Every business needs an employee wellbeing strategy. Sometimes that might just be in the form of a mission statement or wellbeing plan, for smaller teams. For bigger businesses, however, a fully-fledged strategy is the way to go. Ultimately, your employee wellbeing strategy will help to keep staff happy, productive and engaged.
It is worth being clear about what we mean by a strategy, because the term gets used loosely. A wellbeing strategy is not a fruit bowl in the kitchen and the occasional yoga session. It is a plan that sets out how you will address the health and wellbeing needs of your workforce, over the long term, in a way that can flex as those needs change. Everything else – the events, the training, the perks – sits underneath it.
All businesses are different, so unfortunately, there’s no Word document template for you to fill out to get your strategy. So here are the key starting points to consider when you begin putting your employee wellbeing strategy together.
Table of Contents
Why Does an Employee Wellbeing Strategy Matter?
Before getting into the how, it is worth answering the question that usually comes up in the budget meeting: do we really need to invest time and money into this?
The short answer is yes. When employees feel well supported, they tend to be more engaged and more motivated, and that shows up in lower absence, better retention and a healthier bottom line. Put the other way round, an organisation is only as effective as the people running it, and problems that go unaddressed in one part of the workforce rarely stay there.
For what it is worth, we work with some of the largest organisations in the UK. Rolls-Royce, British Airways, Mars, Procter & Gamble, Ubisoft and Capita all use our employee wellbeing services. That isn’t a boast, though. Organisations of that size don’t commit budget year after year to something that doesn’t deliver.
What Should Your Employee Wellbeing Strategy Cover?
Here at New Leaf Health, we recognise four key pillars of wellbeing. Through our work around the UK, we’ve found these four points to be crucial in relation to staff wellbeing. They are:
- Physical wellbeing: physical health and fitness. This can cover illnesses such as coughs and colds, as well as more serious conditions such as musculoskeletal conditions, cardiovascular disease, injuries and disabilities.
- Mental wellbeing: mental health and related conditions. Mental health is a spectrum, and sometimes we’re mentally well, sometimes we’re not and may have conditions such as depression and anxiety. This also considers other conditions, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
- Social wellbeing: this looks at people’s social connections and the wellbeing of relationships. This can include family, friends and colleagues, so it can have a pretty significant role in the workplace.
- Financial wellbeing: people’s financial stability and happiness. This aspect considers the financial health of staff (not necessarily just how much they get paid), as well as long-term financial goals, like buying a house.
Physical Wellbeing in Practice
Physical health is the foundation of everything else, because a healthy body copes better with the demands of work. Plenty of organisations offer healthcare benefits through their employee wellbeing strategy, covering regular check-ups, alongside health promotion sessions. You might encourage activity through gym memberships or fitness challenges, and something as unglamorous as ergonomic office furniture can head off years of back trouble.
Encouraging a sensible work-life balance matters just as much. Staff who take their breaks, get outside and step away from the screen occasionally are far less likely to burn out.
Mental Wellbeing in Practice
Stress, anxiety and low mood are common in workplaces of every kind, and an employee wellbeing strategy worth the name actually tackles them directly. That usually means access to counselling, an environment where mental health can be discussed without awkwardness, and practical education on managing pressure.
A sense of belonging is part of this too. People who feel isolated at work are more likely to struggle. Team activities, open communication and flexible working arrangements all help.
Financial and Social Wellbeing in Practice
Financial wellbeing is not about salary. It is about an employee’s wider circumstances. Can they afford to commute? Are their bills keeping them awake? Are they priced out of the healthier choices you are encouraging them to make?
The trick is to offer support with some sensitivity, and without being patronising. Workshops on budgeting, personal finance, mortgages or pensions tend to land well, and give your staff practical tips and tools. For staff who are well-off, sessions on longer-term investing and even retirement serve the same purpose. This approach ensures that you have an employee-focused workplace wellbeing strategy, and aren’t just checking things off against your business goals.
Social wellbeing has become more pressing since home and hybrid working became normal. Those arrangements support mental and financial wellbeing for a lot of people, but for others the workplace was their main source of company. Long stretches away can tip into loneliness, which rarely stays contained. The answer is balance. Give colleagues the opportunity to connect – a social call, an occasional get-together in person – without making attendance feel compulsory. Forced fun is worse than none.
