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Workplace wellness programs promote the practice of a healthy lifestyle and ultimately reduces healthcare costs for employees and the organization. Though a lot of companies have wellness programs ranging from a basic to advanced versions, what really matters is the measurability of programs and the ROI.
We had observed three major issues with a lot of wellness programs in India,
The success of any program depends on the measurability of the outcomes associated with it. ROI can only be determined if metrics can be established. The current state of wellness programs at organizations makes it difficult to measure the initiatives taken by the HR department. This always results in incomplete program implementation. The best way to go about tackling this situation is to have the Current state Vs Desired state scenario. Integrated wellness platforms such as ekincare can help you get a comprehensive view of your employees' health by means of an H.R.A (Health Risk Assesment) and health checks. These can be digitized and provided to the HR department at an aggregated view, thereby protecting the privacy concerns.
Once the current state is evaluated, the HR department can come up with a desired state and plan wellness initiatives which can ideally be spread throughout the year. To make this simple, let us take the instance of an employee who has taken an H.R.A and health check with a wellness score of 452, this is the current state, so now based on the health expert's recommendations the Desired state can be a wellness score of 546. In this way, a series of wellness events can be planned and each activity can be measured and ROI can be determined.
So, if you want to ensure that your budgets are not being thrown into a black hole, ensure that you set the metrics right when you start wellness initiatives.
Another pressing problem with the current health benefits offered by companies is that the benefits system is broken/distributed. For instance, there is one partner for annual health checks and another partner for providing doctor consultations and another third party for conducting wellness initiatives like Yoga, Zumba, etc. Employee health should always be looked at in a holistic way and since every activity is linked to the overall health of the employee, it makes better sense to have one partner offer comprehensive benefits rather than having multiple partners.
Having a distributed workforce makes it very difficult for wellness programs to work and increases the cost of health benefits. In such a case you need to have a single platform (preferably a mobile app) for the employees where they can get access to all health benefits and wellness initiatives in one place. This will ensure the inclusion of the entire workforce in getting all health & wellness benefits.
