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7 Strategies for Building Well-Being into Your Corporate DNA

Now more than ever, companies that prioritize well-being are going to benefit—from managing risk to managing brand. Employee well-being has always been important, but it has never been more central to the future of work. If you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure of how to move forward, here are seven strategies for taking better care of employees.

WELCOA’s 7 Benchmarks is a step-by-step guide to help you demonstrate your wellness expertise to your leadership, get them on board with your strategy, and finally make progress towards your goals.

WELCOA’s 7 Benchmarks for Building a Results-Oriented Workplace Wellness initiative

BENCHMARK 1

You don’t know if you don’t ask.

Having committed and aligned leaders throughout the organization who are deeply committed to the well-being of employees is an important first step to creating successful workplace wellness initiatives. For most leaders, the line between wellness and organizational success will need to be drawn for them as it may not currently be top of mind. The role that employee well-being plays in an organization is not a simple ROI calculation. Figure out what keeps leaders up at night and help them understand how investing in employee well-being can solve problems in your unique organization. We provide a lot of resources to our members for success in this area, but to get started, use this free questionnaire to assess your company’s current leadership support for wellness. Then you will be one step closer to evolving your vision and getting the support you need to shape your plan.

Assess Your Company’s Leadership Support for Your Workplace Wellness initiative

Assess Your Company’s Leadership Support for Employee Wellness

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BENCHMARK 2

There’s strength in numbers.

Creating a formal or informal team that is dedicated to building and sustaining a successful workplace wellness initiative is an important next step. This engages stakeholders at all levels and helps maintain a cooperative approach to collaborate in support of your workplace wellness initiative. Wellness champions and high performing teams are the nuts and bolts of a successful wellness initiative.

Whether you’re riding solo or have a dedicated group, wellness teams should represent your culture and work together to build on your vision set. Use this infographic to understand what wellness champions are, why are they are important, what roles they can play, and how to manage your wellness team. You’ll take away ideas for creating a great team within your organization that can support the vision set by your entire organization.

Ideas for Creating an Effective Wellness Team

Ideas for Creating an Effective Wellness Team

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BENCHMARK 3

Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first — Simon Sinek

You’ve established your vision and created a cohesive team to begin implementing your workplace wellness strategy, but where do you start? Efforts to support employee wellness involves understanding employee populations and assessing the current state through confidential and secure data collection. Collecting meaningful data to evolve a wellness strategy should measure what matters most to both the organization and the employees.

Start by discovering the type of data to collect to understand what your employees need to be successful and foster a work culture that supports your goals. To help you better understand your employees needs, we’ve created a WELCOA Quick Culture Inventory Template. Use this simple tool which will help to identify which of the major elements of your culture that need to be addressed in order to create a healthier climate for your employee.

Creating a Culture of Wellness: Quick Culture Inventory

Creating a Culture of Wellness: Quick Culture Inventory

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BENCHMARK 4

Failing to plan is planning to fail.

Before you can jump into the interventions and initiatives, it’s important to craft an operating plan. By documenting the details of your wellness initiatives linked with the vision you discovered (your organization’s goals for wellness) in step number one, you can begin to build a roadmap with set goals and opportunities to evaluate your efforts and investment in workplace wellness.

The wellness operating plan reflects the vision, values and purpose of an organization. During the planning phase of a new or revised workplace wellness initiative, it’s important to anticipate some tough questions. To help you overcome this challenge, we’ve compiled a list of the most commonly asked questions when it comes to thinking through the design of the operating plan of workplace wellness initiatives.

10 Things to Consider When Developing Your Workplace Wellness initiative Operating Plan

10 Things to Consider When Developing Your Wellness Operating Plan

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BENCHMARK 5

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. — Mark Twain

Choosing initiatives may seem like a piece of cake, but aligning your vision, team, data AND wellness strategy will help you bring the right interventions to your organization in support of healthy and thriving employees. Determining why, how and what intervention you choose matters in the success of your workplace wellness initiatives.

In this step, attempt to select appropriate health and wellness initiatives based on the data you’ve collected in step 3 to enhance your decision-making skills. This will bring the right intervention to an organization in support of employees across the health continuum toward healthy and thriving lives. As you are planning your workplace wellness initiatives, use the Habits at Work tactical approaches to create alignment with your well workplace strategy and operating plan.

Creating Sustainable Habit Change in Your Company Culture

Creating Sustainable Habit Change in Your Company Culture

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BENCHMARK 6

Consistency cultivates culture.

You are well on your way to creating a successful worksite wellness initiative! Continue this important progress by championing whole employee wellness. Aim to create consistency — from your core vision all the way down to the resources you provide — to help foster unity in your organization. In order to create wellness initiatives that develop healthy employees it is important to evaluate the policies, practices and promotions of your organization. This helps ensure your organization will foster a successful workplace wellness initiative and cultivates a supportive health promoting environment, grounded in the core vision and purpose of the organization. Align the wellness culture throughout your organization so there is consistency within resources, interventions and the experience at work.

We provide sample policies, environmental considerations, and ways to use small nudges for positive health and wellness behaviors. If you’re starting from scratch or even preparing for an annual audit it can be difficult to create a comprehensive workplace wellness policy. Consider using this template to organize your goals, objectives, scope, responsibilities, communication strategy and review procedures.

Sample Workplace Wellness initiative Policy

Sample Workplace Wellness Policy

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BENCHMARK 7

Evaluation is essential.

The data you collected early on will help you determine how successful your approach has been and ways in which to improve. Each organization strives to develop an understanding of the impact of efforts to support employee wellness. It also reflects how findings from the evaluation are communicated to ensure continuous improvement efforts in your worksite wellness initiatives. Understand the importance of evaluating your initiatives, learn how to best communicate your results and celebrate your successes. Learn why evaluation is an essential part of your worksite wellness initiatives, but is often overlooked for a variety of reasons.

5 Reason Why People Don’t Evaluate

5 Reasons Why People Don’t Evaluate

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Organizations that are dedicated to the health of their employees should be rewarded! With a proven framework to help their entire team understand the importance of wellness, and the resources and training to continue to build stellar workplace wellness initiatives, the sky’s the limit. So what’s next? It’s time to recognize all your hard work — with WELCOA’s Well Workplace Process.


Want Help Getting Started?

To begin your journey toward creating a greater impact on human well-being in your organization or business, tap into a network of like-minded leaders, and gain the support, skills, community, and tools you’ll need along the way, become a WELCOA Subscriber today.

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