What Is The Key To Better Wellness Programs?

Wellness and general well-being have become areas of increasing focus and attention in recent years, both inside and outside the workplace for both employees and employers alike.

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After all, employees that are in a better place mentally and physically tend to be more productive and achieve better outcomes on the job.

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Further, given the growing interest in wellness among the workforce, employers have had an added incentive to introduce and promote well-being-related benefits and perks just in terms of attraction and retention alone even absent the productivity gains. 

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The concepts of well-being and wellness, however, are fairly broad, abstract ideas, for which there is no universal agreement with any specificity about what it means to achieve well-being or how best to do so.

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As a result, the variety of potential solutions for achieving well-being has been fairly broad in their own right, which has led to a great deal of employer experimentation with mixing and matching programs, practices, and policies aimed at promoting well-being.

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While not all of those means have been equally effective at fostering and harnessing wellness in the workplace, of course, there does appear to be a growing acknowledgement among professionals in the field that a buffet of disconnected offerings is pretty unlikely to achieve the intended outcomes.

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As for how the desired results from well-being related efforts might be better achieved, this recent article from Fortune contains some insight on the matter that may be worth considering.

How To Achieve Better Results From Wellness & Well-Being Programs

• Offer/Promote Volunteer Opportunities: One recent study involving nearly 50 thousand workers found that of all the well-being-centric benefits they analyzed - including resilience training, apps that monitor sleep, and virtual wellness coaching - the only offering that actually correlated positively with improved workplace well-being was volunteering. 
• Integrate Well-Being Into Company Culture: It’s not enough to provide a smorgasbord of wellness options and leave it up to the employees to take the next steps. Leadership within the company must be developed and encouraged to prioritize the well-being of their people in order to make it possible for either the employees or the company as a whole to realize the potential of their wellness efforts. 
• Remove Stressors: Many wellness interventions seem to treat the symptoms without addressing the underlying disease. Removing sources of stress from an employee’s on-the-job experience can be more beneficial than offering solutions that help better manage the resulting stress. Some of the most effective means for increasing wellness company wide can range from increasing schedule flexibility and minimizing work requirements during non-business hours to implementing a 4-day workweek and offering additional mental health PTO.

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While the experiment with how best to promote wellness in the workplace will likely continue for some time into the future, it does seem to be becoming more clear that there will be no simple one-size-fits-all solution for every organization.

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That said, focusing on the needs and concerns most relevant to your employees and the talent pool you want to attract is emerging as a pretty good place to start.

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