Develop An Employee Wellness Program in 5 Doable Steps
Although it’s often perceived under the light of cost in HR systems, the health of your employees affects just more than that. It is found that healthy employees are comparatively happier, less stressed, productive, and work with higher morale than employees who often experience health conditions.
Due to this significance, the global corporate wellness market was valued at 52.8 billion dollars in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.0% from 2021 to 2028. However, regardless of this growth, to date, many organisations find it challenging to execute a proper program that enhances employee wellness management.
This article will give a clear breakdown of how you can develop an employee wellness program in 5 easy, doable steps.
Analyse And Identify Current Wellness Issues
The best way to start developing an employee wellness program is to analyse the organisation’s employee wellness status carefully. Figure out the main health issues employees face and the emerging trends in employee wellness programs.
An ideal way to do this is by reading about the top 10 drugs prescribed under many organisations’ drug benefit programs, as it may give an overall picture of the leading health issues that affect employees.
Try to get data such as the amount of sick leave taken, employee dissatisfaction levels, and health insurance costs and understand the leading causes behind them.
Get Employee Input
Remember that understanding what employees want and need in a wellness program is key to encouraging them to use it and make it effective. Talk to employees to get a more thorough idea of what they think are the most significant issues in health and wellness and what they expect from the program.
As with any other healthy workplace policy, even an effective wellness program should ideally have input from people who will be related to and benefit from it. Therefore, talk to employees at all levels and departments to get comprehensive data on how the HR system should work to enhance health and wellness.
Set Goals and objectives
Once the data is gathered, it’s essential to analyse them to arrive at a standard set of employee wellness goals and objectives. This can be easily facilitated with an analytical HR platform which generates automatic reports, analysis, and related processed information. The error-free analysis supported through HR technology can help an organisation set goals and objectives that are fact-based and are sure to have a higher success rate.
Depending on the input received from employees and the majority of preferences, you may not be able to please everyone or get all on board with the set goals and objectives. However, make sure the goals don’t contradict the organisation’s existing culture.
Design Components
Creating goals and objectives makes it easy to break down a wellness program’s components and design it. Remember that there is no standard or fixated wellness program, as each will vary based on an organisation’s capacity in terms of resources. Depending on the goal, try to create a simple or elaborate multi-prong program. Try to include various components that target risk behaviours and especially the interests of the employees. Having components that meet the expectations or demands of many employees in the organisation is a good way to improve the effectiveness of a wellness program.
Establish A Budget
Creating a budget is an important step when developing a wellness program. Without funding, the program will stall. Remember that the budget should ideally focus on achieving the set goals and objectives and include the cost of incentives, marketing, and program design. The typical items to consider in a budget would be screening vendor/other provider fees, promotional materials, meeting provisions, pedometers/fitness trackers, incentives for participation, HR professionals hired to conduct the program, wellness committee member time, etc.