Why Health And Wellness Is Not Working For Many Corporates?

A lot of companies complain to us about one fact, that they have very low participation to the health and wellness events they are running, or there is no benefit they are getting for the money or time spent on health and wellness initiatives.

Designing a wellness program is a comprehensive process that involves understanding the requirements of your population. Our advice will be to begin with the following 6-step process:

Identify the need first
This is the most critical step for starting any health and wellness activity. One first needs to understand what employees are seeking to plan a successful wellness initiative. One also needs to understand the enabling as well as hindering factors during the identification process to ensure that a right environment exists for running a program like this. The biggest complaint people have is that they do not have time as work takes precedence most times when there is a conflict with spending time on a wellness activity.

Do a holistic planning 
One off activities based on latest fads is not going to get you far. Avoid them. Plan the entire year keeping in mind the needs of people. One needs to create a sustained push for people to include wellness into their lifestyle. Running one Zumba class, or one talk on smoking or diabetes will not pull people in.

Engage the senior management team
Wellness needs to be part of the culture of the organization and who better than the top management team to champion the cause and build the culture. Ensure that you have created sufficient buy-in with the senior leadership team towards health and wellness. Make sure they are participating in the activities and events, else it would be difficult to convince the others to join in.

Monitor the benefits accrued
Most times health and wellness initiatives die out as there is no tangible justification or benefit for running those initiatives which the team is able to demonstrate. It is essential that some health objectives are defined at the beginning as targets and then progress is monitored against those targets to accrue benefits out of the initiatives undertaken. Holistic planning will help in finding a way to do this.  
 
Change course if needed
Every organization will have to learn on the way. There is no single model of wellness that one can replicate from another organization. One would need to customize to suit the overall objectives and make changes on the way.

Make wellness a part of someone's responsibility
Wellness cannot be a part time responsibility if one wants to get the maximum benefits. A part timer from HR with various other responsibilities will probably have this as the least priority on their plate. Hence, it is critical that if health and wellness is a key element of the employee value proposition, then you put a person responsible for driving out the benefits of the wellness programs.

Therefore, listening to your people, ensuring holistic planning, monitoring and adjusting and proper responsibility will ensure that you get the most out of the investments that you are making in the wellness initiatives.