Creating a Culture of Wellness: Part 2

Values and Incentives

Providing a health and wellness program can be a real difference-maker for many employees who need an extra push to get back into shape or maintain their healthy routines. A big part of assessing what might work best for your team, is to dig into what they value most in their lives, and then to creatively incentivize those values. Are some of your employees competitive and would benefit from a program that tracks hours in the gym, miles walked per day, or lost pounds? Competition can be a good thing. You just need to line up appropriate rewards of their efforts.

Most people value money, right? An incentive program that includes monetary rewards might be welcomed by the majority of your employees. Based financial rewards on accomplished health-related tasks, like exercise, getting their annual check-up, taking a fitness class, going to the gym, taking a health-risk assessment or competing in a run or walk for charity. Think about financial rewards and other gifts that would keep employees engaged into the program and remain motivated. Posting a chart of health milestones in the breakroom might be a good idea. An example would be to sum up how many miles are walked each day, week, month or even within a year. You will be posting some amazing numbers and your team may really be impressed with their accomplishments.

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Communication

No health or wellness program is going to be successful without constant and consistent communication. One way to accomplish this is to develop a web-based program that employees can log into to check on accomplishments, rewards, news and other information to keep them motivated. Holding regular in-services specifically on employee health, wellness and development is a smart move, because you already have a captive audience! Topics can range from new ways to exercise and healthy eating, to preventing heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Participating in community events can be beneficial as can posting health tips and wellness information anywhere employees will see them.

Get Your Insurance Company Involved

One reason that wellness programs fail is we run out of ideas on how to sustain them or change them up to keep employees interested. This would be a good time to reach out to your insurance company and ask for advice and support. They should be more than happy to help you promote health and wellness of your staff. Don’t be shy to ask your contacts about their educational materials and the programs they use for their employees. Do they offer special online programs for their clients? How about fitness and wellness discounts? Maybe your insurance company provide incentives for their staff that you haven’t thought of yet. These are all possibilities to improve your program.

Health, Wellness and Professional Development

Having an employee wellness program that just focuses on health issues like diet, weight loss, smoking cessation, and lowering blood pressure may not be enough to maintain the program. Providing your staff with professional development topics and blending them into the wellness program can yield some very successful results. For instance, take some time to educate your team on team-building and leadership and how they are related to healthy living and working. Design presentations on improving morale, customer service, and retention. Talk about work-place accidents and how to avoid them. The point is that you are investing time and energy into your staff above and beyond a health and wellness program. Your efforts may make significant difference on employee turnover, absenteeism, performance and profit.

Final Words on Creating a Culture of Wellness

Recruiting, hiring and training take lots of resources. Once you have the employee you want, retaining them becomes the task. Offering health and wellness programs and continual professional development has been shown to reduce turnover and improve satisfaction. Who wouldn’t want a group of well-prepared, smart and healthy employees on their team?