Especially with online wellness programs, corporate branding and integration are essential, says wellness expert Barb Rouleau, APRN. In today’s Advisor she shares her “top nine keys” to building great wellness programs.
Rouleau is chief wellness officer at PureWellness, a leading provider of online wellness programs. She was joined by Ron Keen, the firm’s president, on a recent webcast on HR.com.
Here are their nine keys to wellness program success:
1. Corporate branded. Be sure you get your own branding for outsourced and online wellness programs, says Rouleau. You want employees to know that the company is behind the program.
2. Executive endorsed. When executives participate and encourage employees, the program gets a great lift, Rouleau notes.
3. All inclusive. Ideally, your program will meet the needs of more than 80 percent of the employee population, Rouleau says.
4. Comprehensive. The program should address many aspects of health and wellness. Depending on the results of your health risk assessments, a program might include:
- Risk assessment and reporting
- Nutrition
- Physical activity
- Smoking cessation
- Stress management
- Behavior change support.
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5. Accessible and available at all times. Although Keen and Rouleau suggest a mix of onsite and Internet programming for wellness, the Internet is obviously the best way to get 24/7 accessibility.
6. Seamlessly integrated. Lots of programs give isolated information but don’t integrate information from different sources, Keen says. He suggests finding a program in which assessment data—blood pressure, cholesterol, body-mass index—are integrated with goals and measurements of progress.
It’s also possible to go a step further and integrate measurement devices—like pedometers, scales, and blood pressure measuring devices. They can feed directly into the system. That’s a bonus, says Keen, because while you do want people to get involved and care, you don’t want them sitting at their computers all day entering health data.
7. Easy to use. You’d like a one-stop shop with a single sign-on for online operations. As mentioned above, integration helps ease of use because participants don’t have to visit many different places to find what they need.
8. Confidential. Health information should be secure—and employees must believe that it is secure—or employees won’t participate.
9. Broad reporting capability. The first level of reporting is to the employee. In addition, says Rouleau, you want the information aggregated for your use in designing and managing your program. You might, for example, want to:
- Trend out results and see effects of your investment.
- Partition out information by department, location, etc.
- Compare data with other employers in your area or in your industry.
- See who is participating.
- Find out which program features are being used and which are not.
(Make sure program information is exportable to a format with which you can work .)
How’s your wellness program doing? Not so hot or not at all? Well-structured and well-run wellness programs generate ROI of up to 300 percent—music to management’s ears! But the keywords are well-structured and well-run. Poorly structured programs just spin their wheels—no health benefit and no positive ROI, either.
Wellness—NO downside! Wellness programs show impressive ROI, so management and employees are happy. And that means HR is happy. Check out BLR’s Workplace Wellness. Find out more.
Many readers have told us that BLR’s comprehensive guidebook, Workplace Wellness: Healthy Employees, Healthy Families, Healthy ROI has helped them get programs up and running that achieve wellness objectives with a great ROI, while avoiding the legal hassles that, these days, seem to attend any worthwhile venture in HR.
It’s a comprehensive guide that takes you step-by-step through setting up a program, from convincing management all the way through to creating and implementing a workable plan for your workplace. The guide also includes a vast collection of ready-to-use forms, handouts, and checklists that both structure your program and provide the metrics to prove its effectiveness to management’s satisfaction.
If you’d like to examine Workplace Wellness: Healthy Employees, Healthy Families, Healthy ROI on a no-cost, no-obligation basis for 30 days, we can arrange for you to do so. Let us know and we’ll be happy to set it up.
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