What Is a Corporate Wellbeing Program?
A corporate wellbeing program is a set of initiatives, resources, and policies set up by a company to improve the physical, mental and emotional health of its employees.
Part of a larger organisational development strategy, an effective company wellbeing program will ultimately contribute to both the health and happiness of employees, and will increase productivity and loyalty. In a highly competitive market where talent attraction and retention is key, corporate wellbeing programs are an essential tool for building a culture that helps you win against your competition.
How do corporate wellbeing programs work?
All staff wellbeing programs should be long term strategies designed around your business goals and the needs of your employees.
You will want your program to be a natural extension of your company culture and values, but it will be heavily influenced by the industry you’re in and the size of your business. The needs of employees in traditional office environments can vary greatly from those in manufacturing, retail or healthcare, and your available budget will often dictate the range and scale of support you can provide.
Here’s your guide to a range of policies, educational resources and employee wellbeing initiatives in the workplace that you can implement this year.
Examples of wellbeing programs being used in the workplace
Whether you’re offering a comprehensive wellbeing platform that has benefits available to all employees, or you have a flexible program that allows your team to choose from several options, your workplace wellbeing program should demonstrate your commitment to reducing stress for your employees in ways that work best for them.
Here are some examples of health and wellbeing programs in the workplace to get you started.
Policies
Policies like flexible working arrangements, work-from-home days, adjusted in-office hours, increased paid time off, and shared parental leave are all options to consider.
Working with your human resources team to incorporate new company-wide policies is typically more of a long-term project, but can make a significant difference to the wellbeing of your current employees, along with attracting the best candidates for future open positions.
Initiatives
Examples of employee wellbeing initiatives include financial, mental and emotional support for your employees. Not every employee will make use of every initiative, but having these available to everyone can be helpful. These could include specific wellbeing activities for employees like:
- Discounted gym membership or class credits
- In-office yoga, pilates, or meditation classes
- Healthy eating options for lunches or office snacks
- Mental health first-aider training
- Financial health training
- Government schemes and discounts like cycle-to-work or pension contributions
Ongoing wellbeing programs at work could also include:
- Stress management programs
- Employee assistance programs (EAP)
- Substance abuse care programs
- Mental health support and counselling
- Private health insurance
Awareness days and educational resources
Some of the best workplace wellbeing initiatives tie in well with international wellbeing and mental health awareness days, like Stress Awareness Month and Mental Health Awareness Week. These are excellent opportunities to provide educational resources to your team and let them know about the range of wellbeing programs for employees that you offer.
Planning special events around the international and national wellbeing calendar is a helpful way to ensure that all your employees have access to ongoing resources that support their mental and physical health.
With 76% of employees having less than two hours a week to dedicate to their health and wellbeing, pre-arranged events can be scheduled into their calendars well ahead of time and give them an opportunity to step away from their normal daily tasks to focus on themselves.
These moments in time are the perfect time to invite experts on specific topics into your workplace to speak to employees or host workshops on various topics, from nutrition and exercise, to stress management and mental health.
You can even tie these into company goals, with workshops on resilience building, leadership, communication, or habit building that can be applied to your employees’ personal and work life.
How to build a successful corporate health and wellbeing program
There’s never been a better time than now to start thinking about how you can create a healthier, stress-resilient workforce, with wellbeing programs at work.
Goals and business objectives
Any program or initiative you bring into your company must align with the overall goals and business objectives you have in place. This is essential when you’re investing both time and money into a wellbeing program.
Think about what your organisation and industry’s biggest challenges are and how these impact your team, at all levels of the business. For instance, professional services like law firms have dedicated, hard-working employees who operate in a highly demanding and stressful industry. Providing extensive preventative mental and physical health support can be the difference between employee burnout and ongoing success.
Competitive industries often struggle to attract and retain top talent. Think about how your wellbeing program can counter some of these effects with unique, personalised wellness initiatives and policies that boost your brand image to job seekers and increase current employee engagement and loyalty.
Determining what your core goals are is the first step you should take when planning a new wellbeing program, as this will tell you where you need to focus budget and resources to make it happen. Think about whether your focus is preventative or reactive, or a mix of both—for example, offering private medical insurance could significantly increase health care costs across the company, versus preventative educational resources that keep your employees happier and healthier.
Needs for employees
After outlining your goals, think about what exactly your employees want and need from a wellbeing program. Value is crucial to think about—is your investment being adequately used and are employees benefiting from the new initiatives?
Everyone is different, so coverage and tools that can be adapted and personalised will likely be a better option than a large number of initiatives that aren’t being used by the majority of the team.
Budget and resources
All successful wellbeing programs must have buy-in from leadership. Without this, funding for new initiatives won’t be approved and your program will come to an end before it’s ever really begun.
Doing thorough research upfront about what costs will be, both monetarily and in terms of human resources, is essential for gaining support. Relating these initiatives back to business objectives and outcome-based goals will also be necessary for leadership to fully understand how these corporate wellbeing programs have a tangible benefit to the company’s bottom line.
