Workplace Wellness programs are more popular than ever. When done correctly, wellness programs give employees incentives, tools, social support, privacy, and strategies to adopt and maintain healthy lifestyle habits.
Our wellness programs are designed to help any size business. Bee Balanced Therapies uses yoga, massage therapy, acupuncture and mindfulness practices as tools to guide employees towards a balanced and fulfilling lifestyle.
Here’s a list of 4 Top Reasons For Beginning a Wellness Program:
1) Wellness Programs Improve Employee Health Behaviors
One result of effective wellness program management is employee behavior change. With the right education, motivation, skills/tools, and social support, employees are motivated to adopt behavior changes that promote a healthy lifestyle.
Effective wellness programs show employees how to integrate and maintain healthy behaviors into their lifestyles with relative ease.
Healthy behaviors lead to lower health risks, and lower health risks lead to less chronic disease. Less chronic disease means that employers have fewer health care costs, lower absenteeism and a happier workforce.
2) Wellness Programs Reduce Health Care Costs
The ability of a wellness program to reduce healthcare costs depends upon how effective the program really is. Having an occasional lunch and learn about nutrition or simply doing a biometric screening will not be enough to move the healthcare cost needle.
Wellness programs have often been viewed as a nice extra, not a strategic imperative. Newer evidence tells a different story.
Comprehensive worksite wellness programs that improve employee behaviors will see a bending of the healthcare cost trend. Most often employers will discover that the savings from program participation will be greater than the actual cost of the program. Almost all studies done on the effect of wellness programming on ROI show a positive return on investment.
3) Wellness Programs Improve Productivity
Poor employee productivity can be defined as physically being at work, but not working on job related tasks. This type of poor productivity is called presenteeism.
It is estimated that the cost associated with presenteeism due to poor employee health is at least 2 to 3 times greater than direct health care expenses.
4) Wellness Programs Increase Company Loyalty
Loyalty is difficult to find throughout many workers and many workplaces. Issues of overwork, employee benefits that are sparse at best, and a poor work-life balance will eventually go against an employer’s favor, leaving that employer with a revolving workforce that can negatively affect productivity.
Increased employee loyalty is another significant selling point of an employee wellness program. While this is another of those intangible benefits that you really can’t put a price on, company loyalty can still result in reduced costs in terms of recruitment and turnover. This also makes for a more harmonious work environment.
