Need to know:
- A long-term, year-round wellness strategy can help employees make sustainable and positive behavioural changes.
- Both quantitative and qualitative data should be used to inform a wellness strategy in order to target the particular needs of the workforce.
- Embedding a wellness strategy into organisational culture and gaining senior support are vital in obtaining employee engagement.
Making provisions for the wellbeing of employees is becoming a must for employers that want to attract and retain talent in an increasingly competitive environment. Indeed, more than half (53%) of UK employees favour organisations that positively contribute to their wellbeing, as found by Hymans Robertson and Yulife in Closing the wellbeing gap: exploring the interaction between work, health and wellbeing report, published in October 2018.
Furthermore, a straw poll of www.employeebenefits.co.uk readers, undertaken in August 2018, found that 76% of HR and reward professionals feel that there has been an increase in demand for wellbeing benefits at their organisations.
Employers cannot expect to fulfil this growing expectation among both existing and prospective employees with a simple flash-in-the-pan approach.
Joe Gaunt, founder at Hero Wellbeing, says: “For a business or for an individual, health is not something [to] attain and then stop. It’s important that [employers] are invested for [the] long-term.”
Thinking long-term
Among UK employees, 74% believe their ability to concentrate is negatively affected by poor wellbeing, while 13% have used sickness absence to cope with stress, according to research by the wellbeing charity for chartered accountants CABA, published in September 2018.
To combat this, employers that implement a long-term, holistic wellness strategies can support staff in achieving sustained, positive behavioural change.
Chris Bailey, partner at Mercer, explains: “[Employers are] not looking to arbitrarily get people to eat a bit more fruit; that has absolutely no impact on their overall wellbeing. What they’re looking to do is make a meaningful change in people’s lives, and [employers] can’t do that with just one-off, token exercises.”
A year-round strategy also enables employers to consider natural ebbs and flows, adds Andy Magill, head vitality coach at insurer VitalityHealth. For example, wellness interventions tend to generate more take-up and engagement when run during quieter times.
“If [employers] have a planned calendar, that allows [them] to include a range of interventions and engage employees in lots of different ways throughout the course of the year; [this] ultimately is going to have a greater impact in terms of [affecting] healthy behaviours,” says Magill.
Data to inform
To ensure the strategic calendar is as effective as possible, organisations should uncover both quantitative data, such as performance statistics, sickness absence levels and benefits-take-up rates, and qualitative data, such as engagement or satisfaction survey results.
Cate Murden, founder at business consultancy Push Mind and Body, says: “[Employees] are the ones that know what they need, and that’s where [employers should] start. [Businesses] don’t create culture, [employers] empower [their] team to tell [them] what they need from their culture.”
Employers may also wish to conduct health risk assessments, adds Bailey, to provide an indication of what issues need to be addressed in the future.
It is also important that organisations are clear on how they are going to measure success. “Just have real clarity over what the metrics are that [employers] will judge it on, whether that be feedback or engagement, or more tangible business metrics,” Murden explains.
Structure and framework
Specific interventions will vary from business to business, but some methods are more universal, Bailey explains: “[Employers] can look at holiday health around the summer months [and] not drinking to excess during the festive season. [They] can link to wider societal pieces [too, for example linking] mental health programmes to mental health awareness days.”
VitalityHealth uses a health calendar with its clients, with a different focus each quarter that aligns with the season. Healthy eating and nutrition might be more relevant after Christmas, while mental health could be addressed during an organisation's most stressful period.
A year-round strategy should also incorporate weekly interventions, which might range from exercise classes to regular coaching sessions. The latter, in particular, will help employees manage better over the long-term, by dealing with concerns more immediately.
“If [employees have] got any problems on their mind, they can very quickly go and get a solution. That’s how you create proper transformation, rather than people sitting and brewing on issues,” Murden explains.
Senior support
Ensuring senior management buy-in and embedding strategy within organisational culture is critical. “It’s about establishing those cultural norms, because then [the] workforce tends to conform to those as a mass,” says Bailey.
Gaunt agrees: “If people see that the very highest levels of leadership take things like physical, mental and social health seriously, adoption then from the teams [is] on a bigger level, on a more meaningful level and a much higher percentage of penetration tends to follow.”
Technology to support
Access to a platform or app helps employees to track their progress over the year. This is particularly effective when used alongside in-person services, such as an on-site health check.
A platform can also prevent longer-term strategies from fizzling out, by creating a system that is not labour intensive and requires minimal employer intervention once it has been set up and the initial push has been made. These programmes should periodically be reviewed and revitalised, are less likely to fall out of use in the meantime.
Challenges ahead
A year-round strategy for wellness is never complete. As employers gather more data, the approach will naturally evolve and adapt to suit employees’ ever-changing health needs.
Bailey concludes: “In less than a generation, new health risks [have emerged] that need managing, and this really is a case of the workplace needs to adjust and employers who want to remain successful and to outperform their peer groups need to adjust to the changes that are happening in their workforce. They can’t be blasé about it.”
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