How to drive a successful workplace health and wellbeing program

The answer is early engagement.

Our many years of experience has taught us that the early messaging needs to be clearly orientated to the “why” and “how” to generate the most interest. At Healthy Business we do this by firstly helping your workforce understand why taking part in the program is worth their time and effort, followed by communicating how they can get involved.

There is always a group of ‘early adopters’. They are often not overly difficult to get involved and will usually be the bulk of participants over the first 3 months. The next groups to target are what we term the ‘neutral’s’ and ‘soft opposers’. These groups make up the majority of your workforce.

A neutral is, as the name suggests, neither here nor there about the concept, while a soft opposer is someone who might initially be a bit skeptical but is capable of being turned around. Once we get the soft opposers involved, and they start seeing and reaping the benefits; bingo, we’ve got it! Soft opposers make the best advocates for a health and wellbeing program.

Both the neutral and soft opposer groups respond well to word of mouth and consistent messaging to assist them in knowing more about the program. Word of mouth addresses both of these needs and is very powerful as it comes from a person in a similar circumstance that is trustworthy.

In a similar vein, participation in a health and wellbeing program needs to be throughout the ‘org chart’. When leaders engage and share their stories of using the program, confirmation of health and wellbeing as a priority within the workplace is demonstrated.

‍The focus in the first 6-9 months needs to be facilitating word of mouth at all levels of the organisation.  

Then, the final group are firm opposers. They tend to be the minority, and as the years progress and people start to understand health and wellbeing more, and they see more and more of their colleagues getting involved, their numbers continue to reduce.

Overarching all of these insights and strategy is the need to make the program part of the workplace. For example, our most successful clients have worked with us to make use of the HealthCi app, our services, and in particular the Check-in part of the workday or week. It might mean connecting a part of the program to a toolbox talk or pre-staff meeting, or to incentivise sign up and program usage. We’ve also noted that the most successful workplaces share and celebrate progress by the workforce in respect to individual health and wellbeing outcomes.

Our team have a lot of experience and insights into engagement, so be sure to come to us for specific ideas for your workplace. We will always have utilisation and engagement high on our agenda, so will no doubt be coming to you with strategies too.

‍

Get in touch with us today and start driving a successful health and wellbeing program in your organisation.