You’ve got your corporate wellness programs planned out: events organised, facilities prepared and leadership on board. Job done, right?
Wrong. The best plan in the world poorly communicated is doomed to failure. You could have an entire wellness facility set up for your workers, but if none of them know what’s on, when, and why it’s going to help them, you might as well not have bothered in the first place.
So you need to communicate wellness messages — and communicate well. With the right method, you can overcome some of the worst barriers of wellness in one fell swoop: perceived program complexity, friction at change in general and, of course, the sensitivity of personal health issues.
But saying ”communicate well” is one thing, but doing it is another. To solve that problem, we’ve put together this quick look at how wellness can be communicated well, with some practical examples that you can adapt for use in your own wellness program.
Let’s get started.
First, ditch the business speak. In many aspects of your company, this vernacular is a useful way to express complex subjects in a few words: “going forward”, being “across this” and of course the act of “taking something offline”.
Health is an intensely personal matter, and using clichéd and sterile business-speak doesn’t convey that.
But this kind of language is deadly to wellness communication. Health is an intensely personal matter, and using clichéd and sterile business-speak doesn’t convey that. Even worse, it can make it confusing for your employees to actually understand what the wellness program involves.
Clarity is key. Use plain language, make the value clear and absolutely ditch the business speak. Here’s a tip that professional writers use: if you’re trying to say something, just say it. Write or speak as though you are expressing an idea to a friend, not a client or a contact in a business email.
Clarity is key, but brevity is the soul of wit. Don’t overwhelm your employees with a thousand tips, a hundred new wellness initiatives and dozens of events.
Start slowly, introduce your wellness program in parts, and make that information easily understandable. If you’re sending out wellness m emos or creating a wellness presentation, use visuals, graphics, create a tutorial — and always, always, always repeat that information in more than one place.
Good communication is a two-way street — otherwise it is just preaching. It’s guaranteed that your employees will have questions, critiques and perhaps one or two complaints about your wellness program.
Whatever you do, don’t ignore this interaction with your employees.
Anticipate this, and whatever you do, don’t ignore this interaction with your employees. Provide FAQs for questions that keep cropping up, and always use feedback to improve the program: you’d be hard-pressed to find a better way to get data on what your employees really want than the complaints box.
Finally, you have to come to the realisation that there is only so much you can do on your end to communicate the value of your wellness program. Your employees have to engage and seed the cultural change necessary to make it truly effective as well.
You are aiming for your program to go ”viral” — spreading naturally from person to person until it reaches the critical mass required to make it a permanent part of your day-to-day operations.
Your employees have to engage and seed the cultural change necessary to make it truly effective.
This change can be subtle, and it can take time to happen. The worst thing you can do is rush this process. Never try to force the program down your employees’ throats with your communications. It will at best be ignored and at worst be actively resisted.
If your wellness seminars are getting a poor turnout, don’t just make them mandatory. If your newsletters are being ignored or deleted, don’t increase their frequency. If your events are just a flop, don’t keep doing them. Find alternatives. Take feedback into account and adjust accordingly.
Communication in wellness isn’t just blunt reminders to stretch or to take a break from the screen. It’s about providing something of real worth to your employees, and being able to communicate that worth without being complicated, overwhelming or boring.
Learning how to do this with your organisation can take time and expertise — that’s a fact. But don’t shy away from the challenge; the benefits can make the effort more than worth it.
Want to learn more? Check out our free ebook on wellness programs below!