Depending on the nature of your business, you may need to put more focus on a specific area of wellbeing. Time-pressured jobs may require mental health support. Whereas manual labour workers may need help around back care and other aspects of physical wellbeing.
Similarly, a business working remotely may need to focus on social wellbeing. By contrast, an organisation with lots of low-paid workers may need to consider the financial wellbeing of those staff.
You will learn where you need to focus when you reach out to your staff. Speaking of which.
Initiatives to Include in Your Employee Wellbeing Strategy
A good workplace wellbeing strategy features actions and initiatives. This doesn’t mean you need to immediately start organising exercise groups and yoga sessions, though. Quite the contrary, in fact. Your first step is to find out what will have the most impact on your business.
Find out What Your Business Needs from a Wellbeing Strategy
For this step, you will have two primary concerns. Firstly, you should consider your objectives and policies as a business. If you have a mental health policy in place, for example, you may look at how you can support that policy and fulfil its goals.
If your business aims to have an excellent workplace culture (to attract the best talent, for example), then you may look at how social wellbeing initiatives can support that goal.
Secondly, it’s imperative that you consult with staff in order to determine what they need out of an employee wellbeing strategy. Are lots of your staff worried about finance? Do they regularly struggle with stress or illness? Speak to people throughout the business, including your team leaders, and learn where you can offer support.
This is where a formal needs assessment earns its keep. Surveys, focus groups and one-to-one conversations will all tell you something different, and between them they give you a picture of what your people actually need rather than what you assume they need.
There is always a temptation to skip this and go straight to whatever the budget allows. Any wellbeing intervention is better than none, but giving staff a hand in shaping the strategy is itself good for wellbeing – people feel listened to. Do not skip this step.
A good idea here is to complete a needs analysis for your business. That would need a whole other blog (and probably then some) to explain, but we take you through how to create one, including some examples, on our Workplace Wellbeing Leadership Course.
Build Your Wellbeing Team and Brand
Unfortunately, a straightforward Word document isn’t going to cut it – it’s time to get creative. To have maximum impact, you need to communicate your wellbeing plan using an easily recognisable internal brand.
You should look to give your wellbeing plan a name, at the very least. The more time and effort you put into branding, the easier it will be to communicate ideas to employees. You could create a logo and develop a brand identity, for example.
Another important step at this stage is to determine who in your team will support your employee wellbeing strategy. We often recommend training Wellbeing Champions to help plan and deliver events and key communications outlined in your strategy. These are staff who are passionate about wellbeing and are willing to spend some time promoting it.
You should also consider training mental health advocates throughout the business. Utilising Mental Health First Aiders or Suicide First Aiders can offer key support to staff. They can also help you communicate important ideas around mental health initiatives.
Health Promotion in an Employee Wellbeing Strategy
Health promotion plays an important role in any employee wellbeing strategy. Simply put, you need to help your employees to care about health and wellbeing and to be somewhat personally invested.
Part of this will come down to your organisation’s culture and pre-existing notions towards health and wellbeing. If your staff don’t talk about wellbeing in the workplace, then a communication campaign from your Wellbeing Champions could be a great place to start.
Health promotion events and initiatives also play a key role in wellbeing. This is important when it comes to reducing risk – i.e. helping people make changes to their lifestyle in order to avert potential illness and disease.
Here at New Leaf Health, we run staff health checks and health screenings for many of our clients, giving their employees insight into key health stats such as blood pressure, body fat, visceral fat, cholesterol, blood glucose and more. This empowers someone who may have high cholesterol, for example, to take their results to a doctor for further investigation. Hopefully, this helps them prevent serious conditions such as heart attacks and strokes from occurring down the line.
Education and Awareness Initiatives
Education and awareness play a huge role in any wellbeing campaign. A lot of people simply don’t know what they can do to look after their own wellbeing.
