What is a wellness plan?
Many think of a wellness plan as focusing on only fitness or only on your diet. However, the reality is taking into consideration all aspects of our health that are intertwined. A wellness plan on an individual level is a plan aimed to achieve overall health in multiple areas of your life. Wellness is deemed taking a holistic approach, the main pillars of health being general, mental, physical, lastly diet and nutrition. To make an individual plan you first need to assess each area of your life and create goals to aim for. When we are looking at corporate wellness we are looking to identify what health areas your staff want to improve. Your corporate wellness plan will then be aimed at creating programs and motivating staff to participate.
Investing in your staff health and wellness is not only beneficial on an individual level but also on a corporate level. An effective wellness program will see a reduction in health care costs, within the UAE region in particular where it is the employers obligation to provide medical insurance. Catching potential health risks early and education staff play a major role in reducing the health care costs. You will see an improvement in performance, healthier staff are happier and motivated knowing you care about their wellness. Creates a company culture that is hard to leave, whether its retaining staff or enticing new staff wellness programs make an impact.
What should your corporate wellness plan include?
- Analysis of current health status of staff
- Analysis of wellness needs/wants
- Relevant campaigns/challenges and webinars
- Communication with staff
- Getting experts involved
- Internal participation
- Reassessment
Analysis of current health status of staff
In order to plan a wellness program that your staff will participate in, you need to understand what their current health status is. However, this is not information that you can readily access and using hospitals within your network can increase your insurance premiums. The nurses at Safe Hands are objective and conduct health screens for their clients. They take basic measurements to create individual reports for each individual in attendance and explain all the results during the screening. They will collate a company report with all the averages to highlight key health measurements that should be improved on at a company level.
Analysis of their wellness needs/wants
A health screening gives us objective health measurements however assessing all aspects of health is key. A questionnaire around general health, mental/spiritual health, physical health, diet, and nutrition allows us to do a full assessment. You want an in-depth questionnaire that allows individuals to express their current status, current concerns, lifestyle, and habits. A crucial part is to ask staff what their goals are and what they would want to achieve out of the corporate wellness program. This is a questionnaire that the nurses have created for their clients and allows them to add any additional questions that may be specific to them.
Schedule of relevant bespoke campaigns/challenges and webinars
From both the online health survey and health screen report there will be key areas that stand out to focus on. It’s important to also review your staff goals and align them with the plans you schedule. If you were to do set programs, some staff may engage but it is likely the majority won’t. If you are making a plan based on quantitative data in turn you will get engagement and improvement.
Communicating schedule with staff relating to their needs that have been been addressed
Once the schedule is in place communicating with your employees of upcoming plans and the reasoning behind these choices is vital. This should all be actioned close to the time of the health screening being complete along with the schedule. Individuals seeing their health reports will be at the best stage where they want to make a change. Use this and reinforce the benefits of each challenge, campaign or webinar. Prizes are also a great way to motivate staff and encourage some friendly competition among staff.
Getting experts involved
With each wellness schedule plan the associated specialist within that area should be creating the challenge or holding the webinar. This assures the right information is being shared with your staff and they are able to ask questions and receive answers/ be guided in the right direction. Safe Hands utilise their experts to create certain aspects of their wellness programs and hold certain webinars. Safe Hands Nurses are experts in wellness from, analyzing the results, recommending plans and getting the relevant specialist involved in your plan!
Internal participation
When constructing a wellness plan, whether created internally or using external assistance, there should be a delegated internal member to assist in motivating staff. Often staff may need that extra push of motivation and reasoning to join in on certain programs. This helps when there is an internal advocate. This may change from person to person as the program changes or this may be one individual.
Reassessment
When all scheduled programs have been completed you start from the beginning with the health screen and questionnaire and compare your results. Do you need to assess if the results improved? Were your staff engaged? What worked? What didn’t work? What are the new goals? The answers to these questions will enable you to improve year on year!
Follow these steps to ensure a successful wellness program for your company that keeps staff happy, productive and healthy! Reach out to our wellness experts to find out how we can help make this a reality within your organization!