4 Ways to Strengthen Your Employees' Health & Wellbeing
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Today, nearly 70% of the American workforce is still working from home and while employees are trying to manage this collision of work and personal life, employers are struggling to support their existing workforce, let alone offer benefits that attract and retain top talent moving forward.
source: MetLife’s 19th Annual U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study 2021
Corporate Wellness Programs—Not a New Concept
Corporate wellness programs are not a new idea; in fact, they have been around since the 1970s. What started as an initiative to reduce employee injuries to improve productivity morphed into a standardized, generic offering of steps challenges, third-party websites with scholarly articles on low-fat diets, and 1-800 numbers to aid in smoking cessation. WE CAN DO BETTER.
The dramatic shift in culture and environment employers and employees have undergone in the last year has revealed that “we the employees” want more than one-size-fits-all offerings. We need our employers to show care for us by supporting our health and wellbeing so that we can focus on our work. And to do that, EVERY company needs to consider itself a health company.
Image Courtesy of Top CHRO
In MetLife's 19th Annual U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study 2021, almost all employees surveyed (94 percent) want their employers to offer benefits that have a meaningful impact on their everyday quality of life. Embracing this new landscape will be complicated and ever-evolving, but businesses of all sizes can start to strengthen their employees' health and wellbeing by including these 4 strategies.
1) Personalizing for the Unique Individual
Each of us is unique in our health and wellbeing journey. We have different experiences, needs, and preferences. We live and work in different environments. If a benefit doesn't feel personalized, relevant, or flexible, we reject it. 93 percent of employees say the ability to customize their benefits is a "must-have" or "nice-to-have" option. In addition, 72 percent of employees say having benefits customized to meet their needs would increase their loyalty to the company.
Fortunately, the rise of digital solutions makes scaling personalized offerings a feasible option. App-based technologies make it easier than ever to bring service into the hands of your employees no matter when they want to use it, wherever they may be.
2) Holistic, Whole-Being Health
For several decades, corporate wellness benefits centered around physical fitness — ie: stretch breaks, on-site fitness centers, and group walking challenges. While focusing on physical fitness was fast, easy, and affordable, it neglected nearly 97% of our week since the average employee only spends about 2 hours a week exercising. Employers can tip the scales in favor of whole-being health by expanding offerings to include services meant to address other dimensions of wellness: financial, spiritual, emotional. Including programs that help employees manage stress, prepare for retirement, practice mindfulness, eat a balanced diet, optimize sleep, and more can help employees establish lasting positive behavior change.
The Prowell Model - Image Courtesy of Innovative Workplace Institute
3) Leveraging Data & AI to Measure and Respond
With this lean into technologies that are capable of providing personalized, holistic benefits, employers need to be quick to measure and evaluate. Employers need to be moving beyond "checking the box"- it's one thing to offer personalized, holistic benefits; it's an entirely different thing to assess your population, implement offerings, reassess for feedback and adjust accordingly. Look for software/digital solutions that can help streamline that process by providing data you can actually USE when making decisions or by offering AI-enhanced technologies that can assist in responding to the employee user in real-time.
4) Feedback Loops for Finetuning
Arguably the single most powerful thing you can implement to benefit the health of your workforce is improving communication channels between leadership and employees. 82% of employees report that they would consider leaving their job for a more empathetic organization. Feedback loops are an efficient way to concurrently better understand employees' needs and help employees understand the services available to them.
Positive feedback loops are a basic concept in psychology, and the science behind them is simple: establish a safe, secure channel to regularly collect feedback from employees, use that feedback to make decisions, and communicate that decision back to the employee. In other words- don't just collect information about your employees; show them exactly how their feedback is being used.
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The effects of the past 15 months on our workplaces and personal lives are undeniable. We all, employees and employers, have had to navigate stress, uncertainty, fear, and discomfort. By learning from these shared experiences, employers have the opportunity to build cultures that truly place their most valuable assets first: their people. Building a benefits package that is personalized and holistic, that adapts with the employee base, is easy to understand, and is communicated clearly and often will ensure employees are genuinely happy inside and outside the workday.
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