Jackie Buttery: Where to start with a new wellness strategy

You want to support health, your leadership team is suddenly regarding a wellness strategy as the hot topic, and you have a catalogue of cold callers and emailers pitching their services at you. So where to start?

Regardless of whether you have a large budget or none, your underlying objectives should be the same. You want to support your employees in times of ill health and you want to target efforts that will address the health concerns of now and mitigate the risks to health for the future.

Acute ill-health

Within the health space you will be spending almost your entire budget on the treatment of ill-health. Utilisation data across the insured benefits you offer will illustrate where you are spending your money and for most organisations that’s going to be on cancer, musculoskeletal and mental health conditions.

Logically that’s where you start, focusing your efforts on addressing the major concerns. Unhelpfully however this data provides insight into those with acute symptoms only; it doesn’t tell you about your employees who are in work, who carry around a health niggle or worse, who could show up as a statistic on the insurance report of tomorrow but not of now.  

Keeping focus

When you embark on a wellness strategy, tread cautiously, seek input. It’s easy to offer massages on site once a month, to put bananas at the tea points, to run resilience training and to tell people health and wellbeing is important.

What’s less easy is truly targeting your effort where it is needed most and in the razzamatazz of lots of small start-up businesses offering all manner of things it’s easy to lose focus. 

Employee and provider input

Success is not just about a big bang launch and a leadership statement of intent. Delivery of a successful wellness strategy will require sustained effort and winning the hearts and minds of employees. That demands some planning and your efforts need to land well.

Seek out those statistics from your insurances to test those major areas of spend but also seek out the input of your employees. They can tell you what they perceive their health risks to be. They can tell you what efforts they would like you to make.

Fascinating how little this is done, despite the engagement surveys and other feedback processes. Keep it simple; make it meaningful. It’s all within your grasp.

This article was written by Jackie Buttery, global head of reward and benefits, Herbert Smith Freehills