How to choose the right wellness interventions

Designed to motivate and enable employees to better their physical, mental, emotional, financial and other areas of wellbeing, interventions take a holistic approach to employee wellness. This is a trend that is helping businesses reduce healthcare costs, improve their recruitment and retention efforts, boost employee presenteeism and productivity, promote employee engagement, and build healthier workplace cultures.

With 74% of employees sharing that they are concerned about at least one aspect of their wellbeing, according to a Metlife Employee Benefit Trends Study, it is imperative that you choose wellness interventions that will best align with your employees' needs, as well as your organisation's business objectives.

So how do you choose suitable interventions that will help make your employee wellness programme a success? These pre-selection strategies will help you make more informed decisions:

1. Assess your employees' health status
   Knowing what the bigger picture of the health of your workforce looks like, will help guide you on choosing interventions that would meet the overall needs of your organisation, like reducing health risks, overcoming health issues and improve productivity. To gain better insight into this area, things like health risk assessments, employee health screening and a review of health claims data prove to be helpful. The results of these will directly inform your health and disease management programmes, designed to help employees get or stay healthy.

2. Define your wellness goals
   It is important to set clear, short- and long-term wellness and productivity goals that are realistic and within your budget. While setting these goals, consider things like the ability and willingness of your management team to encourage and participate, incentives you would be willing to offer, what your wellness activities will be and how they will be implemented.

3. Choose the elements that will bring your interventions to life
   Your wellness interventions will require elements that don't only educate, support and encourage employees to better their overall health and lifestyle habits, but also motivate and incentivise them. Things like company policies and values must always be considered to create a tailor-made wellness programme that meets your employees' and company's needs well.

The wellness interventions you choose should lay a strong foundation for your overarching wellness programme, support your employees through maximum engagement and help them meet their overall health goals. A successful wellness intervention should be:

Evidence-based - it should align to current corporate wellness trends that are backed by evidence.

Engaging - an intervention's success is directly proportionate to the level of its employee engagement. Communicate well with your employees and ensure that they are fully aware of the personal benefits that they can gain through higher engagement.

All-encompassing - interventions should address various areas of holistic health, such as traditional, emotional and financial wellness. The one-size-fits-all theory does not apply to interventions, which is why a multi-channel strategy that focuses on various wellness aspects is needed to meet your employees' different requirements.

Accessible - interventions should be readily available and simple enough to be used by all employees. Employees who are working remotely should especially be considered.

Customised - interventions should be able to address the wellness needs of the individual as well as meet the unique requirements of the organisation itself.

Purposeful - all interventions must have a clear intention of meeting specific wellness needs and achieving realistic results.

All employees are different, and so too are their wellness needs. Before any interventions are planned and implemented, it is always a good idea to take some time to find out more about your employees - what interests them, their career goals and where they currently are on an emotional level. In doing so, you will help ensure that the wellness interventions you choose do not only improve the lives of your employees at their place of work, but beyond there too.