Six Employee Wellness Program Ideas to Implement Today
There’s no better time to spring into health. And there’s no better way to encourage employees to do the same than launching new wellness programs.
Here are six employee wellness initiatives to implement today!
1. Provide healthy meals or snack options
As many spend the majority of their daily lives at their places of work, providing healthy meals or snacks gives employees easy access to nutritious foods and makes it easier for them to maintain a healthy diet. While this can be an expensive perk to offer, it may help employees to feel more energized, focused, productive, and happy. It can also encourage employees to be in the office and encourage more conversations in the common areas.
Some healthy food subscription options to look into: Hungry Root, SnackNation, Garten. Employers can also help manage costs by providing snacks on certain days of the month.
2. Encourage personal time off and self-care
To be productive, people not only need a healthy amount of rest and relaxation, but also the flexibility to rest and relax when they need to. While it may not be possible to accommodate all self-care needs during normal working hours, allowing employees to rest when they say they need to benefits your organization in the long run.
Employers encourage their employees to take care of themselves, even when it may not be ideal for the business’ immediate needs, show they genuinely care about the wellbeing of their employees. And employees who feel cared for are more committed to their companies and ultimately more productive. Making this a win-win.
3. Provide mental healthcare support and resources
Though mental health can be difficult to navigate, as not everyone is comfortable talking about it and some may be afraid that talking about mental health may lead to crossing professional boundaries, the truth is that mental health needs to be acknowledged, maintained, and treated for improvement to be made. Life can feel overwhelming at times and providing mental health support and resources for employees can help them navigate these struggles and enable them to show up to work as their best selves.
Studies show that the global economy loses an estimated one trillion dollars per year due to lost productivity as a result of neglecting mental health needs. Many mental health platforms and online services are available to help employers better support, and prioritize, their employees mental health. These include:
4. Offer reimbursements for health and wellness expenses
Reimbursements are one of the most popular health and wellness benefits employers tend to offer. Most commonly, companies will reimburse employees for gym memberships or fitness classes. However, as more health and wellness products and services become available, many companies are looking to expand their reimbursement offerings. Some of these include offering reimbursements for meal subscription plans, fitness equipment and app subscriptions such as Headspace and ClassPass.
5. Encourage team-bonding in and outside of the office
The more your team gets to know one another, not only do relationships among coworkers become stronger, but also communication enhances, brainstorming and idea-sharing happens more frequently, and daily workflow becomes more efficient.
To help build relationships in the workplace, consider implementing weekly team lunches. Most people don’t like to chat while working, so facilitating weekly team lunches gives employees the opportunity to engage in casual conversation and get to know each other better. To help encourage relationships outside of the office, consider implementing quarterly team outings and events. This can encourage employees to build stronger bonds and friendships over non-work related topics and conversation.
6. Offer Wellness Incentives
Research shows that one of the best and most effective ways to get people engaged and stay motivated to participate in your corporate wellness program is to offer incentives. Incentives can fall under a variety of categories:
| Cost Incentives | Example: Cash rewards, gift cards, reimbursements | |
| Low or No-Cost Incentives | Example: Paid time off, extended breaks | |
| Progress-based Incentives | Best for increasing and maintaining participation. Employees can earn multiple incentives throughout the program. Increasing the size/value of the incentives as the program continues is an additional way to motivate your team to participate | |
| Participation-based Incentives | This type of Incentive can be given to anyone who participates in the program. Because of its non-competitive nature, this type of incentive is best for increasing camaraderie and cohesiveness among employees | |
| Performance-based Incentives | This type of incentive can be given as employees reach certain goals or milestones in your program. If you have a team of highly-competitive people, this type of incentive is an effective way to ensure high participation rates | |
| Results-based Incentives | This type of incentive is typically given at the end of a program to employees who reach an overall goal |
The most common type of incentive is monetary and often includes:
- Cash rewards given directly to employees as bonuses.
- Reimbursements for classes, memberships, subscriptions, equipment purchased by employees, etc.
- Money deposited into an Health Spending Account (HSA) – which we’ll talk more about later in this article.
Other incentives may include:
- Material gifts (i.e. apparel, appliances, tech, equipment, etc.)
- Gift cards
- Company events
- Free meals/lunches
- Free subscriptions or memberships
- Paid Time Off (PTO)
- Extended or additional breaks