Posted in: MarchSo, what is a holistic wellness program?
At least four components make up a person's well-being: physical health, financial health, personal health, and professional health. Of course, we all have focused goals like losing five pounds, minimizing our debts, or worrying less. But the wellness programs that typically focus on these narrow goals or just one or two of the four components of overall well-being leave employees with questions of how to find balance throughout all the areas of their life. A holistic wellness platform will enable your employees to do exactly that!
To achieve a successful holistic wellness program, you must:
Set the stage for employees to gauge and improve their overall wellness. The key to shifting the wellness paradigm from fragmented to holistic is understanding the four components and communicating clearly about the importance of each to your employees. You must not only demonstrate your keen awareness of the ways these four areas affect motivation and performance, but you must also provide your employees with the necessary resources to spur them to overcome physical, financial, personal, and professional health battles. Changing behavior is challenging. Support your employees by providing them with the necessary tools to help them improve their overall wellness.
Rework your program as necessary. In my experience, helping your employees find balance comes from constantly evaluating, refocusing, and reworking your wellness program. Wellness must be a priority and an intrinsic part of your organization, and as the needs of your employees change, the communications, activities, and available tools and resources related to each component of the wellness program should as well. A holistic approach embedded in the corporate culture can work and does provide a return on investment. Naturally, the workplace won't replace individual accountability. But, with the proper communication style, an effective rewards system, and a powerful social force that comes from having wellness champions on your team, it can most definitely encourage it.
Get data from comprehensive health assessments. Companies keep rolling out health assessments that are focused solely on individuals' physical health, believing they are the key in predicting the company's total state of wellness. Yes, they may predict physical health risks, but it is naïve to perceive physical risks as the total picture of health.
People engage more with systems and solutions that treat them like people, so health assessments can't just target physical health factors like BMI, LDL cholesterol, heart health, and nutrition. They must also question areas that will show more comprehensive wellness results, such as job satisfaction, belief in the organization, and ability to manage stress, to name a few.
New developments in the field of human capital and productivity are yielding comprehensive assessments, and the results are exciting! Taking a whole-person, whole-population approach to measuring productivity and other predictors of workforce performance enables companies to build more effective action plans and yield better results.
If you are motivated to build a culture of wellness and not only minimize health care costs, but also truly improve productivity and engagement, then now is the time to embrace Total Well-Being's holistic approach to corporate wellness.
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