Why Dependent Participation in Your Wellness Plan is Important

The family that takes care of their health together sticks together. Extending your wellness program to spouses and family members can help strengthen the connection your employees have with your leadership team, and with their role overall.

Research from Bravo Health shows that when spouses and family members are included in wellness initiatives, employers experience increased employee participation (twice as high) and are more likely to see meaningful, lasting change.

And an employee’s family and friends (spouse, partner, children, extended family and social networks) have the power to encourage healthy behaviors and participation. These individuals are the biggest motivators for exercise and healthy eating — they have a a bigger influence on an employee’s behaviors than health and medical professionals.

Our 10 best practices are effective tools we implement with our wellness solutions to ensure that companies have a successful employee wellness plan. We explored our tenth and final best practice, Dependent Participation, to help demonstrate how you can properly build a thoughtful employee wellness program with spouse and family support.

What is Dependent Participation?

Dependent Participation is when your employee well-being program includes opportunities for spouses and family members to participate.

How to Include Dependent Participation in Your Wellness Plan

Now that you've learned how much of an impact family members and spouses have on health and well-being, here's how you can successfully implement dependent participation within your own employee wellness program. Following our best practices, your Dependent Participation was developed correctly if...

—Spouse/partner have a wellness program that is at an equal value to the employee incentive.
—Full programming is available to a spouse/partner with the same participation requirement as the employee.
—Family-specific programming is offered.

Interested in learning more about implementing an employee wellness program at your company? Let us help guide you. At OnSite Wellness, employee health and wellness is our specialty.

We offer additional supporting services on top of our Best Practices. Incorporating an employee wellness program at your workplace can have massive benefits for your employees in tracking and managing a healthy lifestyle.

Let us help you reach your goals and set your employees up for success! Contact us today to get started.