Access and communication
Lack of awareness about company initiatives is a major reason for program failure. When it’s not top-of-mind for your team, a habit they’ve already established, or easy to access, the take up rates will remain low and budget will likely be wasted.
This is especially the case if you have a hybrid or remote team, as they aren’t always in the office to benefit from in-person workshops, healthy snacks, or other initiatives you’ve put in place.
When building your wellbeing program, think about how you can support both in-office and at-home workers who may not prioritise their health over their daily work. Email reminders, send wellbeing benefits to their home, or host tele-workshops to support your hybrid workforce.
Data and feedback
As the business grows and employees come and go, you’ll likely need to adjust your program’s initiatives or overall wellbeing policies to adapt to new needs of the organisation and your team.
Keeping track of what parts of your program are being used and which aren’t is essential for knowing exactly how your team is using the program and where to invest more of your budget.
Ask your team for feedback at least once a year to get a better understanding of their needs over time and how you can better support them through the wellbeing program you have.
What are the benefits for employees?
For time-stretched employees, a corporate wellbeing program can point them in the right direction for benefits that impact their mental and physical health that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to.
Improved individual health and wellbeing
When wellbeing initiatives are focused on the whole-health of employees, these team members can feel more able to deal with the stressors they will inevitably run into during the work day.
But with these practices in place, the lasting impact of these stressors is significantly lessened and burnout is less likely. Comprehensive programs are one of the best ways for employees to focus on specific areas of their health that they want to improve, in a way that works best for them.
Reduced stress
Workplace absences as a result of stress and the long-term sickness this can cause are higher than they’ve ever been in over a decade. By lowering employee stress levels, each individual team member can benefit in both their work and personal life.
Reduced stress means employees are able to bring their best selves to work more of the time, and thrive in roles that they love. Knowing that their company cares about their health and wellbeing means they are more likely to be loyal to you long term.
Improved work performance
When employees are routinely under high pressure and feel chronically stressed, their work performance and output will undoubtedly suffer. Research has found a direct correlation between stress levels increasing and productivity levels decreasing, so addressing the root cause of this is essential.
With stress management as a preventative and proactive measure, employees are more able to focus on their daily tasks. This means better concentration, improved memory, enhanced decision-making abilities, and, ultimately, a more productive day.
What are the benefits for employers?
It’s not only employees who benefit from corporate wellbeing programs. While the focus may be on the individual, the impact of corporate wellbeing programs can be felt throughout the whole organisation.
Increased productivity
Research has found that happy people are around 12% more productive, so it’s natural to conclude that happier employees are more likely to feel focused and attentive at work.
Not only can this mean individual tasks are accomplished more quickly, but it can also lead to greater discussion around creative ideas and building a more collaborative work environment where team members can openly share thoughts on completing projects more efficiently.
Higher employee retention
Global employee engagement took a significant hit during the Covid-19 pandemic, but research has found that it’s on the rise again—in part, due to a new focus on wellbeing throughout organisations around the world.
Engaged employees are more productive, produce higher quality work, and are more likely to stay with a company for a longer period of their career. And with a record high of 23% employee engagement worldwide, this is something that your business should be looking to achieve.
Competitive edge for employee acquisition
Offering a good salary is no longer enough to attract the top talent to your organisation. The best way to stand out from competitors and bring in the best team members is to offer unique benefits, like a workplace wellbeing program.
With 45% of UK employees ranking “great culture” as the most important factor when looking for a new job, this is no longer a “nice to have” but a must-have.
Wellbeing programs demonstrate to job seekers that your organisation is dedicated to improving work/life balance for their people and that they take both mental and physical health seriously. For a Millennial and Gen Z market, this integration into company culture is something they’re actively looking for.
Reduced costs for employee time off work
Preventative wellbeing plans are one of the best ways to help reduce the number of absences an employee has throughout the year due to stress-related illness. Poor mental health costs UK employers over £45 billion a year, an increase of 16% since 2016.
Implementing a plan to tackle the stress epidemic and how it plays out in your own organisation can save thousands of pounds each year, with these savings giving your company more to reinvest back into business growth and employee wellbeing initiatives.
Re-prioritise health and wellbeing in your workplace
For too long, we’ve normalised a society where the majority of people are suffering from dangerous levels of workplace stress, creating a global stress epidemic that can be hard to recover from.
We can help turn the tide and preventatively manage health for your employees. By partnering with experts from health, science and beyond, we blend academic and clinical excellence to identify and overcome the causes of stress and burnout.
This research is translated into our proprietary methodology, the WONE Method, alongside artificial intelligence (AI) and biometric data from your team to create data-informed micro moments of recovery for each employee on an individual level.
Invest in your employees’ health today and get started with your own corporate wellbeing program. Book at demo and find out more about how Walking on Earth can support your goal of mitigating workplace stress and building a holistic, sustainable approach to employee wellbeing.
