It is said that people are the backbone of any successful business, and employee wellbeing initiatives are now considered a ‘boardroom priority’. But in order to get results from your wellbeing efforts, it’s important to have a cohesive plan that’s built around the needs of your business.
Encouraging your colleagues to lead healthy and fulfilling lives both in and outside of work can be hugely beneficial to your business, as well as your peers.
According to a CIPD survey, the most common reasons companies focus on employee wellbeing are to make their organisation ‘a great place to work’ (helping them to attract and retain the best talent) and to help boost business performance. Also for the public sector, the main driver is to lower absence figures.
Wellbeing initiatives are one of the main ways your company can demonstrate how much it values its people. So, it’s no wonder many companies today are looking for ways they can keep their colleagues fit and healthy at work.
A case study from Benenden Health
At Benenden Health, we’re no different. Health and wellbeing is what our organisation is all about. We’ve created various guides to help employers achieve positive business results through keeping their workforce fit and healthy, and it’s really important that we practice what we preach.
So, when we partnered with wellbeing specialist Jane Abraham to create our employer’s ‘Guide to developing a health and wellbeing strategy’, we were inspired to investigate our own offering, and to make sure we were ‘walking the talk’.
To help companies plan their own health and wellbeing strategy, we’ve created a new and improved version of our free employer’s guide to developing a health and wellbeing strategy.
We realised that we had been introducing lots of wellness initiatives over the years that were valuable and popular among our colleagues, like free access to our on-site gym, a cycle-to-work scheme, flexible working benefits and complimentary membership of our core Healthcare for Business product.
What we hadn’t done, however, was pulled them all together into one clear and cohesive strategy. We knew we needed something measurable that aligned with our objectives, to maximise positive business results.
We’re not alone in this ad-hoc approach; after all, it’s easily done. Lots of companies decide to implement wellbeing initiatives in this less joined up way, without having considered what their employees really need, and what might be the most effective for their business.
In fact, only one in ten UK organisations have a specific wellbeing strategy in place – many others will rely on one-off initiatives instead. Whilst well-intentioned, so many employers have yet to devise a cohesive plan that can be measured, evaluated, and tweaked to fit their specific workforce’s needs.
Creating a health and wellbeing strategy
To help companies plan their own health and wellbeing strategy, we’ve created a new and improved version of our free employer’s guide to developing a health and wellbeing strategy.
As well as including the benefits a health and wellbeing strategy can have on your business and detailed guidance on the five key stages of development, it now includes a full case study on how we applied the framework at Benenden Health. Download the free guide to find out how we used the five-stage process to get more from our wellbeing efforts, and see positive business results.
If you’ve recently implemented a health and wellbeing strategy at your company and you have any tips or success stories you can share, let us know on Twitter or LinkedIn using #healthandwellbeingatwork.
