How to choose the right initiatives for your health and wellbeing strategy
How can your business effectively reward hard-working employees?
A health and wellbeing strategy is beneficial to both your people and your organisation. Part of delivering this strategy is finding the right initiatives to support, motivate and reward your employees.
To help make some of these decisions, we’ve devised a five-stage health and wellbeing strategy template, which is free to download here. The template is easy to action and will help you either start from the ground up with a health and wellbeing strategy, or evolve the one you have in place already.
How to start building a rewards strategy
Creating a cohesive wellbeing strategy for your whole organisation can be a big task – and for many, one of the most vital parts is deciding on the initiatives you can introduce.
To ensure that your outputs translate into positive outcomes, it pays to listen. Taking the time to talk to your people about their current level of satisfaction with the incentives on offer will help you to identify patterns in the strengths and weaknesses of what you currently provide – and also highlight any gaps.
Find out how our business health and wellbeing services could support both your business and employees here.
At Benenden Health, we started small, to think big.
Our own health and wellbeing strategy, which has been fine-tuned over the years, started from very humble beginnings. We had a long wish-list of “blue sky thinking” initiatives, which we then had to trim down based on a budget and based on what our research told us the team needed.
It may help to group your potential initiatives thematically, such as:
Food and drink
Physical environment
Internal procedures
Line manager training
Social events and awareness activities
Access to professional help and support – for example an employee assistance programme (EAP) which offers employees wellbeing measures, such as mental health support. Naomi Thompson, Head of Organisational Development at Benenden Health, explains: "if we can manage wellbeing, we improve presenteeism and if we can improve presenteeism we improve performance."
Choosing the right initiatives for your workplace
The beauty of keeping things simple at the beginning is that you can focus on the areas that are working well and develop them further, before revisiting the areas that need improvement. As you get a feel for what’s working within your business you can expand your health and wellbeing offering.
How do you create a list of initiatives that's far more targeted?
Review against your objectives – Your overall strategy should align with your values and business objectives. Within this, your initiatives should support those objectives. For example, if you’re on a mission to improve employee engagement significantly, certain initiatives will fulfil your aim over others. Once you start to rank them in order of effectiveness, the priorities will become clear.
Review against budget – Your chosen initiatives need to work within your budget. In many cases, there may not be a formal budget, so the focus will be on deliverables that take time rather than money to launch.
Tracking success – It’s important to measure the impact of your initiatives, so you eventually understand what to do more of and what to pull back on. Furthermore, being able to evaluate the performance of your initiatives is crucial to some organisations where budgets are up for discussion. The best way to retain a budget, or to secure further budget, is to prove the “ROI” of your measures. This will ring particularly true for initiatives that are designed to reduce absenteeism and increase motivation.
Look at accessibility and relevance – Your initiatives must be accessible and relevant across the team, in the literal and figurative sense. If you have a combination of remote, office based and flexible workers, do you have something for all of them? Do your initiatives appeal to all cross-sections of your workforce? Have you teed up the launch of new initiatives appropriately to all of them?
Go back to your employees and ask again – Bringing your team along on the journey right from the beginning will maximise their engagement with your efforts. It will also help to avoid any initiatives that would land badly with them; meaning that you can get things right more quickly, improve outcomes within your workforce and see the benefit returned to the business more quickly.
Choosing the right initiatives is critical to ensuring that employees are engaged with your wellbeing strategy. Get started today by downloading our free, five-stage strategy template.
Our business healthcare
Benenden Healthcare for Business provides an affordable, high quality, private healthcare solution to support all your employees. With easy setup and no exclusions on pre-existing medical conditions, we want to help make healthcare a standard of employment for everyone, rather than just a perk for the few. See how we can help you develop a healthcare solution that works for your whole business.
