The Ultimate Guide To Corporate Wellness

Workplace wellness and corporate wellness are typical umbrella terms used to describe the programmes, benefits, policies and activities that organisations provide to their employees to improve their wellbeing and overall health & safety.

It’s broad, I know. To break it down a little more, let’s just concentrate on corporate wellness programmes. Fundamentally, they are put in place to help employees with their overall health and prevent bad habits from impacting that health. Four important areas that wellness programmes focus on and succeed with are:

1. Research. Wellness programmes are most effective when they are built around research carried out before a programme is implemented within a company. Employees will all have different wellbeing issues, so therefore an off the shelf programme will not be effective and generate the results that leaders and employees of organisations are looking for.

2. Awareness. Implementing a workplace wellness programme requires a certain amount of information that needs to be communicated to employees. They may simply need to know the reason there is a programmes in the first place, how to they get the most out of a programme or simply learn that their employer cares about their wellbeing inside and out of the workplace. Without this awareness, the buy in from staff is much more difficult. Workshops and training are great ways to initially engage a workforce in programmes.

3. Activity. Participation in programmes is a challenge for any company. Employees want to be physically and mentally well, so that’s a nice start. Now how do you help them towards those wellness goals? Incorporating healthy and fun activities into aspects of the programmes is essential. Whether it’s using gamification to motivate employees to walk more or educating them on nutrition or mental health through workshops, there are great initiatives that companies can use to get buy in from staff. We explore these further in the strategy section.

4. Results. Workplace wellness is a tough one to measure. It’s not as simple as measuring the ROI of a marketing or sales department but it is quite clear when looked at closely. We can all safely say, workplace wellness is fundamentally a good thing. But why is that? Well, it prevents and improves. It helps prevent employees from experiencing burnout, thus improving productivity. It helps prevent employees from leaving your organisation in search of those with wellness programmes, thus improving retention. It helps prevent employees from succumbing to bad habits with their diet or mental health, thus improving their overall wellbeing in and outside of work. We will cover this further in the benefits section where we will bring in some of the research conducted.

The implementing phase of the programme is a critical part of the process as it contributes to the success of a wellbeing programme. According to a study carried out by Research Gate in 2018, it compares companies that successfully implemented workplace wellness with those that were less successful. It reported two critical success factors: engaged management and effective promotion of the programmes. We are aware and understand the significant importance of ensuring the entire workforce of a company are educated, engaged and receive communications about the wellbeing programme being implemented within the organisation.

We provide our clients with programme launch days and wellness technology to ensure on-site and off-site employees are engaged within the programme. Our clients can also avail of marketing activities and support from our marketing department to maximise the engagement of the programme and to communicate the wellbeing initiatives that are available to employees of an organisation that have started their wellbeing journey with us.

After we gather the data from the review phase, we then adjust the programme if necessary. The components of a company regularly change so our wellbeing programmes need to be continuously altered to ensure that we are reacting to these changes. Our mental and physical health experts review and adjust the programme to maintain effective and positive results for our clients. We work closely with management in each organisation we work with to compliment the changes in that company and to adjust our programme to reflect these natural organisational changes.