How to Create an Integrated Employee Wellness Program

It's sad but true: employee wellness programs often fail. They're new, exciting plans at first, but the energy seems to fizzle out after the first couple of months. There are a number of reasons these programs fall flat, including lack of participation, accessibility, and other factors.

A common reason these plans don't work out is because they're too generic. When building a wellness program, you want to personalize your activities and options to the region your employees live and work in. Every employee has different concerns and interests. Creating a personalized, integrated employee wellness program will keep your team engaged while encouraging them to explore new wellness offerings.

Your employee wellness program needs to be intentional; you want to make sure your program includes relevant and useful resources for every single one of your employees. What good is a program if you can't fully reap all of its benefits? That's why we're here — to help you create a functional employee wellness program that makes sense for you and your employees.

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 fourth best practice, which is Integrated with Other Resources, to help demonstrate how you can properly build a successful and intentional employee wellness program that lasts.

What is an Integrated Employee Wellness Program?

Your well-being program should be integrated with organization-specific resources and partners. These can include your insurance broker, Employee Assistance Program, safety, medical, and health plans, and financial/401k plans, along with community resources/partners, like fitness centers, parks and recreation, nonprofit organizations, and training vendors.

How to Integrate Other Resources Into Your Wellness Plan

Now that you understand the importance of an integrated employee wellness program, it's time to learn how you can successfully build one yourself. Following our best practices, your employee wellness plan is integrated correctly if...

—Resources and partnerships are identified to be included in the well-being program.

—Your program includes incentives — employees can earn incentive for engagement with pre-determined resources and partners. For example, you could award points for an employee meeting with your partnered financial advisor.

—You make partner promotional materials available to your employees.

—Organization and partners share pertinent well-being data and information for strategical execution of the program. (i.e., send reporting to brokers).

—You coordinate meetings with partner organizations to evaluate a partnership and develop a strategy to better well-being.

—Your partnerships are built into well-being programming at least quarterly.

Each month, we'll continue to break down each of our 10 best practices in more detail — be sure to follow along and don't miss out on how you can invest in these wellness solutions to help your employees thrive!

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.