Employee wellness programmes are a solution for employers looking to give their staff the opportunity to improve both their physical and mental health. With mental health at the forefront of many discussions around employee wellbeing, it's important to make sure that mental health is at the top of your agenda.
As an employer, it’s part of your legal duty of care to support your employees at work, which is why it’s important to find a solution that works for your business whilst meets your employees’ needs.
So how should you go about implementing one? Here are our top tips...
- Ask yourself why
Before making any decisions, ask yourself why you’re doing this. Have you spotted an increase in absenteeism? Have you identified a problem with employee stress? Do you feel your employees would benefit from a wellness programme being put in place? Getting to know the reasoning behind the programme’s implementation will help you determine what you want to achieve and allow you to assess and measure whether it’s working.
- What do your employees need?
In order for you to know which wellness programme you should implement, you need to understand what your employees want from it, enabling you to tailor it where necessary. The best way to understand your employees’ needs is, simply, to ask them – send out surveys, run a workshop or carry out an assessment. Just gather as much data as possible to ensure that you’re making an informed decision.
- Draw up a plan
Next is your plan of action. This will ensure you complete the task as time and cost-efficiently as possible. Your plan should include shortlisted wellbeing programmes, which internal stakeholders will be accountable for running the programme and how you’ll monitor its effectiveness once in place.
- Frequently assess your wellness programme
Whatever you decide to do, you should put a process in place to continually assess and monitor the success of your wellness programme – ensuring it’s a working solution to your employees’ specific needs. There are a number of ways you can track this – from anonymous feedback surveys to monitoring how your employees feel since the programme has been implemented, to actually tracking specific metrics like absenteeism rates.
How to go about choosing the right solution for your business...
When searching for the right solution for your business, it’s important to keep in mind a number of factors. Finding one that matches your budget and company size, suits your business brand and meets employee needs is quite a task but it’s not impossible. Whether you need support with occupational health or you simply want to improve general employee wellbeing to reduce absenteeism and boost morale, tale your time to research and find a benefits package that best suits your business.
