Engaged and motivated employees are the heart of a successful corporate wellness program. They tend to gain more from their company’s wellness initiatives and serve as an example for other employees in the office. This is why HR professionals and wellness professionals are always on the lookout for new ways to maintain and increase employee engagement throughout the year.
Keeping employees engaged in your workplace wellness program is no small task. Employees can easily lose steam and motivation once wellness activities become repetitive and unchallenging. And without employee engagement and participation, a wellness program would be worthless.
So, whether you’ve had your wellness program up and running for years or if you’re launching your program for the first time, try out these seven tips to help keep your employees engaged in your wellness program all year long:
Use a content calendar.
Content calendars are a wonderful tool for HR professionals and wellness coordinators. They make organizing and planning wellness initiatives and messaging strategies a breeze. By planning out your year in advance, you can ensure that employees always have something new and exciting to focus on each month – which helps keep employees engaged. Content calendars are also excellent for measuring and optimizing strategies. You can create benchmarks to gauge the effectiveness of different wellness initiatives throughout the year to see what works best for your employees.
While you can certainly create your own content calendar, it might take some extra time and resources. Thankfully, there are a lot of free resources you can find online. Be sure to personalize your template to fit the needs and goals of your employees and company.
Communicate your wellness initiatives.
Effective communication is key to employee engagement. Without a communication plan in place, employees won’t know about all the great perks your worksite wellness program has to offer. Be sure to communicate your company wellness goals, visions, and activities with employees on a regular basis. Employees won’t be willing to participate in a program they know nothing about or one that is too complicated to understand. Give your employees enough information and time to understand what your wellness program is all about. Send out weekly email blasts, announce wellness updates in meetings, and be sure that managers are up-to-date on wellness initiatives.
Start some wellness challenges.
Wellness challenges keep things fun, exciting, and challenging for employees. Incorporating different wellness challenges is a great way to help employees climb out of a wellness rut, celebrate special events or milestones, boost momentum, and instill a sense of friendly competition – all of which will greatly boost employee engagement. It’s best to get creative with wellness challenges instead of repeating the same challenges each year. Try to include both individual and team challenges to switch things up. Step challenges, gratitude challenges, meditation challenges, 30-day challenges, and point challenges are all great ideas to help motivate and engage employees.
Provide some stress relief.
Providing some stress relief at the office will help boost employee engagement. It can be difficult for employees to feel fully engaged and motivated in their wellness program when they’re under a lot of stress. Your workplace wellness program will be the last thing on an employee’s mind when dealing with chronic stress or working in a stressful environment. An easy way to combat this is by including stress education and coping strategies as a part of your wellness program initiatives. Offer employees onsite massages once a month, bring in a yoga instructor each week, or practice daily meditation as a team.
Take advantage of holidays.
Use national health observances to promote healthy habits to your employees each month. For example, Heart Month is a great time to promote heart-healthy behaviors. Or celebrate some of the fun, obscure holidays like National Almond Day (February 16), International Day of Happiness (March 20) or National California Strawberry Day (March 21). The National Day Calendar website has a useful list of holidays by each month to help get you started.
Utilize social media.
Social media can be a great platform to boost employee engagement for your wellness program. Encourage employees to track their wellness journeys and capture moments from their wellness challenges on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Start company hashtags that employees can use to document their success on social networks and find other users who are competing in the same challenges. Using social media helps keep things fresh and exciting for employees. You can also utilize your company’s social media accounts to post wellness updates and repost employee photos.
Focus on holistic wellness.
An effective and engaging wellness program will cover more than just nutrition and exercise. It’s important that companies address different aspects of health and wellbeing throughout the year. A holistic wellness program will cover topics such as stress, sleep, preventative health, nutrition, physical activity, financial wellness, mental health, emotional health, and social health. Incorporate these different topics for wellness challenges, activities, and educational events.
Employee engagement and participation levels will rise and fall throughout the year – it’s only natural. To help keep these levels as high as possible, employers should strive to keep their wellness programs fresh and exciting. By incorporating some fun challenges, providing effective communication, and making an effort to spice things up, you can certainly maintain and even boost employee engagement all year long.
What ideas do you have for boosting employee engagement in your wellness program? Share in the comment section below!
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