We have seen huge growth in the number of wellbeing strategies in the workplace over recent years with many employers offering products and services to help physical health and more recently mental health. However, it’s fair to say that financial health is still in its infancy on the wellbeing agenda although its growth is accelerating.

Whilst it’s encouraging that companies are developing strategies in different areas in the wellbeing space it is often too siloed and disjointed. It’s important that we think about our employees’ wellbeing holistically. If somebody is feeling out of control in one area of their life, it has a knock-on impact in many other areas.

Think about it from your perspective. I’m sure you can think of a time when you were concerned about something – maybe changing jobs, maybe a big expense coming up, maybe a relationship not quite working as you’d like, or money worries. This impacts how you behave, your concentration, your ability to sleep properly and how you react to situations. Ultimately, this will affect you physically and mentally as well as potentially financially if it starts to impact your focus at work.

As an employer how can you help build a wellbeing strategy that’s inclusive, engaging, cost effective and valuable to your workforce? I have put together a simple 10 step checklist which can get you started on the right track.

1. Understand your workforce demographics

How well do you know your employee base? What’s the average age, geographic split, gender breakdown, average salary? Does this differ across business unit or site? Do you have more than one industry in your workforce? What challenges might those differences give you? Understanding your employees allows you to determine what benefits and support may be more valuable to them and this may vary for different cohorts in your company.

Do you have absence, sickness, accident and turnover data split out into the right categories? Are there patterns of behaviour or challenges that you maybe aren’t aware of?

This may sound daunting but don’t worry, there are people analytics providers and experts that can help you do this,  such as the tools offered by LCP.

2. Understand your business objectives

It’s important to understand the business objectives – why are you doing this? What do you want to achieve? Are you more ‘leading the way’ or ‘following the market’ in your approach? What does success look like? Is this a ‘campaign’ or a long-term business strategy? It’s important to make sure key business stakeholders are brought into the strategy, so it doesn’t lose its way.

3. Ask your employees – what’s working well? What’s not so good?

One of the best ways to find out how employees feel and what they value is to ask them. You can do this in several ways including through surveys. They don’t have to be big scary time-consuming tasks, just a few simple questions can get you some helpful insights.

You could also do roadshows which you may already have for your benefits, so you could run a feedback exercise and offer a prize draw. Another idea is to run focus groups – these are smaller discussion-based groups that are fantastic at getting opinion from key groups of employees. It’s important to have these groups representative of your workforce with a good spread of ages, job roles, locations and levels.

4. Build an inclusive strategy – incorporating physical, financial, mental health

Any wellbeing strategy needs to be inclusive of physical, financial and mental wellbeing. These elements are intrinsically linked and can’t be as effective if they are looked at in isolation. Whilst it’s great if you are looking at all three areas for the benefit of your employees, the most successful strategy will involve pulling these into one overarching strategy to build overall health.

5. Create an open and honest environment

Creating an open and honest environment is important when promoting employee wellbeing. A supportive workplace where employees feel comfortable to be themselves and to share experiences could help others deal with their own issues and concerns. 

Some employers have created areas on the intranet where senior figures have shared past experiences with their own mental health showing that these issues and concerns can affect anyone and there’s no shame in asking for help.  These have been successful, but for some employers who are just starting out, that could be a challenge to set up. If that resonates with you as a company, it’s ok to start small. This could be high level blogs from senior people sharing the vision. The more you do, the more comfortable people will start to feel and the broader you can make your communication.

6. Share experiences

This doesn’t necessarily have to be big gestures, this could be a smaller group of people who are happy to speak about their previous issues to grow the support organically. One thing is to not force people, they will open up when they are ready and feel safe to do so. Some people may be nervous to discuss when they are in the thick of their problem or concern (others will welcome the opportunity), but once they are out the other side, it’s far easier to be open about what happened and how you resolved the concerns. 

The important thing here is to not be judgemental but be empathetic, listen and offer support. Things like Employee Assistance programmes (EAPs) and any advice or benefits that support your workforce are good to talk about too.

7. Clear multimedia communication

With the growth of our multigenerational workforce, communication can be a challenge. How messages are received by an 18/19-year-old is very different to someone over 60 for example.

A multi-media approach is the best way to ensure your messages are received by all your target employees. A combination of online, offline, workplace promotion and payslip messaging are all great ways of communicating and gives the best chance of your message being seen.

8. One size does not fit all

We all know communication needs to be engaging and again we need to think about the multigenerational audience.  If you are promoting a savings benefit for example, this is relevant to all ages but the hook for your younger employees may be travel, house purchase or car purchase whereas the hook for older employees could be children’s higher education, retirement provision or achieving those bucket list items. While you are promoting the same product, it’s a different underlying engagement angle.

Provide your employees with benefit options that they can utilise should they need to and at a time that’s right for them. Build their knowledge and confidence to be able to make smart well-informed decisions when they need to and to provide support they can call on such as EAPs when they need extra help.

9. Measure success

Measuring success is one of the hardest parts of any wellbeing strategy. How do you measure feelings and attitudes?  How do you know if the actions you’ve taken have made people feel happier and more in control? This area underpins what you do and is one of the most important parts of any strategic discussion or planning.

You can use fact-based metrics, or people analytics such as turnover, accidents and absence to measure the improvements in those as we know poor employee wellbeing impacts productivity and focus at work. It’s the softer metrics that are harder to measure. One way you could do this is to go back to those fact find initiatives such as surveys and focus groups to ask employees after a period of time how they feel.

10. Learn from mistakes

Just like anything we do, we will make mistakes. The important thing is to learn from them. If something doesn’t work, don’t beat yourself up, learn from it – make changes, and try again.

In summary, understanding your workforce and the challenges they face will help you decide what benefits are the most appropriate for your employees. Providing a range of options, communicated effectively will ensure your messages are received. Your employees can make the most of what you are providing to help support them and build their knowledge and confidence to be a well-rounded, happy, healthy and productive part of your organisation.