Finance is a good example. Tax, pensions, ISAs, mortgages, benefits – there is a lot of information out there, and it gets complicated quickly. Younger staff experiencing financial independence for the first time often have no idea what options are open to them. Workshops on budgeting and personal finance can make a genuine difference, and they cost very little to run.
You might also consider workshops to help staff help themselves when it comes to mental wellbeing. Stress and resilience awareness can be an incredibly useful coping mechanism for your employees, helping them to manage their emotions. This is especially important in high-pressure industries, where stress and burnout may be common. Giving your staff these tools to help themselves can contribute greatly towards a happier, healthier and more productive workplace – which is exactly why you’re creating an employee wellbeing strategy in the first place, right?
The Working Environment
The workspace is an area that many people overlook when it comes to wellbeing. With the recent shift to working from home, though, it’s a more important consideration than ever.
Initially, you may want to look at workplace amenities that contribute towards wellbeing. Perhaps some little things, like fruit in the breakout area, or free period products in the toilets. Ask your staff what they would appreciate and tie it into your wellbeing objectives. Do you want to encourage healthy snacking? Stock the kitchen or vending machines with some nutritious treats. Do you want to encourage staff to exercise more? Offer a place for bike riders to store their bikes and change clothes.
Of course, many staff will still be working from home or remotely, and some may be working flexitime, too. This should definitely form part of your employee wellbeing strategy, as convenient working arrangements (such as working from home, or flexing hours around school runs) are often very beneficial for the wellbeing of staff.
On the other hand, it’s worth considering the social equilibrium of the working environment too. Are remote workers experiencing loneliness or isolation? Do they get enough time to catch up with colleagues and managers? Check in with your staff, and include initiatives to ensure that they receive support socially, wherever they work.
What You Should Consider for Your Organisation
Primarily, any employee wellbeing strategy should be concerned with equal access. In other words, does your policy support everyone in the business and does it meet their needs effectively?
For example, if you have a multi-sited or regional business setup, with larger workplaces and smaller ones, would the staff at the smaller workplace still have access to the same initiatives and opportunities afforded to those at the business headquarters?
If you don’t consider this aspect of your strategy carefully, you can end up developing an “us and them” feel to things, which is completely counterproductive to the point of a wellbeing strategy.
Most of the plan will also be dictated by your budget. Studies have shown that investing in wellbeing properly does return a net profit in increased productivity from staff, but only if you carefully plan how the budget will be utilised. There’s no point in offering free massage sessions at work if nobody is interested in them, which is why it’s so important to speak to your staff and find out what they want.
You also need to factor in how you will communicate your employee wellbeing strategy. As we touched on earlier, having Wellbeing Champions in place is crucial to the success of your initiatives. But you will also need to ensure the buy-in of senior management, too. If HR is incredibly passionate about wellbeing, but the operations management team are less enthused, find out why. Then try to determine what could persuade them to be more wellbeing-focused.
Implementation and Communication
Rolling the strategy out needs a plan of its own. Assign responsibilities, allocate the budget, and set a realistic timeline for each initiative. Trained Wellbeing Champions are invaluable here, since they can carry a lot of the delivery and the day-to-day communication.
Make sure staff know what is happening and what is available to them. Clear, honest communication about the goals of the strategy is the difference between a programme people use and one that quietly gathers dust. There is a secondary benefit, too: telling people you are investing in their wellbeing is itself a demonstration that you care about them.
How to Evaluate Your Employee Wellbeing Strategy
From the very start, you should have clear goals in mind for your wellbeing strategy, and you should have a plan in place to evaluate your success towards those goals.
You need to define your goals very clearly (who doesn’t love a S.M.A.R.T. target?) Then you should set regular intervals to assess your progress towards them.
Setting SMART Goals
Most people meet the SMART acronym at some point and then promptly forget it, so here is the version we use when we’re training wellbeing leaders on how to build an employee wellbeing strategy:
- Specific – state exactly what needs to be done.
- Measurable – be clear about what success will look like.
- Accepted – agreed on by everyone involved in the process.
- Realistic – you know it is practical, and steps can be taken to achieve it.
- Time-bound – state when it will be achieved.
