Plenty of companies pay for all sorts of wellness initiatives, and plenty of them go completely unused. The likely reason isn’t that your employees don’t want to feel better; it’s more likely that what your wellness programme offered isn’t what your employees needed from you.
Many companies invest in expensive wellness programmes with the idea that providing employees with some sort of way to feel better will help them to work better and be happier in the workplace. While this idea isn’t necessarily wrong, the engagement that many companies see with their wellness initiatives is typically very low. Does this suggest that employees don’t care at all about feeling better? Not exactly. It’s far more likely that the accurate conclusion is that the company wellness programme isn’t correctly tailored to what employees need; it’s based around what the company thinks they should need.
Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and dissect exactly why a wellness programme isn’t working, there are services that companies can engage with that will do this work for them.
Companies can then still provide employees the opportunity to work towards feeling better with Gifteo’s employee wellness programmes, as an example, but without tying up management staff in thinking through and building such a programme themselves. Wellness programmes like these are built to flexibly fit around employees’ lives, rather than expecting them to rearrange everything to make use of a wellness programme that doesn’t make sense.
Let’s look a little closer at some of the common things included in bog-standard company wellness programmes, and at why they don’t work.
Inflexible Company Gym Memberships
One of the most common wellness initiatives for a company to provide is a gym membership. It seems like a great, straightforward idea: exercise is one of the most important things for us to do to feel healthy, and gyms are expensive, so why not provide access to a good source of exercise?
There are a few problems with this idea. If someone is interested in using a gym for exercise, chances are they already have a membership at a gym that is convenient for them. Should they switch from the convenient gym to whichever one the company has arbitrarily chosen?
Plenty of other people get their dose of exercise without needing to ever set foot in a gym. Local sports, home gyms and all sorts of other activities can give people all the exercise they need. And there are some people who simply don’t care about exercise at all, or who live too far away from the chosen gym for it to be remotely feasible for them to use.
A smarter programme could, instead of offering a single gym membership, provide an allowance for exercise that employees can claim. It’s flexible, and encourages without demanding.
Webinars Scheduled During The Workday
Another common type of wellbeing initiative that many companies try to undertake is to introduce learning webinars about different wellbeing-related topics. Unfortunately, many companies set the times for these webinars in the middle or towards the end of the workday. It doesn’t matter how good or important the speaker is, how useful the topic might be or even how hard the company pushes such a thing, unless it is a mandated must-attend activity, lots of your workforce is probably going to prefer actually getting their work done.
You might think the solution here is to shift the live webinar time, earlier in the day, or maybe sometime after work. But any time you choose for a live webinar will have issues. It will disrupt workflow and productivity, or it will be right when employees are engaging with other family responsibilities or simply uninterested in doing something they associate with work.
Instead, offering access to asynchronous materials is a much better idea. The whole point of wellness is to take off the pressure, and allowing employees to engage with the wellness materials when they choose to is an important part of that, rather than forcing them to engage with it on top of an already loaded schedule.
Schedule that talk, sure. But record it, and hold the recordings in an easily accessible learning platform for your workforce.
A Wellness App That Goes Unused
Wellness apps also belong on this list. The company might have paid a whole lot for the app to be designed well and relevant to the workplace. Maybe it’s a popular wellness app subscription that everyone gets for free. However it works, it looks great when a significant portion of the workforce downloads the app. But do they use it over time?
The most likely situation is that most of the employees will not engage with the wellness app beyond the initial download. Unless the app is directly plugged into how tasks are completed and employees find it eminently relevant to their day-to-day work, it’s just more noise that gets in the way of them doing their job, not something to make sure they are doing their best.
Real Wellness Is Flexible
You might have noticed a bit of a theme throughout this article, almost as if we are advocating for a more flexible and less rigid approach. The truth is that offering a solution for something like wellness that is designed as one-size-fits-all is doomed from the start. The reality of that situation is that one-size-fits-nobody.
Wellness means different things to different people. The best way to provide a real culture of wellness in your workplace is to provide your employees with the resources and help to seek out wellness on their own terms. This sort of flexibility is more likely to lead to significant change over time, and a happier, healthier workforce.
