New Year’s Resolutions for Your Workplace Wellness Program
Each new year provides the opportunity to reflect and learn from the past and look ahead to the future with a renewed sense of hope. This renewed sense of hope is often fueled by New Year’s resolutions designed to encourage us to grow, change, and reach for our potential.
New Year’s resolutions are not only for individuals though, they can also be designed for businesses! And what better time to assess your company’s wellness program and resolve to make sustainable changes that will increase engagement and help your employees improve both their physical and mental health.
Here are some wellness program resolution ideas designed to build on past successes and improve engagement and ROI in the coming year!
Resolve to Celebrate Success
Before defining your resolutions for 2023, take a moment to reflect, evaluate, and celebrate the wellness program milestones you and your teams reached in 2022! The successes and lessons learned in the past year can not only provide valuable benchmarks for the coming year but also help you create a culture of health in the coming year and beyond. As you identify your successes, take a moment to celebrate them with your team and recognize your collective achievements and accomplishments, then use these to reaffirm your dedication to creating a healthier and more productive workforce.
Resolve to Increase Senior Management Visibility
It comes as no surprise that success starts at the top and the most successful workplace wellness programs are found at companies where the CEO and C-Suite executives are engaged, vocal in championing the cause, willing to participate in challenges, and open to sharing their own personal success stories. To help drive senior management’s participation, create goals for your executive teams and include them when designing wellness challenges. Healthy, engaged employees are happy, productive employees and there’s no better place to start than the top of the company.
Resolve to Make Healthy Choices Easy
The most common barriers to wellness program participation are lack of time, lack of interest, lack of awareness, lack of access, and privacy. Resolve to address these issues by making healthy choices the default option, so that time, interest, awareness, and other barriers are broken down. Implementing simple changes, such as serving healthier foods at meetings, in the cafeteria, and vending machines, can go a long way in creating a stronger culture of health. You may also consider creating policy changes, such as making certain areas “soda or candy free” and/or environmental changes, such as posting health and nutrition messages in places where employees will see them (elevators, restrooms, hallways, coffee stations) or installing bike racks, locker rooms, and showers. The easier you can make it for employees to make healthier choices, the more your teams will participate.
Resolve to Get to Know Your Employees
When designing a successful workplace wellness strategy, it is imperative to know your employees. Whether creating a new wellness program or revising an existing one, make a resolution to get in touch with your employees’ health profile and interests and solicit feedback from your Wellness Champions and senior management. You may consider schedule small focus groups to obtain personal feedback, uncover barriers, and develop a program that is based on listening, learning, and understanding your employee population.
Resolve to Communicate and Refresh All Year Long
A new year provides an opportunity to leverage the momentum of employees’ personal New Year’s resolutions to remind them that the wellness program is available to support their goals. By starting the year with a campaign that highlights your wellness programs and communicates information that educates employees, provides updates, and recognizes past success, you can jumpstart your engagement. Then, as the year progresses, it is imperative to create a strategy that includes a year-round communications roadmap that reflects national health observances, local community health initiatives, and company-wide wellness objectives. Resolve to remember engagement is fluid and design campaigns that anticipate the lows, leverages the highs, and keeps you connected to your teams throughout the year.
Resolve to Have More Fun
While most companies focus on the launch of a wellness program, and create a wonderful kick-off event that includes open communications and lots of enthusiasm, many wellness grow stale as the year progresses and engagement wanes. Resolve to refresh your program, add new components, and keep people excited to participate. Also remember that wellness shouldn’t be serious all the time; keep it fun, fresh, and exciting by sponsoring corporate, departmental, or team challenges, offering incentives and giveaways for meeting goals, holding walking meetings, and designing other fun initiatives that promote both physical and mental health. Incorporating fun and freshness into your wellness program is energizing and can provide incentives for employees who would normally shy away from participating.
Resolve to Encourage Personal Goals It’s been proven that personalized goal setting increases the likelihood of success. So this year, resolve to encourage employees to set measurable, achievable goals so they can experience early success and maintain their momentum as they work towards making sustainable changes. By attaining early successes, your employees will build the competence and motivation to fuel them as they face challenges. To further support your teams and promote their individual success, consider providing tools, resources, and encouragement needed to create a culture of health. Health coaches, health and wellness portals, and wellness challenges are some examples of what may be included in your wellness plan offerings.