Employee Wellness

The Wellness Committee ought to set out a plan for the entire year that outlines accomplishing objectives and objectives, in addition to provides details for advertising and marketing and evaluating  the program.

The plan is the detailed map of what kinds of programs will be offered, when and where they’ll be scheduled, how they’ll be marketed and analyzed, and what the budget is.  

It’s important to plan your wellness activities based on your objectives and objectives, in addition to the budget since different strategies will yield different outcomes.  For  instance, if your objective is to elevate awareness on a topic, then distributing  handouts or scheduling a one-time education session might  be appropriate.  

Notwithstanding, if your goal is to change behavior, then different strategies could  be necessary, such as ongoing weekly sessions and support groups.  Click here to link to Program Design Choices for additional ideas.

Wellness Program Advertising and Marketing

This is the time to plan your advertising strategies!  How can you market the wellness program and ongoing activities?  No matter how you decide to, market often, keep it fresh, and remind employees again and again!  

Consider having an overall kickoff activity to let everyone know about the wellness program.  Executive Management should provide the introduction or invitation so that all employees are aware of their support and leadership in the program.

Possible marketing and advertising methods –

• Sending email messages, including reminders

• Posting flyers,

• Displaying bulletin board postings,

• Writing articles,

• Sending letters or

• Sending special invitations.  

Other Wellness Program Considerations –

• is the program promoted to all staff members or to a specific target audience?

• Do you have a program champion (someone who’s connected with different groups in the organization, and well respected) who can help in your promotion efforts?

• If your advertising efforts do not seem to be working, do you have a way to revisit and adjust your strategy?

• How will you determine success and evaluate your program?  and how’ll you collect the information needed to evaluate your program?  

Topics most often included in Wellness Programs –

• Nutrition

• Exercise/Exercise

• Tobacco Use Cessation

• Bone Health

• Heart Health

• Healthy Back

• Stress Reduction

• Chronic Illness Awareness and Prevention

• Self-care; Wise Healthcare Consumer

• Screening Services (Body Mass Index (BMI), blood pressure, bone density, cholesterol, glucose, posture, vision, and other…)

• Ergonomic Assessments

• Wellness Fairs

• Kids/family Events

• Others topics that employees have interest in  

The topics and type of Wellness Program planned depend on the needs and interest, overall goal and resources available.  

Program Design Options include awareness programs such as  flyers and/or education sessions, behavior change or modification programs such as tobacco use cessation and weight loss classes, and environmental or organizational support such as no tobacco use policies or healthful selections in vending machines.  

The programs planned also depend on the demographics of your workforce.  When you’ve a young, healthy workforce, you could want to focus the wellness attention on keeping staff members healthy and not need to screen for illness.  

Instead you could want to focus on healthful lifestyle behavior such as exercise and good nutrition to prevent the begin of disease.  Click here for more information on strategies for keeping employees well, identifying disease early, or returning employees to work who already have a chronic disease.

It is also important to consider, and plan how you will evaluate the success of your wellness program.  The system needs to be established for tracking certain data and recording events depending on the program objectives and desired outcomes.  

Step 7 discusses program investigation in more detail.   and Step 6 will launch your program!