4 Ways To Make Your Corporate Wellness Program Available For All

You’ve worked hard to set up your wellness program. Your employees participate in HRAs, biometric screenings, challenges and competitions, and potentially even more. People are involved, but now it’s time to take it to the next step and make the program available to all of the employees at your company. Whether these employees are international, mobile, at retail locations, or seemingly uninterested, here are four ways to make your corporate wellness program available to everyone in your organization.

Harness Your Wellness Champions
You know those people that participate in every event? Those ones helping to recruit others to attend events, giving you new ideas, and generally cheerleading for wellness? They’re your wellness champions. Harness their power and implement corporate wellness program components where company employees are not invited by the CEO or their boss, but by a trusted friend or colleague. Employees are much more likely to trust a program if a friend or trusted co-workers invites them. By taking a grassroots, bottom-up approach to wellness, you give your employees a sense of ownership and allow them to drive participation. And it all starts with wellness champions. Get them to invite others, and provide champions and new recruits alike with the tools to recruit even more people to participate. Taking this approach to recruitment allows you to engage everyone on a personal level. This includes people who distrust everything that comes from corporate—they’ll get involved through the trust created by a trusted friend. It also allows you to get through to people who normally ignore messages, as being recruited by a friend cuts through the clutter.
See: How Your Most Connected Employees Can Help You Spread Good Health

Increase Participation Methods
Companies with employees in retail, manufacturing, or hospital environments can often encounter the “unplugged” issue, i.e. employees in different store locations, warehouses, or even those that are constantly traveling. How do you reach these individuals? Make your program relevant and engaging. Components like team wellness competitions mean employees will join together and keep one another engaged, regardless of location. This team building can be enhanced with social wellness platforms that unite employees across locations. But having the ability to overcome geographic boundaries and get individuals involved in team-based wellness competitions presents its own challenge in ensuring that employees can report their activities and get credit for their team. Technology is helping us overcome this issue, as well. It was recently reported that nearly half of Americans are now using smartphones, and 88% of American have some form of cell phone. Use the availability of this form of communication to your advantage—let participants in the challenge text in results, report on a mobile website, or even call in. If this is not an option, let them track on paper and have a wellness champion report their activities for them. And these challenges and competitions don’t have to be focused on physical activity—you can use them for other components of your corporate wellness program like completing HRAs or getting annual flu shots and physicals.
See: How Competitions & Social Games Can Drive Employee Wellness

Go Global
Engaging employees worldwide provides a great chance to get them feeling more involved with the company and connected with their colleagues at the homebase. They feel like they belong, and they jump in to encourage colleagues around the globe to pursue a path to better health. Engaging employees worldwide does not come without complexities, though. Global employees need tools that are available 24/7 in their native language, and they may need someone to turn to at hours different than the ones you work. Tools like online platforms that cater to employee wellness are critical here, as is native language support availability. Going global may be one of the more complicated activities to complete on this list, but succeeding in this area means bringing all employees together to truly feel like they are part of one company. This has a massive effect on morale and view of the company, and gets employees to work together like never before.
See: The Right Fit—How an Employee Wellness Program Boosted Health and Morale

Make It Social
Social networking allows people to connect around similar interests and activities. Once connected, people create a community where they communicate, share information, and forge bonds. Social networking can happen online or offline, but technology has allowed us to scale this concept more efficiently so that we can engage more people. Combine this availability with recent research showing that health is contagious within social networks, and you can see how you can put the findings of this research to use by tapping into the existing social network at your company and using it to spread healthy behaviors.
See: Going Viral – How Social Networks Spread Employee Wellness

What other methods have you used to engage your full population of employees? Let us know and join the discussion in the comments.

employee wellness programs, corporate wellness programs