A Healthy Company Culture is Key to a Successful Workplace Wellness Program

Even with the best worksite wellness program in place, without a supportive company culture, many employees won’t utilize or benefit from it. If your goal is to have a healthier more productive workforce, you must get employees actively participating and fully engaged in what you have made available to them. This is extremely hard to achieve if your company culture is not in line with your employee wellness goals. According to Virgin Pulse’s fourth-annual State of the Industry survey of over 1,000 HR leaders, workplace culture is the biggest roadblock to improving employee well-being and engagement. Without addressing this aspect of your wellness program, it will remain difficult to keep your employees motivated to make behavior change and even harder to reach those already hesitant to engage.
 

Achieve More Cohesiveness Year-Round by Providing a Healthy Workplace Culture

There are several ways to increase engagement, provide accountability and track success. Our overall goal with our programs is to support companies in creating a healthier environment that will lead to improved well-being for all employees. Here are a few things you can do to improve your overall culture and increase employee engagement:

• Take an honest look at your company culture. Do employees like coming to work? What is the energy like? Do your employees work as a team? How would an outsider describe the mood of your workplace? Look for ways to improve culture and engagement that are cohesive with your wellness programming. Make the foundation of your culture change focused on employee well-being. When incorporating our Healthy Campus, Healthy Employees program into a company, we assess and get to know a group and determine where the potential for creating a healthier culture may be hiding. By offering healthy campaigns and programs centered around those findings, we generate excitement for healthy living among employees over time. The goal is to keep wellness on the forefront rather than just adding a to-do list of requirements to already busy employees.
• Build trust and nurture relationships with employees. Do your employees trust the intentions of your wellness program? Look at how you are communicating wellness to your group and who is implementing it. Are the leaders in your organization truly supporting and engaging in the wellness program? Do you have an outside vendor or person employees can confide in? Health is a very personal thing. It is important to provide professional and experienced staff who are thoroughly trained in building trust among individuals in your organization. Our team achieves this primarily through our one-on-one coaching sessions. We give employees the tools, guidance, and accountability in a trusting environment so they can make the behavioral changes necessary for lasting lifestyle improvement. This results in a more productive and a more loyal workforce. 
• Be sure your culture and wellness messaging aren't in contradiction to each other. Don't offer donuts or fried foods during work-related events and meetings while expecting your employees to work towards nutrition and weight management goals. Can you expect a more active workforce if you do not support and encourage regular breaks from their workstation? Create policies around these kinds of things that align with your wellness program vision and goals.

If you are looking to maximize the benefits of your wellness program by encouraging employee participation, let us help you. Research indicates that people who receive ongoing support and education will be more successful in experiencing a permanent shift in behavior. Our programs are designed to inspire your employees to stay motivated and committed to long-term lifestyle changes.
 
Contact us today for a free consultation. We can help you choose programs and services that will best fit your company’s goals, current health profile and budget.