Say you have decided you want to reduce stress-related absence. A SMART version of that target might look like this:
| S | We would like to reduce stress-related absences across the business. |
| M | We will reduce the rate of stress-related absences by 20%. |
| A | Through our needs assessment, we have determined that 50% of our staff experience stress at work every week. |
| R | Recent industry research indicates that resilience training can help to improve mental health outcomes. |
| T | We will achieve this by the time we undertake our annual wellbeing survey, next April. |
Those figures are invented for the sake of the example, but they show how little effort it takes to go a step beyond “let’s reduce staff stress”. Framing goals this way keeps your employee wellbeing strategy accountable, and gives you something concrete to report against.
Metrics and KPIs
Establish clear indicators early so you know whether the effort is paying off. Reduced absence, improved satisfaction scores, lower turnover and productivity measures are all reasonable places to start.
Business metrics matter, but do not neglect direct feedback from staff. Surveys will tell you how people are actually engaging with the programme. They may tell you your ideas are terrible. That is fine – take the feedback and improve. Your employee wellbeing strategy is not a referendum on you as a wellbeing leader; it exists to meet the needs of your staff, and those needs will keep changing.
Gathering feedback will be an important part of this process, but it can’t be as shallow as simply surveying staff and asking “did you like it when we did X or Y?” You should look to factor in business productivity data and financials. This is often a great way to gain the buy-in of upper management, too.
When it comes to preventative health measures, many of our clients here at New Leaf Health opt for regular health checks so that staff can compare their numbers and see how they’ve progressed. Some businesses choose to rent the equipment, allowing for greater access, so that all staff can really invest in their health numbers. With these clients, we supply regular (and anonymised) data reports, so that they get an overview of the average health stats across the business, and can compare changes over time. This is the kind of approach you should take with the whole employee wellbeing strategy so that you can identify and celebrate your successes.
Be Prepared to Change Course
Your employee wellbeing strategy is not set in stone. Monitor it, and if something is not delivering what you expected – or a new need emerges – adjust it. Flexibility is what keeps a strategy aligned with a workforce that is always shifting.
If an initiative flops, that is not a failure. You have learned something about your people, and you are closer to the approach that will work for them.
Don’t Forget to Communicate
Finally, you’ll need a platform to communicate your evaluation. If you find that staff productivity levels are on the rise, don’t let it sit in an Excel spreadsheet. Decide how and when you will communicate your successes to the business. Perhaps you could provide video updates on your staff intranet or display posters around your workplace – this will help spread the message about your wellbeing initiatives, too.
Communicating the results to upper management is just as important, so ensuring that wellbeing is on the agenda during important business strategy meetings is also key. We actually have a session covering management buy-in on our Wellbeing Leadership Training Course, as it’s so crucial – this course also helps you build your employee wellbeing strategy from the ground up, so it’s a great place to start.
Celebrate the Wins
When the results start coming through, mark them. Acknowledge the people who designed and delivered the work, share the stories with staff, and give a nod to the employees who got behind the initiatives.
This does more than lift morale. Showing people that the programme works is the most persuasive recruitment tool you have for the next round – and the more people take part, the more the business gets back.
Next Steps
If you’ve reached the end of this article, you’ll hopefully now have a clearer picture of an employee wellbeing strategy. Because every business is different, no two strategies are going to be the same. That’s why the information we’ve given you here is intentionally very broad.
If you’d like to go further, our Wellbeing Leadership Course is built on nearly 30 years in the sector – we started working with clients in the mid-1990s, when wellbeing was barely on anyone’s agenda – and it gives you the tools to develop a strategy for your own organisation. Click here to learn more.
Additionally, if you have some ideas for a strategy and are interested in introducing some wellbeing initiatives into your business, why not have a chat with us? We work with hundreds of businesses of all sizes around the UK each year. If you have a specific wellbeing challenge, we likely know how to address it. Send an email to enquiries@newleafhealth.co.uk and one of our team will be happy to have a chat with you.
And finally, if you decide to go it alone, we hope this has given you a great jumping-off point to help you build your employee wellbeing strategy. Before you go, download a copy of our free Workplace Wellbeing Calendar. It’s packed with dates and campaigns to help you plan initiatives across the year. Click here to get your copy.
