Employee Wellness Programs Can Be the Best Thing for Your Employees

Dr. Purushothaman
January 22, 2014

 

What are you doing for your employees? If you are offering them healthcare, this is great - but in today's day and age, employees expect a lot more. There are companies like Google that offer adult playgrounds for their employees, so the least you can do is make an effort to keep them healthy. One of the best ways to do this is to implement employee wellness programs.
Employee wellness programs can take on many different looks. For example, depending upon what your employees want and what the average age of your employees are, you may want to offer:

Fitness programs

Nutrition classes

Healthy food on-site

Health assessments

The more you offer, the more your employees will appreciate you and want to continue working for you. Employee wellness is one of the most important things you should be focusing on when it comes to maintaining and reducing healthcare costs as well as trying to reduce the turnover rate within your company.
You should have some data about your employees. This doesn't mean the raw data that flows in from the healthcare company. It means actual, polished data that you can query through in order to learn important details about the employee population you have on property. When you know more about their overall level of health, you can offer employee wellness programs that are geared to what they need most in order to improve their state of health.
If many of your employees have a high BMI and are suffering from obesity, you may want to look at the kinds of foods you are offering on property. If you have a cafeteria on site, it may benefit you to offer a wellness program inside to affect the type of food they are eating. If you have vending machines, make sure they are loaded with healthier items.
If your employees are dealing with other health problems, you might want to offer other employee wellness programs as well. All of the programs you offer should be based upon what your employees suffer from health wise and what appeals to their demographics. If you don't know enough about your employees, you are not going to be able to offer the right programs - and your employees aren't going to participate in them.
Technology is at such a level that you can get the help you need when it comes to receiving employee data. Whether you are looking for a secure online portal to query data or a simple visual dashboard to log into, you will be able to find it with a benefit optimization system.
You need to offer something impressive to your employees to ensure they stay with you. When you show that you care about employee wellness, you will be able to give employees a reason to stay for many more years. The best way to do this is with various wellness programs - but first you need to have data about your employees to ensure you select the best programs.
About the Author
Dynamic Health Strategies (DHS) is a benefit value-optimization and management company that offers specialized employee healthcare benefit cost-management advice, tools and consulting services for Self-insured Employers and their Benefit Consultants. DHS has saved its customers millions of dollars by pinpointing waste, fraudulent billing, and improving employee wellness.

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