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The Ultimate Guide To Corporate Wellness

What is this guide about?

Corporate wellness is understandably becoming a larger priority for companies today with employers increasingly placing it as a priority in maintaining a healthy and productive workforce. What does your company do right now to tackle the issue of wellbeing in the workplace? Benefits like health insurance, flexible working hours, subsidised or free food and gym membership are great for attracting new talent, but don’t necessarily keep them engaged in their actual workload. This is a tougher thing to tackle because it boils down to the question of how do you keep every individual employee motivated to come in every day and enjoy what they do, to ensure their productivity matches the same productivity they had in the their first week. Corporate wellness programmes are being implemented more and more now with organisations experiencing the above problem more than ever.

The clutter of workplace wellness programme strategies, ideas and options are endless. This is why we created this guide to break it down into it’s simplest form and make it easy for employers to learn how to set up their own wellness programmes, relay the benefits of an integrated programme to your staff and how to ensure that it is successfully implemented and maintained.

corporate wellness

So, what are corporate wellness programmes exactly?

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.

corporate wellness
wellness programmes

What makes a successful corporate wellness programme?

The success and failure of corporate wellness programmes lies primarily in the execution of a successful wellness strategy. This will dictate the commitment from employees and employers. One solution to fit all is rarely on the road to a successful corporate wellness programme. Treating employees as individuals with individual challenges and motivations is the first step towards the success of your programme.

A sign that a wellness programme is successful is when there is ongoing leadership, support and commitment felt from both employees and employers.

Imagine a new employee arriving on their first day to a company. This company provides ongoing education around physical and mental health from day one. They also provide incentives to employees to actively work on their wellbeing. Their senior management and middle management are actively promoting this programme and ensuring its consistency.

This creates a culture in which employees feel that their wellness in the workplace is of critical importance to its success.

STEP 3

Implement

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.

Here’s some examples of tailored programmes we’ve created
for organisations over the last 12 months:

PREVENTION OF BURNOUT FOR TRAUMA WORKERS

It is believed that implementing workplace wellness programmes with professions supporting other’s needs will help address vicarious traumatic responses and enable participants to develop consistent coping strategies, minimizing the effects of stress and preventing job burnout.

WEIGHT MANAGEMENT
PROGRAMME

The effectiveness of a weight management programme can be dependent on a variety of components including: self-monitoring, counsellor feedback and communication, social support, use of a structured programme, and use of an individually tailored programme.

SMOKING CESSATION
PROGRAMME

Our initial assessment uncovered a need for a smoking cessation programme on our client’s site. Our team utilized a combination of qualitative grounded theory and thematic analysis coupled with quantitative measures to investigate the causation of maladaptive health outcomes across that particular organisation.

Workplace Wellness & Health Programmes

STEP 4

Review

We understand that employees goals and needs change over time, so reviewing the effect our wellbeing programmes have within an organisation is a necessary component of our research programmes. By reviewing the programme, we can identify and analyse the data that has been gathered over the period of the programme.

We provide our clients with a report of research findings to display the impact our wellbeing programmes had on the employees of organisations we work with.  

Corporate Wellness Programmes

STEP 5

Adjust

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.

Corporate Wellness Programmes

TRUSTED BY IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATIONS ALIKE

corporate wellness programme

Our Methodology

Our team of experts will work comprehensively to understand the wellness requirements of your organisation. The research process consists of eight stages as seen below:

1. Collecting initial data from the company

2. Defining the purpose of the research

3. Reviewing current literature

4. Creation of hypothesis

5. Creating a comprehensive research design

6. Testing and data collection

7. Analysis of research data

8. Report of research findings

These 8 steps enable us to produce workplace wellbeing programmes grounded in psychological theory and underpinned by data gathered from your workforce. We continuously measure and review the programme to ensure that we are achieving the objectives of each organisation. Organisations have different needs and we are committed to exceeding your wellness expectations.

Our vision is to build and implement evidence-based programmes that promote beneficial emotional, creative, intellectual, environmental, social, occupational and physical outcomes for all our clients.

Start your wellbeing journey today to ensure your employees are happy and healthy in their place of work.

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