6 Considerations To Offering Wellness Benefits For Employee Health

Wellness benefits are incentives offered to employees for keeping themselves in the best health. You may have heard about wellness benefits being offered at many corporate offices. If you are a small business owner, you may want to enact a similar program for your employees. But is it doable on a smaller budget? This post will help your business to determine whether offering wellness benefits to your employees is a feasible, affordable option.

What Are Some Wellness Benefits?

You have many options when it comes to wellness benefits for your employees. Smoking cessation programs, partial gym membership reimbursement and healthy workplace pantries are some examples of wellness benefits that may work well for small businesses, like yours. There are also challenges, such as the weight loss variety, that will not only help your employees get healthy, but also encourage workplace camaraderie. All of these wellness benefits are low cost options perfect for small business. More so, these programs should not implement a forced ranking health scale as it can affect workflow and participation.

Employee Opinion

What do your employees think of wellness benefits? Do employees want wellness benefits? Or, would they prefer that money spent elsewhere? These are the questions you need to ask before implementing a wellness program at your business. If your employees will not appreciate a wellness benefits program, why waste the money? Workers can provide useful feedback and insight that will make your decision making process easier. After all, if wellness benefits programs improve employee retention rates, they are certainly something to be considered. Seek employee insight during the process of deciding whether or not wellness benefits programs are worth it. This will help you make the best business decisions possible.

Choose One Or Two

Another important thing to remember when it comes to wellness benefits for your business, it is not an all or nothing affair. Even enacting just one or two of the ideas listed above will help improve employee health, workplace health and safety and employee morale. You know your employees best. Use this to your benefit. If, for instance, you know that many of your employees are smokers, make a smoking cessation incentive program top priority. Then, when you see that it has been effective, you can choose to add on another program. Wellness benefits do not have to be all encompassing. Remember this, and choose a program or two aimed specifically at your employees’ personal challenges and concerns.

Considerations

Recently, there has been a decline in the wellness benefits being offered by large corporations. These companies cite a lack of return on invest, ROI, as the cause. However, this is misleading. Results show that some wellness benefits are more effective than others. If you are able to target concerns specific to your employees, including those in entry level jobs, you will be able to see a better ROI sooner. Healthy employees are happy employees. Happy employees are productive employees. Remember this. It may pain you to spend money in what seems like a frivolous manner. However, your workers will work harder when they are happier. That will make you happier, too.

Advantages Of Wellness Programs

Worksite wellness programs have a slew of benefits for both employees and business owners, perhaps even more advantages than sponsored retirement plans. By integrating a wellness program into your business HR practices, you can experience the advantage of improved recruitment and retention of talented, healthy employees. In addition, you can benefit from reduced healthcare costs, lower rates of injuries and illness, less employee absences, improved employee moral and working relations and increased productivity and responsiveness. These are incredibly benefits to any organization, so it is important to consider these when determining whether or not a workplace wellness program is right for your business.

Workplace Benefits

There are many workplace benefits to offer your employees. By law, if you have 50 or more employees, you must offer health insurance, disability insurance and workers’ compensation. However, there are benefits your employees can earn for staying healthy. For example, allow employees to participate in a steps competition. The winner earns a paid day off. Other benefits to help your employees’ health include offering remote opportunities so they can work at the gym, at home or outside. More so, you can allow for flexible employee scheduling. Certainly save money by allowing employees to participate in exercise or other activities to earn benefits such as earning a gift card or PTO.

Other Options

If the prospect of enacting a wellness benefits program at your business seems overwhelming, there are other options out there. There are companies that provide options for third party wellness benefits. A quick google search will provide you with multiple sites you may want to take a look at. These third party providers vary in their offerings including business promotional items. However, they all have one thing in common. They allow you the opportunity to provide wellness benefits to your employees, without the headache of having to organize and implement everything yourself. If this sounds tempting to you, conduct further research.

Your employees are happier and more productive when they are healthier. They will also be far less likely to be involved in any business accidents if they are healthy, strong, fit and alert. If you want to bring wellness benefits to your small business, it is definitely doable. Just remember to choose one or two programs that are specific to your employees’ needs. If you would like to provide wellness benefits to your employee, but feel that the task of organizing it all yourself is too daunting, consider third party providers. Conduct further research before deciding the best way to offer wellness benefits at your small business.

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