On average, you spend about nine hours a day at work, thus it is only right for your workplace to have an up and running corporate wellness plan! Furthermore, talented millennials these days are drawn to companies with elaborate corporate benefits for employees! Companies like Twitter provide employees with unlimited vacation days as well as full medical and dental coverage, while Hasbro emphasises on its family-centric values by offering paid leave for both parents, along with assistance with foster care and adoption leave! However, corporate wellness plans are not as easy to form as you think – it’s not just about creating a lounge area in the office or providing free gym memberships to employees. Therefore, here are 4 ways you can design an effective corporate wellness plan!
1. Determine Needs of Employer and Employee
The first step to developing an effective corporate wellness plan is to understand your employees’ needs, and how these needs can fit into the organisation’s objective and goals. This can be done by conducting an organisational assessment to determine your employees’ interests and needs. From the assessment, you can then evaluate what can be implemented in the corporate wellness plan to best suit both sides’ needs.
2. Encourage Open Communication
Another way of understanding your employees’ needs is through them communicating directly to you. Open communication is important in the workspace as it minimises unnecessary conflict! This essential trait can be fostered through various team building activities such as terrarium, laser tag, art jamming, saber tag and combat archery tag! These games help players get to know each other better as well as understand one another’s strengths and weaknesses, encouraging open communication where team members are able to voice out their opinions.
3. Provide Practical Activities
Effective corporate wellness initiatives offer practical and useful activities that employees can participate in. These activities might include fitness programs and challenges. For example, fun and exciting games such as bubble soccer art jamming and laser tag are good ways to relieve employees’ stress while enhancing their team-building skills! Challenges can also include eating clean initiatives where employees learn how to meal prep by attending cooking classes! Such activities not only help employees to relieve stress and get to know each other better, they also equip employees with skills that they might find useful.
4. Integrate Wellness Into Your Company
There is no point in providing employees with an excellent corporate wellness plan without any changes to unfavourable working conditions. Instead, this will have the opposite effect where employees doubt and resent the management for implementing such plans when their basic needs in the office have not been fulfilled. Thus, wellness should be embedded in your organisation. Whether it is by changing the food options in the canteen or allowing your employees to take a day off when they produce good results, you should be able to lift some burden off your employees’ shoulders and help them to work in a stress-free environment. This way, they will be able to concentrate at work and increase productivity.