Many of your employees this month are developing professional and personal goals for the coming year, and many of their personal goals deal with wellness.
By developing a corporate wellness program, you can help your employees achieve these goals and reap numerous benefits for your company, including decreased health care costs and increased productivity.
“The key to having a successful wellness strategy is identifying the health needs of your population, selecting the appropriate interventions and evaluating your success,” says Kristine Sapak, manager of member and corporate wellness at Priority Health.
Smart Business spoke with Sapak about how to create a wellness strategy and build that into a successful corporate wellness program.
How do you begin to build a successful wellness strategy?
The first step is to assess the population. You need to look at your resources, budget and needs. Do you need to reduce absenteeism? Do you need to reduce health care costs? Look at your goals and assess what you’re trying to accomplish. Are you trying to improve the health of your work force, or are you trying to improve their health by X degree in X year? Employees also need to assess their health status and look at their health risks, needs and interests to determine if they need to be doing something more. Employees also need to be educated on how to affect their health risk.
Then you have to start looking at changing behaviors. You may think employees are solely responsible for changing their behaviors, but that’s not the case. You also need to think about changing your corporate culture to support their efforts.
Does your company encourage walks on lunch breaks? Do you encourage people to go to the doctor for care? Do you have a culture that embraces tobacco cessation and is supportive of people who want to quit? Do your company-sponsored meals include healthy options?
The final step is to evaluate. Employees have to look at where they are on a regular basis and determine if they’re improving. Have they decreased their health risk or maintained their status? Have they improved their quality of life? You also need to evaluate your wellness program through participation, the overall health risks of the population and employee feedback.