What Do Wellness Programs Offer Your Employees?

Have you invested money into an employee wellness program yet? If you have not, you could be missing out on a huge cost savings for your company. Wellness programs are an effective way to raise awareness about employee health issues that are forcing your healthcare costs to skyrocket but also reducing the productivity of your company and leading to a lot of absenteeism within the organization. How can a wellness program help you to save money and how can you get started on the proper implementation of a program like this?

Research wellness programs that have been implemented by other companies as you are focused on creating your own. This is one of the best things to do as it will help you in being able to figure out what you need to do but it also allows you to have reference as to what works and doesn't work. You might feel that offering gym memberships is a smart idea but research could provide you with evidence that it doesn't work well and creating an on-site facility is effective instead. Being able to understand all of the different wellness programs out there and knowing your options will really help you in creating an effective program for your company.

Look into the cost of implementing a wellness program. The costs may seem high to you initially but you have to look at the facts and see that most companies see a huge return on their investment. It varies with each company but some have reported a return ratio of 5 to 10 times the initial investment amount! This is a huge savings to your company and definitely something that you need to look into if you are debating if you would like to implement a wellness program within your company or not.

Employees will benefit greatly from the wellness programs as they show the employees that you are invested in their health and overall well-being. You want to focus your efforts on showing your employees that they really do matter to your company and implementing a wellness program is a great way to show them just how important they are to your organization and how much they really do mean to your company. When people feel appreciated and respected by the companies that they work for, it helps to make everything easier and they will feel a greater sense of devotion to the company.

Help employees to start taking an active role in their health by doing little things to promote health. Instead of having pizza parties and other things, offer them healthier food choices as a reward or consider offering different incentives altogether. Sometimes food becomes too much of a reward to companies and when you offer unhealthy food selections, you are not doing the employees any favors in being able to control unhealthy habits.

A lot of your employees may not even be aware that they have health issues. When you conduct the health screenings as part of the wellness program, they may see these issues for the first time and will finally understand how to address them. You need to be able to focus your efforts on helping your employees to get better and to get healthier. When they are given a health screening, it does allow them to see that there are some serious issues. The other benefit is that the health screenings show the employers what type of things they need to address in the wellness program. You can focus more of your efforts on certain elements of the wellness program so that you don't end up dealing with a program that doesn't do much to promote health or to get your employees to address their health concerns.