Employee engagement is crucial to sustaining a strong wellness program. Well-being at organisations is rapidly evolving since the pandemic eased about a year ago. Employers are beginning to evaluate their well-being offerings to see if they are moving the needle in regard to the health and well-being of their employees. Essentially, this involves understanding the shortcomings of traditional well-being programs and then reinventing them to meet employees’ different needs at different stages.
Think of curating an effective wellness program as treating a patient successfully. Treating a patient for say, a chest infection, involves several steps from diagnostic procedures, including a simple physical exam to laboratory investigations and chest X-rays, to identifying the right antibiotic regimen for the patient. Similarly, providing the most effective wellness programs for your employees requires first investigating to understand what their real health and wellness challenges are and then providing solutions that work for them.
Many HR professionals whom we have spoken to shared that they had offered many well-being initiatives for their employees but they were not having the impact they had hoped for on the workforce.
Well-being takes a holistic approach. For many organisations, offering leadership training for managers, training and re-training of employees, recruiting more employees, improving communication channels in the workplace, and putting in measures to check burnout are the most urgent and most common solutions that employees need.
In tackling these problems, leaders of the ogranisations need to ask tough questions and have difficult conversations.
What is our organizational culture?
What changes do your employees really want to see?
What are their deepest concerns about work?
What are their mental and physical wellbeing challenges?
How is work impacting their quality of life?
What can be done differently?
A mismatch between actual problems and solutions offered inevitably leads to poor outcomes. Organisations might need to re-prioritize resources invested in routine biometric assessments and incentives into providing coaching services for employees, a key to improving their personal and professional well-being.
It is important to understand that well-being programs are not one-size-fits-all; what works for one organization may not work for the other. A mental health lunch & learn week may fit just right for an organization that has a strong culture of wellness and is supportive of its employees’ health through strategic solutions but may be ineffective for an organization that is yet to resolve these primary issues. Wellbeing programs need to be customised depending on the needs of the workforce and what stage they are in in the well-being journey.
Part of creating a customized wellness program for your organisation is also personalising these offerings. Even among a group of employees with similar well-being issues, solutions that work best for each employee can vary. Providing a customised wellness plan for employees involves understanding their individual situation, identifying their social, economic, and health factors and integrating these nuances into their wellbeing solutions.
Curating the right wellness program for your ogranisation requires paying attention to the granular issues of wellness and health in your organization. Well-being and health are not independent issues and they are dependent on a large number of factors, including organizational culture, workplace issues, and personal health circumstances. Understanding these contexts help leaders to identify their employees’ actual wellness challenges and implement the most effective solutions.
Need help planning your corporate wellness program?
We can survey your employees, create customisable wellness programs that fit your employees and deliver wellness content to empower your employees to live a better and healthier live collectively and seamlessly. Learn more about the PUML Corporate Wellness Program.