Four top tips for engaging employees with wellbeing benefits to support productivity

Employees are at the heart of any organisation, so it’s important that they’re provided with the resources to manage their physical, mental, emotional, financial and social wellbeing.

All organisations have a statutory duty to ensure the health, safety and welfare of their employees. However, those organisations that go beyond and create a holistic framework to support whole employee wellbeing will see a more engaged and productive workforce.

This, in turn, will have many benefits for an organisation including:

• Reduced absenteeism and presenteeism and the associated costs to an organisation

• Reduced staff turnover and the associated costs in recruitment and training

• Increased employee morale and improved reputation for the organisation

• Reduced likelihood of claims on healthcare and group risk plans and the effect on future premiums

Other factors are currently affecting employee productivity and organisational success. The Covid-19 pandemic, ‘The Great Resignation’ and Brexit are leading to a shortage of workers across many industry sectors. With an ongoing war for talent, those organisations that promote an effective wellbeing strategy and embed it in company culture are likely to win against their competition.

So how can your organisation engage employees with wellbeing benefits and support productivity?

1. Start with an audit of your existing wellbeing benefits

It’s important that before making any changes to wellbeing benefits you audit what you already have and measure their effectiveness with your employees. Once you know what’s working and what isn’t, you can make informed decisions on what needs changing.

Take a deep dive into your benefits and any management information you can obtain. Assess how the wellbeing benefits work with your organisation’s diversity, equity and inclusion and environmental, social and governance policies.

Ask for employee feedback on the wellbeing benefits they are offered. Listen to their needs and include wellbeing benefits that provide the most support to them. By doing this, your employees will feel heard and see that they’ve helped effect change in the benefits programme. Go even further by communicating to your employees in a ‘you said/we listened/we changed’ style communication.

2. Review how you communicate with your employees

Quite often, employees won’t know about the spectrum of benefits available to them. Therefore, the issue may not be down to the benefits, but the way they are communicated.

Many organisations have challenges in employee engagement and how organisations communicate with their people around wellbeing benefits is crucial to engagement.

Organisations that have clear communication, consistent messaging and ongoing dialogue will see better engagement.

3. Use a wellbeing calendar of events

A simple, but effective, way to engage employees with their wellbeing benefits is the use of a wellbeing calendar. Over the year, create engaging wellbeing campaigns around key awareness days and tie them in with the wellbeing benefits the organisation offers.

Most organisations offer low-cost but high-value employee assistance programmes. These will usually have their own health and wellbeing calendar which organisations can use, including multiple awareness dates per month, covering aspects of physical, mental, emotional, financial, and social wellbeing.

Organisations may also want to have virtual or in-person health and wellbeing days, utilising their relationships with various benefit providers to deliver webinars, seminars, competitions/giveaways, etc, to highlight the wellbeing benefits and increase engagement with them.

4. Consider the cost of living and financial wellbeing

It has recently been announced that energy prices and national insurance contributions are being increased and this may have come at a time when many organisations have had to freeze pay increases and are generally struggling.

Money worries can affect employees’ mental wellbeing and this can hit their productivity. One in five people with mental health problems are in debt and organisations that offer support around financial wellbeing will benefit from more engaged and productive employees.

There are many ways organisations can engage employees with financial wellbeing benefits. This could range from workshops on pensions and savings to education about financial scams.

Often overlooked are the value-added services included with benefits such as group risk policies and health cash plans that can help employees with their finances. Some group risk providers offer limited digital physiotherapy consultations to employees, saving employees time and money.

Many health cash plan providers will offer access to discounted shopping websites. Furthermore, health cash plans allow child dependants to be covered for free.

Getting it right

What ultimately makes an employee productive varies from one individual to another, but knowing you have the right benefits and policies in place, as well as a robust and consistent communications and education strategy, you’ll start to recognise the return on your investment with improved productivity and a happier workforce.

Many companies are looking to expand on their wellbeing benefits during 2022. So before you start introducing a whole new suite of benefits/services, or look to change internal policies, make sure you measure your employee engagement and understand what’s important to them – so you can be sure that your benefit budgets are spent wisely.

The author is Zoe Ashley, healthcare consultant, Buck

This article was supplied by Buck