With the derailing of business operations by COVID-19, most companies have switched to remote work for ensuring employee wellbeing & safety. While precautions can help in keeping this dangerous pathogen at bay, taking care of mental health and wellness plays an extremely crucial role. As the wellbeing of your remote workers matters more than anything else, leveraging employee wellness programs can help reduce stressors caused by the pandemic. Let’s dig deeper into employee wellness programs and why you need to implement them:
Employee wellness programs and their benefits
Employee wellness programs are a comprehensive set of resources that are primarily designed to promote the overall safety and employee wellbeing. A wellness program might include assessments, strategies, policies, as well as activities tailored to target the specific needs of every employee. Implementing an employee wellness program can be beneficial for your business in numerous ways such as:
- Increased employee engagement: Using employee wellness programs can help in effectively addressing employee issues which further boosts engagement. By successfully engaging the employees, a wellness program helps them develop a healthy relationship with the company.
- Reduced absenteeism: By improving employee health and uplifting their morale, wellness programs help to decrease absenteeism.
- Decreased healthcare costs: Implementing a well-thought wellness program can help minimize healthcare costs. According to the Harvard Wellness Program study, a company saves around $3.27 over every dollar invested in a wellness program.
- Enhanced employee productivity: By building a great workplace culture, wellness programs enable employees to realize their true potential which results in higher productivity.
Why should you implement programs for employee wellbeing during COVID?
As the pandemic has massive health, social, and economic devastation, implementing employee wellness programs has become more essential to assess employee sentiments on the new way of working. By uncovering key factors that can help to boost the employees’ productivity even during the uncertain times, wellness programs help you create a sustainable working model that contributes to success. Here’s why you need to focus on implementing programs for your employee wellbeing:
- Mental Health
Using employee wellness programs can help to effortlessly manage the mental-health challenges that employees face due to the burden of remote working. Being digitally engaged at their homes all day long, employees usually experience a blurring of work-life balance. Offering free therapy sessions and confidential counseling can support the employees’ mental health in challenging times. - Physical Health
Considered as a key metric for driving productivity, physical health plays an indispensable role in workforce performance. Implementing wellness programs help you promote healthy behavior among employees in the remote workplace. Conducting health webinars and online fitness classes enable your employees to stay fit and well.
Engaging remote workers with your wellness program
As most of the employees have been working from their homes nowadays, it’s important to create wellness programs that resonate well with the remote workforce. Follow these tips to seamlessly engage remote workers with your wellness initiatives:
Follow a flexible approach
Since you need to create wellness programs for your remote workers, flexibility should be given utmost priority. Be it conducting live-streaming fitness sessions or sharing vouchers for online clinical checkups, following an ‘out-of-the-box’ approach always helps you to engage your workforce in wellness programs.
Leverage digital solutions
Including online fitness sessions in your wellness program is just one way of reaching out to remote employees. Conducting webinars and presentations related to work, finances, family, and health on digital platforms like Skype, Zoom, and other video resources could encourage remote workforce engagement.
Go beyond geographical locations
To promote employee wellbeing in a remote setting, it’s important to check that wellness initiatives of engagement programs are not restricted to a particular location. You should avoid adding offsite options in your wellness programs. Enable your employees to participate in health screenings from their own community clinic or specific healthcare professional. Also, providing fitness equipment to remote employees can help to track their activity, no matter where they are.
Building a successful wellness program for your employees
Begin with assessments
Before developing a wellness program for your employees, it’s important to evaluate their overall health and personal interests. Conducting surveys for your workforce help to gain actionable insights into their needs. Also, conducting a health risk assessment helps you analyze the health of your workforce before setting up a wellness program for them. Use Voxco’s omnichannel solutions to uncover the key drivers of employee experience.
Establish your objectives
After a successful assessment of your workforce, you need to wisely set up goals for your program. Be it improving the health of your employees, reducing the absenteeism rate, or maximizing the productivity of your workforce, each goal is a statement of long-term accomplishment that is expected from the wellness program.
Design your wellness program
Based on the varying needs and resources of the company, employers design an effective wellness program for their workforce. No matter if the design of a wellness program is a simple or detailed one, it needs to target risk behaviors while aligning well with the employees’ interests. Your wellness programs might be focussed on stress reduction, health screenings, weight loss, nutrition education, smoking cessation, exercise programs, and more.
Creating an employee wellness program can help to improve the health and wellbeing of your remote workers even during unprecedented times. Need to bolster your employee experience with best-in-class employee wellness programs? Get in touch with us to book a demo!
Voxco is trusted by Top 50 Market Research firms, Global Brands & Universities in 40 countries. Voxco offers full omnichannel capability including CATI, Predictive Dialler, Online surveys, offline CAPI, and Panel Management.
Sahaj Sharma
Sahaj Sharma is a content marketer at Voxco. Owning a bachelor’s degree in computer science engineering, he loves exploring digital industry trends and creating content to help businesses shape their market presence. Apart from content creation, the other three things that vie his mind share are fashion, food, and travel.