Need Ideas for Your Employee Wellness Programming?
How often have you been at work when there is an email or an “all-hands meeting” where the subject is the great new initiative your company is starting to improve employee health and wellness? It seems like once a year, companies role out new ideas and ‘initiatives’ to improve employee wellness, only for it to be lost in the black hole that is your email inbox and the next staff meeting? The reason most of these initiatives fail almost immediately is they are usually too hard to implement, too complicated, too boring, or it just feels like another thing your company is doing to check the preverbal box of caring about employee wellness.
However, this doesn’t need to be the case. It is possible to implement employee wellness programs and initiatives, and in fact, the best solutions are often easier and less complicated than that app the director of HR had you download, navigate to your specific page (like finding the fountain of youth), sync your smart watch (if you even have one), jump through a few more hoops, only to never find your page again. Then when you log back into your app, you are presented with a bunch of things you probably don’t care about, cannot find your personal page, and not really sure what you were supposed to do with the app in the first place! Then you find out how much money your company is paying for it, and you likely want to pull your hair out. Don’t worry, it will be gone in a year.
So why are employee health initiatives so hard to start and maintain? Because they are WAY TOO COMPLICATED. Instead, companies should be focusing on fun, simple, easy to setup, and easy to use ways to get employees to engage in healthy activities. Below are a few ideas you can quickly and easily implement these into your workplace culture, but first, there are a few key factors to consider when designing these types of activities.
Key factors to consider
1. Friendly Competition
Friendly competition is the number one motivator for behavior change when it comes to improving wellness. Utilizing this is incredibly important in helping your employees get AND STAY motivated.
2. Social Encouragement
Community and social encouragement are the second most important factor when it comes to keeping individuals motivated. It is important that your employees see managers participating in the initiative, and also giving encouragement to their employees.
3. Easy
The activities must be incredibly simple and easy to use for everyone involved. Remember, the more steps involved and the more complicated something is, the less likely it is to be adopted by employees.
4. Variety
Keeping it new and fresh keeps employees coming back month after month, and helps them in building habits. This is critical to having long-term employee wellness.
Below are some really quick and easy things you can do at your workplace to improve employee wellness. While all of these ideas can be tracked using a simple spreadsheet, those can be easily loss, do not directly take advantage of friendly competition or social encouragement, and do not offer simple reminders (push-notifications to the participants). The FytFeed platform takes care of all of the work for you, including building and hosting the challenge, giving you the materials to share it with your workforce, and all of the analytics once the challenge has completed.
1. Active Minutes Challenge
While steps challenges are always popular, they are (no offense) kind of boring, require a smart device tracking steps, and tend to be dominated by the runners in the group. In contrast, things such as an active minutes challenge allow the participants to log whatever they consider being active into the employee challenge. This has some massive benefits to those that may not be as active as others, and giving them the autonomy to decide what is being active for them, will really encourage engagement in the challenge. In addition, these individuals can count things such as yard work as being active, and be able to keep up with the more physically active participants in the challenge (such as those runners J). It is also recommended to put a goal on these challenges in addition to a leaderboard, as participants can compete for the top spot or just push toward hitting the goal!
2. Squats/Push-ups Challenge
Everyone can do a squat or push-up! These are great challenges to get participants at your workplace having fun and improving their health at the same time. As before, be open and encouraging to what counts as a squat or push-up and help the less active participants be able to compete! Even encourage employees to do these WHILE AT WORK! There is nothing better than walking down the hall way, or in a zoom meeting, and your co-working just busts out a few squats to encourage others to join in! As before, put a goal on this challenge to encourage all activity levels.
3. Mindfulness Minutes
Mental health is just as important as physical health in today’s workforce. Encourage your employees to take a few minutes each day to unplug and just focus on their own mental health. This is incredibly hard in today’s society, so making a simple and easy challenge that encourages your employees to do can go a long way in their mental health. In fact, encourage them to do it DURING WORK. This will not only improve their overall mental health, but will show that their management truly cares about their wellbeing and is actually bought into the idea of employee wellness.
4. Hydration Challenge
While fad diets come and go, one thing remains constant when it comes to nutrition; drinking plenty of water is important. It is recommended that adult drink at least eight, 8 oz. glasses of water a day, so set a goal of that and see who can hit it! The best part of something as simple as a hydration challenge is it can actually lead to much more complex and beneficial wellness behaviors such as better food choices and being more active! One small change in a person’s daily routine can have big impacts in the long-term.
5. Points-Based Challenges
A word of caution here. As mentioned, one of the main reasons why employee wellness initiatives die is simply because they are too complicated to follow. So having a points-based challenge can attempt to hit on all things wellbeing, but can get complicated quickly. A good and simple points could be something such as 1 point for 30 minutes of physical activity, 1 point for a healthy meal choice, and 1 point for drinking 4 glasses of water. As with all of these ideas, make sure they are approachable and inclusive for everyone in your workforce and can go a long way to changing the habits of your employees!
It's As Easy As That!
You’re quite literally off to the races with these fun and easy ideas to boost your workplace wellness programming. If you want to make it even easier, we can set you up with all of the challenges we listed above, and easy tools to get your employees involved. Schedule a 15-30-minute meeting with us with no obligation today to find out how! If you want to create a challenge or a bundle of challenges, we can get you set up in one call!