Skip, Skip, Skipping To Work – Part Two

Last week we started to take a look at the benefits to both employee and employer of partaking in regular physical activity and introducing a workplace wellness program.

However, it’s all well and good realising the benefits of such wellness programs, but your employees need to be engaged in them. Here are a few suggestions to encourage engagement and participation.

Educate Your Employees: This is a crucial part of any successful wellness program. Even the sedentary employees need to know, understand and appreciate the benefits of leading a healthier lifestyle and how to go about making the necessary changes in their lives to achieve this. This group of employees will be the most challenging group to reach, but once you’ve done it, will be the most worthwhile.

Offer Incentives: This idea could be a fundamental to engage your employees in a wellness program, especially if it’s a monetary incentive. However, bear in mind that this could provide only temporary motivation when the long term goal is to develop long term positive behavioural changes.

On-site Health And Fitness Champion: Whether you have a fitness centre within your organisation or not, you can have someone trained to carry out fitness assessments, personal training or give general health and fitness advice. This will show your employees that you are taking the wellness program seriously.

So once you have encouraged employee engagement in your wellness program, you need to encourage them to maintain their participation.

Continued Presence: Having a permanent health and fitness champion in the workplace provides continued encouragement, education, support and motivation to your employees.

Programming:  Leading edge and innovative programming and implementation of services provides incentives and spurs interest to your organisations wellness program. If you offer a varied range of top programs from the health and fitness world it will invite different audiences of your workforce.

Continued Promotion:  Promoting your wellness programming with specific internal marketing that provides an educational value will assist in creating overall interest and participation in your organisations wellness program.

Combining these three suggestions will drive engagement resulting in increased retention in involvement. Continued participation is vital as the more the employees take part, the more likely they will experience and achieve results.  The results in turn fuel the continued participation of the employee.  The ultimate goal is behavioural change and engaging all employees, especially the sedentary employees, into a healthy and fit lifestyle, and as mentioned before the paybacks for the organisation include a higher level of productivity, employee retention, achievement, better peer relationships, and reduced absenteeism among others.

If you would like any information about the importance of employee well-being and employee engagement within your organisation, then please contact us on +44 (0) 1255 850051.