When launching a new health and wellbeing strategy, you need to be proactive in the way you publicise it. After all, your workers won’t be able to access benefits if they don’t know they exist. 

Drawing upon our recent experience of delivering a new health and wellbeing strategy, we’ve outlined three ways we helped to engage employees during the strategy launch. 

Launching a new health and wellbeing strategy is an unparalleled opportunity to talk to employees about the new benefits at hand. 

1. Invite employees to help name the health and wellbeing strategy

How do you encourage employees to feel part of the strategy from the outset?

A good idea is to get employees involved in naming the new strategy. Invite your employees to submit their suggestions for a name and choose the best one via a vote – or something similar.

Giving employees control of the name helps them take ownership of the strategy from the very beginning – it’s their name, for their benefits programme.

This is exactly what we did for the launch of our own health and wellbeing strategy. We invited employees from our strategy working group to put forward their name suggestions, and they came up with ‘Working Well, Living Better’. 

2. Run a range of launch activities to get employees engaged

Once the strategy was named, we celebrated its launch with a week of activities. Each day’s activities matched a separate theme of the strategy.

For example, on Monday, our mental health day, we launched our wellness action plans and encouraged teams to take lunch together and place positive statements, like ‘Actually, I can’ and ‘I am in charge of how I feel’, around the workplace to support positive thinking.

On Wednesday, we placed the spotlight on work relationships. Friday was our chance to look at physical health, when we ran active sessions, including ‘The Benenden Health Walk’, stretching sessions and fitness classes.

There are many benefits to organising a range of launch activities. First, it’s easy to tailor your activities to specific themes of your strategy, to create a week that reflects your initiatives exactly.

Plus, it’s a great talking point for employees. As they get involved in the different activities, they start thinking about the new strategy and the benefits on offer to them. 

Getting employees to talk about their health is crucial as it not only helps to open a dialogue in the workplace about health, but it also encourages employees to take responsibility for their wellbeing. 

To help with this, we created a series of posters, which you can use to start conversations about health in your own workplace. 

3. Focus on line managers to support employee engagement

The line manager is a key communication point between decision-makers and the workforce. If they aren’t aware of the benefits on offer, they can act as a barrier – potentially undoing all the great work you’re doing to implement a health and wellbeing strategy.

In addition, the relationship between manager and employee is a key predictor of wellbeing at work. If an employee feels unsupported or unheard, it could impact their knowledge and adoption of wellbeing initiatives. 

Providing line managers with tools to learn about new initiatives will inform them of what’s available, so they can promote them and get buy-in within their team and work together to create a healthy working environment. 

The launch is a huge opportunity to improve employee engagement

Launching a new health and wellbeing strategy is an unparalleled opportunity to talk to employees about the new benefits at hand. 

By focusing on line managers and organising activities that celebrate the range of benefits on offer, your new strategy will find the reception it deserves.

If you’d like more guidance on improving employee engagement by developing and launching your own health and wellbeing strategy take a look at our FREE health and wellbeing guide.