This will also help establish the staff to trust the leadership management and the healthcare professionals.
2. What goals do you want to achieve?
With the data from the questionnaire and biometric health screening with the help of the leadership team and health care professionals, you are now ready to start planning any relevant challenges, campaigns, educational webinars, and/or workshops.
Investigate what employees have said that they like to do and try to accommodate it if possible. If you see any high BMI results, you could maybe look at conducting a ‘steps challenge’. If the diet is maybe poor, look at doing ‘eating 5 fruit vegetables a day challenge’ in combination with a nutrition webinar. If they aren’t getting enough sleep (anything under 8 hours of sleep a night is classifier sleep deprivation) you could look into doing a ‘switch off campaign or sleep webinar’ to name a few.
3. Do you have the right team to educate your staff?
While it is AMAZING that you want your team to become healthier, fitter, and have the right mindset to be more productive, however, sometimes, it is a little beyond a leadership team to educate on specific wellness topics. You might feel during the corporate wellness program that you might need to bring in health care professionals to help you educate. This might be on a diet, nutrition, sleep, ergonomics, or physical health.
Remember, getting the correct information relayed to your staff is very important when it comes to Health and Wellbeing to ensure that everyone has the best chance to succeed.
The leadership team should also set themselves as inspiration when doing corporate wellness because everything starts from the top. If the employees see that the leadership management is pushing for it and are also doing what they preach, it will strengthen that engagement and participation within the company.
4. Do you have a budget?
Make sure you have a budget and make sure the money is spent on the areas that need improving the most. Prizes for challenges are always a good idea and should be included in the budget as it really increases engagement. They don’t need to be big or expensive prizes, just something to reward and provide encouragement.
4. What will be the duration of your Corporate Wellness Program?
It’s time to set a plan. Ideally, corporate wellness programs should be 12 months, this is to ensure you see results as corporate wellness is not an overnight job. People don’t have to engage every day and campaigns don’t have to run every month but send a calendar and stick to it even if times get busy and your workload increases, don’t give up on ideas set in place.
5. What is your expectation of the team?
Have high expectations of your team and let them know. This will boost them to participate and rise to these exceptions. Remember there is a difference between encouraging and bullying. Don’t be disheartened if they fall off the health bandwagon during a challenge or campaign. Just keep communication open so they can openly talk to you or a member of the leadership team about why they are finding it hard to participate at this given time.
6. Have you reflected on the results?
Once you have completed the 12 monthly Corporate Wellness program it is time to get some feedback from the employees about what they enjoyed and how they are feeling now. This can be done by reassessing with the Health Questionnaire. The Biometric Health screening should also be reassessed to see how much each individual physical health has improved. This is a great way to gauge how successful your corporate health program has been.
What next?
Our team of wellness professionals at Safe Hands can help set up, plan, implement and manage your corporate wellness program from start to finish or even just help with one aspect of it. Feel free to get in touch with the team for more information.