How to find out if employees are engaging with your wellbeing programme and address the findings
All too often I am asked why people are not, say, using their gym membership; not attending the big events the company is organising on their behalf: or, after a brief period of excitement, why no one is participating or taking advantage of the wellbeing related benefits on offer. Inevitably, if people are not engaging enough this leads to questions from the Board as to why money is spent on wellbeing, and the results of these schemes are not visible.
Here are the three most common traps that companies may fall into, together with some solutions on how to increase the engagement and value your wellbeing platform delivers.
1. Create a fitness space
Trap: One of the most common traps to fall into is creating a fitness space and/or hiring personal trainer/yoga/nutritionist to lead on the wellbeing offering, and then simply expecting this to reduce stress and increase health levels alone. Although you will get an initial positive response, within a few months the fitness space ends up becoming just another meeting room. Compounding the problem is the fact that people don’t want to be seen in their leggings in the office and, in some extreme cases, the gym manager doesn’t even use their own space.
Solution: Having a wellness space is a great idea, but don’t rely on someone who has a niche background to be the answer to all of your problems. Remember that fitness and health are two different problems, and require their own unique and tailored solutions. Ensure that the space and activities cater to your varied workforce and are centred around reducing cortisol levels, providing an opportunity to break up the day with some fun activity – as well as becoming more fit overall.
Be sensitive to the fact that there’s a lot of body shame associated with physical activities and offer alternatives such as lunch time walking etc. If you choose to have a fitness/nutrition professional to lead your programme, ensure that they are expanding your offerings to included mental and emotional health as well.
2. Increase attendance to health talks
Trap: Assuming that lunch and learn and/or wellbeing week is at the core of your wellbeing programme. Neatly tied with the first question, is how can you get more people to attend the lunch and learn sessions the company is investing in. Although there’s a huge benefit in bringing high quality speakers into the workplace, often attendance is poor and it is difficult to ensure continuity post talk or wellness week. Often we hear from employees that their biggest blocker is scheduling, location or duration. The other is content-related – although it is great to have a celebrity speaker or your health insurance company come in to talk, often there’s very little value or new information that those events provide.
Solution: Start off with understanding the subjects that most employees are interested in, respect your workforce’s intelligence, and offer them cutting edge and practical information. Take advantage of technology and broadcast the event to those who are in other locations or working remotely. Make it available afterwards to those who could not attend. Ensure that all of the content is delivered in a time conscious way as everyone is pressured with meetings and deadlines. Give people the opportunity to continue the engagement on the subject in the coming weeks, not just as a one-off. This will allow for best practices to be shared, keeps the energy high, and better focuses attention on your wellbeing initiative.
3. Personalise your wellbeing initiatives
Trap: One-size-fits-all. Lack of personalisation is ultimately what erodes the impact of a wellbeing initiative over time. It is easy to copy what other companies are successfully doing – and not unreasonable to expect it to also work for you. But in reality, the lack of deep study and understanding of one’s workforce and its wellbeing needs are actually what truly causes the lack of real engagement.
Your employees are highly intelligent consumers, and we all have huge amounts of information available to us outside work. Rightly or wrongly, the increasing expectation is that it is the company’s job to bring us the right benefits and offerings to ensure we have a healthy work/life. Most HR professionals and leaders are not experienced and/or trained on how to do design a workspace for healthy living, so it is easy to try and mimic the perceived success of others.
Solution: Data, data, data. Don’t wait on the annual surveys to understand what people really need. There are brilliant tools out there that will get people understanding their engagement, stress level and blockers. Once you have that data, analyse it, get user groups involved, and professional advice to help you customise best practices. Having live data and high quality resources is what will support you in staying current with your offerings, and involving employees directly ensures that you have a continuous support.
Finally, understand that one’s wellbeing offering is ever evolving, and keep invoking employee curiosity and receiving continuous feedback, as well as offering high quality content/initiatives. These are all bound to result in an immediate boost in employee engagement, and in the long term, positive and sustainable results.
This article is provided by Elevated Living.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, Levell
A 360C wellbeing@work company, from strategy advisory&implementation to digital wellbeing platform.
