What Are The Essential Components of Employee Wellness Program? 

The components of employee wellness programs cover health benefit plans that most organizations offer as a part of their service package. An employee wellness program can be defined as a program that helps employees stay healthy. 

All workplace wellness programs aim to create healthier employees, resulting in a boost in productivity and minimizing healthcare spending. However, the effectiveness of an employee healthcare program depends on what constitutes the program. Some of the most successful employee wellness programs are those crafted to address the specific needs of employees. 

Employee wellness programs have become vital for all types and sizes of businesses as they help attract quality employees. While large organizations have access to financial reserves to roll out an elaborate program, smaller companies focus on offering a more personalized plan based on their employees’ interests and needs. 

Google, for instance, has created the People and Innovation Lab for their 10K plus employees in which they apply the elements of science to deal with organizational problems. It also focuses on promoting the health of its workforce. A relatively smaller organization called KIND with about 700 employees has a wellness room with all the facilities needed to keep their staff members rejuvenated. 

Between these two extremes, there are a few essential components of employee wellness program. 

Surveying To Know What Your Employees Need 

The management can very well roll out an employee wellness program, but if it is done without understanding the unique health and wellness concerns of your organization and industry, it could be an exercise in futility. Speak to employees in various departments and determine their health-specific issues, especially those connected with the work processes. 

Factors such as burnout, stress, working in a highly inconvenient environment, lack of access to clean water, toilet facilities are among the common problems employees face. Find a way of addressing these issues and all those that find a common thread among employees from diverse sectors and departments. 

Planning The Structure of The Wellness Program 

Planning the details of an employee wellness program involves taking information from the survey and using that data to create features that address the concerned employees’ problems. Many employees working in specific departments, especially in the night shifts, feel stressed and overworked when they do not get sufficient sleep and rest during the daytime. Ensuring flexible working hours and a system to identify and address mental health issues can be achieved with proper planning. 

Identifying the Goals

What are the benefits you aim to provide from your employee wellness program? Identifying the key and ancillary benefits properly is very important. Once the benefits are identified, you can assign KPIs for your wellness program, and the same can be connected to your long-term business goals as well. You can do simple checks like tracking the percentage of absentees since a specific wellness policy was introduced to know its effectiveness. 

You can also create personal milestones for individual employees and encourage them to work towards achieving these targets. It is a simple yet effective way of internalizing your goals and tracking their progress at multiple levels. 

Tracking the Progress of the Wellness Program 

Tracking the progress of the employee wellness program and its effect on the team as well as individuals with respect to the goals and the KPI’s set can help you measure if the program is performing on expected lines. The success of the individual and the group can be measured against the goals, and the top performers can be rewarded to encourage them and the team to keep going at it. 

Tracking the wellness program is important to ensure accountability and offer tangible results. It also helps you make course corrections before wastage of resources if the program is not delivering the expected results. 

Ensuring Greater Participation 

Are all employees benefiting from your employee wellness program? The value of the program can be realized only if the benefits reach a larger number of employees. It is also an important factor in measuring the success of the program. 

Suppose your research indicates that the team is not taking advantage of enjoying the benefits of the employee wellness program. In that case, it is apparent there is a glitch somewhere along the line, and you must go back to the planning stage to tweak the program appropriately. 

Recalibrating To Make The Program Work On a Broader Level 

The employee wellness program must be tracked and measured continuously to make it work even when the circumstances and situations change as they are bound to as your establishment evolves. Recalibrating must be an ongoing process and must be considered even when the program is working fine. 

Find ways of improving it and make it even more beneficial to your team. If all the program segments are not delivering the expected results, you must brainstorm and find ways of making it relevant to more people. 

Conclusion

An employee wellness program cannot be set in a rigid framework and within an inflexible set of rules and activities. The program’s features should be flexible and designed to evolve and serve your employees better with time.

Onsurity provides affordable, accessible and comprehensive healthcare plans for SMEs, startups and growing businesses which cover every component needed for an employee wellness program. Onsurity’s healthcare membership is packed with all the fringe benefits that your every employee looks forward to having for their health and safety like group health/term life insurance, doctor teleconsultations, fitness webinars, discounted health checkups and medicine orders delivered at doorstep.

Isn’t it amazing? Apart from these benefits, the plan is extremely pocket friendly, time saving and hassle free!