Employee wellness program are intended to provide an avenue for people to focus on their health and wellness being. But, what happens when motivation fails or participation and engagement decline?
First and foremost, it’s critical to engage employees. Avoid the board room debate and communicate directly with your employees.
A few subtle but powerful wellness program saboteurs include:
- Tone: is the wellness program designed with fun elements applicable to people of all levels both professionally and physically? Or does it have it have a demanding tone with punitive consequences?
- Time Management: if employees are working 12 hour days, the last thing they want to do is spend an additional 30 minutes at work participating in a wellness program.
- Leadership: are company leaders actively participating, engaged and promoting the wellness program or do they deliver lip service and bring in donuts daily?
Multiple reasons can contribute to the demise of a wellness program. But don’t lose hope. Return to your workforce. Have one-on-one conversations and ask questions at meeting. Keep in mind that some employees may be hesitant or embarrassed to answer honestly. In those cases, an anonymous survey can be extremely telling. Although, when creating surveys, question neutrality is imperative along with offering a combination of multiple choice and open-ended answers. Surveys questions may include what are the top wellness concerns/goals, is program content aligned with concerns/goals, if not what types of activities would they participate in, do you feel an emotional investment in program, if not what’s needed, etc.
You may be surprised at the survey results. Two recent employee wellness surveys revealed stress at one company and program content in another. The first required a deep dive to remedy the latter was an easy fix with content diversification.
Whatever the cause of an employee wellness program decline, it’s definitely worth the investment of time to research why and find positive solutions. After all, the answers may very well be tied to work productivity.
Roseann is UBF's health management practice leader and is the glue that turns wellness into health management. Roseann has many years of experience in health and wellness management as well as much knowledge of nutrition and its industry.