Today, discussions about employee benefits cannot adequately happen without business leaders talking about wellness programs for good reasons! Wellness programs that are started for the right reasons and intended to help employees make healthier decisions can transform the workplace culture and every lives involved.

However, with so many different types of workplace wellness programs, deciding what works well for your business can be daunting and requires a substantial thinking, planning and iteration to ensure its effective and yields result.

And whether you are initiating a new wellness program, or assessing effectiveness of ongoing program, there are a few factors that can predict which programs may thrive and which ones may fail.

This week, Seftugo discusses key questions your business should ask as you create a wellness program for your employees.

Reasons for Thinking of a Wellness Program

Perhaps you’re yet to make up your mind whether you should invest in wellness benefits?

Corporate or employee wellness programs are usually designed to establish a work environment that promotes employee’s holistic well-being by helping employee to think about their health and make healthy choices enabling them and your business to thrive.

They are usually offered by businesses for different reasons such as helping employees and their families to manage chronic illness, boosting employee morale and productivity, reducing absenteeism, increasing job satisfaction and engagement, and reducing insurance costs.

In perspective, below are a few statistics to ponder on if you’re not sure yet whether wellness program is right for your business:

• 61% of workers have experienced burned out in their current job.
• Three quarters of employers views well-being as important to their staff and useful in talent recruitment and retention strategy.
• Two third of employees in the workplace attributes wellness program for helping make healthier lifestyle choices.
• 78% of companies now consider employee well-being as a critical part of their business plans

Questions to Ask When Creating a Wellness Program

The best way to start off on the right foot when creating a wellness program is to think a bit about why you want one, what you want it to do, and how you want people to engage with it.

As such, here are some handy questions to ask yourself before you start the process of gathering wellness program quotes:

1. What is your business trying to achieve with wellness program?

Understanding whether you’re aiming to boost talent recruitment or looking to build upon your company culture will go a long way to helping you determine which wellness benefits will be the most effective for your company.

For example, your CEO may care about cutting healthcare cost while line managers something else entirely like attracting the best talent or improving productivity.

Reckoning the full spectrum of priorities within your organizations’ leadership, helps to set programs goals and measure their effectiveness over a period of time ensuring business get the best out of benefits budget spend.

2. How will you evaluate whether you’re successful?

The best way to know whether your programs will succeed and, even more importantly, communicate that success to your leadership, is to decide how you will measure program impact before you roll it out.

Apart from scheduling and budgeting, make an evaluation plan part of your annual planning process in order to determine how you will measure the ROI to understand the impact on your bottom line.

Otherwise, it would be pouring organization’s resources down the drain if the programs are running yet you aren’t tracking its impact to justify investment. The more you know what success looks like and how you can prove the ROI, the greater the budget you can get for more useful wellness programs and continue to grow the programs.

3. What type and scale of wellness benefits are you looking for?

Is your company looking to make a statement in its industry, or is it simply looking to stay competitive with its peers? Do you have a large budget for more expansive solutions, or do you need to keep a firm grasp on costs? All of these questions can help you understand what type of wellness benefit options will work for your company needs.

Low-cost wellness benefits might simply be a matter of your company offering subsidized gym memberships, nutritionist sessions, or access to employee assistance programs.

The budget needed to roll out different wellness solutions will always differ, and you'll need to factor this into your plan.

4. Who are your employees and what are their needs/wants?

Employees in different phases of life responds to and treasures various benefits differently largely due to their distinct needs, experiences and life stage.

Employees with young families may appreciate benefits that grant them more time to be with their family while tenured and much older employee may find support to help them achieve retirement planning goals more appealing. Of course this is generalization, but it underscore the reality and different issues that may be priorities at different stages of life.

Therefore, it's important to be aware of your employees and their needs to make it easier to create and deliver benefits they’ll want to use and get most bang for your back.

5. How will you engage your staff with their new wellness programs?

It’s important to effectively communicate any new or changes to existing programs to employees to allow them notice programs being offered in the first place, better understand what’s available and make most of them.

Therefore, before you launch any new program, it’s critical to have a well-crafted communications plan with multiple touch points to engage your employees and give them time to connect with new programs.

It’s not enough to have a single kick-off event, or send out an email once a year to let people know availability of the benefits. It should be a concerted effort to engage with employees multiple times throughout the year across various channels such as emails, in-person or virtual meetings events, and more.

Effective wellness communication also engenders trust and higher participation levels.

Getting Support to Create Wellness Program for Your Business

Once you’ve answered these questions, now the fun begins…..pulling together some of the best workplace wellness benefits and perks for your employees.

Here at Seftugo, we love helping businesses through every stage of setting up not only a wellness program, but an entire employee benefits package that meets both the goals of your company and the needs of your staff.

In addition to benefits sourcing, Seftugo also offers a range of added value services that include:

• Communication assistance and staff orientations
• Administrative help and claims processing assistance
• Designing benefits that suit unique need of your workforce
• Round clock support to employees to ensure they get most out of the benefit.

Let our staff meet with you to show you why corporate partner with us for their employee benefits and wellness program creation. Click here to schedule a call with us today!