Don’t make the mistake of keeping wellness and your business culture separate. They are a match born in heaven, which when melded together properly, quickly produces not only a happy and healthy workforce, but a self-regulating, self-growing, health-focused workforce. Sound good?
Here’s how you combine the best of your culture with the best of your corporate wellness programs:
Relevance
Picture this: a group builders complaining of back issues, so they are sent off to do wrist stretches. Meanwhile, office workers are worried about repetitive strain injury, so their wellness officer recommends some exercises designed to strengthen their back.
Ridiculous, isn’t it? But you’d be surprised at how often people try to inject a generic, non-personalised, non-relevant wellness program into their company. Unsurprisingly, these programs nearly always end up being left to rot by the employees as they find absolutely no value in it.
If you want to meld your workplace culture with wellness, you have to provide a program that provides relevant solutions to your workers.
If you want to meld your workplace culture with wellness, you have to provide a program that provides relevant solutions to your workers. That might be something physical, like the above-mentioned wrist exercises (but for the office workers this time), or financial, like subsidised insurance cover.
By making it relevant, you are giving people a reason to take part in the wellness program to the point where it becomes part of the day-to-day and fully adopted into the culture.
Finding the fit
Relevance is a good place to start, but you also have to consider finding the ”fit” for wellness in your business---in other words, picking activities that people will engage with, as well as timing it correctly. This is key to creating a culture of wellness in the workplace.
No small order, right? But it’s not as complicated as you might think. Let’s start with picking activities that people will engage with---so useful outcomes and fun activities. Let’s take a common wellness feature: decreasing the rate of smoking. If you have an office of people who are smoking and want to quit, you’ve found a relevant as well as a useful activity. Make it into a competition to see who can smoke the least, and you’ve made it fun too.
Next, there’s the timing. This one is simple: you can’t just throw wellness at your workers out of the blue and expect them to engage. In the anti-smoking example, if you banned smokos with no warning with a building full of smokers, you’re not going to get a great reaction to your wellness program. Ease into it, don’t make it sudden and communicate constantly.
Incentives
Now you know you need a wellness program to be relevant, engaging and well-timed in order for it to become an intrinsic part of your business culture. But there’s one more factor to consider: no wellness program is complete without the right incentives, and it’s a key part of melding it with your culture as well.
Let’s say you’ve got an office full of sports fans; rugby specifically. Lots of co-workers head down to the pub after work to watch the game, and it’s become an established part of the work culture. Because you’re a savvy wellness coordinator now, you spot an opportunity: an inter-departmental (or even inter-office) rugby match in the near future would be:
- relevant (it would help fight back against the lack of exercise common in sit-down offices),
- engaging (people would find it fun), and,
- well-timed (you aren’t just dropping it on people, but rather building up to it).
But there’s more at play here than just bragging rights. If you can find the right incentive for people to get involved with the tournament, you can make the Office Rugby Tournament a highlight of the office calendar and an intrinsic part of the culture.
Ideally, you want an incentive that is both attractive and health-positive. Something people want, and something that will keep them going with the wellness program. A heap of chocolate and wine for the tournament winners might be attractive to some, but it’s not health-positive, and an equally large heap of raw carrots might be health-positive, but it’s not very attractive.
Ideally, you want an incentive that is both attractive and health-positive.
For the above rugby tournament, we would suggest a trophy that formalises the bragging rights of the winning team, as well as a customised rugby uniform as well, giving them a reason to participate in the next competition too. These are both things that a group of competitive rugby players would want, and it doesn’t compromise the message of your wellness program either.
This is just one example though. Incentives will be different for every program, every set of employees and every company. Not sure where to start? Consult with your employees: they’ll be able to tell you want they would want to get out of their program better than anybody else!
Summary
Integrating your wellness program into your business culture creates a program that is self-growing, self-regulating and far more effective in promoting good health outcomes for your employees.
To improve your chances of injecting this wellness into your culture, make sure it is:
- relevant: a solution to your employee’s specific problems
- a good fit: engaging and well-timed
- well-incentivised: attractive and health-positive
Fulfil those criteria, and you’re well on your way to combing the best of your culture and the best of your wellness!
To find out more about wellness programs, check out our free ebook below.
