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Tackling Employee Wellness: Five Steps For Transformation

Tackling Employee Wellness: Five Steps For Transformation
from Thomsons

There can be no question about it; employee wellness needs a kick-start in the right direction. Work-related stress, anxiety and depression now account for over 10 million working days lost each year, while 40% of NHS resources are spent on preventable diseases.[1] Combine this with an increasing array of financial pressures, the demands of an ‘always-on’, but sedentary, lifestyle and you have a recipe for a high-stress, high-cholesterol workforce.

Taking steps to improve employee wellness – financial, physical and mental – can bring about real, positive change for businesses. Healthy employees are more productive, more engaged, and more capable of consistently performing well. Yet existing programs are falling short of delivering on this. Our recent Employee Benefits Watch 2016/17 report highlighted a significant disconnect between the traditional benefits employers are offering, and the flexible wellness benefits employees want to help them lead healthier, happier lives.

Now’s the time to transform our thinking and approach to employee wellness. Here are five steps employers can take to improve employee wellness:

1. Align your people strategies and initiatives
As far as benefits are concerned, employee engagement is the single biggest objective for most HR and reward professionals. Employers will be almost 30% more likely to achieve this goal if they align their people and benefits strategies. If employers are looking to increase workforce productivity for example, they may want to introduce benefits that help employees focus on work. With 2.4 million working households in the UK facing money worries, a financial advice service may be the answer.

2. Segment and be relevant
No one likes feeling like another name on a long email list, or having to sift through vast numbers of communications to find the information they’re looking for. Employees are no different and sending them personal and relevant messages can go a long way to encourage them to take advantage of the benefits that matter most to them. The solution lies in segmentation: dividing employees into different groups based on their preferences, to send them targeted messages that they actually want to receive. Just 9% of employers currently do this – and those who do are twice as likely to meet their benefits program objectives.

Read full article on Thomsons.