3 tips for implementing a successful corporate wellness programme

Ensuring a regular physical activity regime is important for your worker's health and productivity in the workplace. Below you’ll find three tips to improve corporate wellness and ensure your workplace brings out the best in everyone.

While you might be aware of the benefits, creating an environment of positive corporate wellness is often easier said than done. There are a lot of things that can influence you or your employees to skip the gym or jog around the park. Three things you can implement to make sure that you have a successful wellness solution are listed below.

Embedding wellness in your workplace

According to the Champion Health study, the most common changes employees want to make to their lives centre around energy and weight management. Overall, 42% want to boost their energy levels, while 41% want to lose weight, both strongly linked to a physically active lifestyle.

Partnering with a corporate wellness solution, particularly one that includes physical activity, like Myzone, enables you to actively support your employees in adopting healthy behaviours, and making the changes they want. With clear benefits for the organisation too, as over £12.6 billion is lost in the UK due to poor mental health in the workforce every year (Westfield Health Report, 2022). And similarly, a reported 200 million workdays are lost in the US to mental health every year.

Three tips for implementing a physical activity-focused wellness solution that will succeed:

1. Fully inclusive - It needs to be accessible to, and fair for every individual. Otherwise, a bias is created, and exclusion may occur, resulting in the opposite of your intentions for some employees.
   
   For example, focusing on speed or time in the gym is not accessible. Instead look for a metric that is fair for all, such as heart rate zones, a completely personable metric.  
   
   
2. Community aspect – this not only boosts social health but creates a safe space for motivation and support from employee to employee. This is key for ensuring physical habits are sustained over the long term – the key goal for any wellness programme. 
    
3. Focus on sustainable change - for a wellness plan to be effective it needs to abide by the rules of the habit cycle or there is a risk of the solution being short-lived and, in short, failing. Therefore, seek solutions that offer engrained triggers and rewards – to sustain engagement.
   
   For example, Myzone’s immediate gratification of social ‘likes’ to workouts is accompanied by the longer-term rewards of hitting 1300 MEPs (the equivalent of WHO physical activity guidelines) and progression through status rankings. Together creating a continuous trigger, action, and reward cycle.  

How corporate wellness brings teams together

One of the things employers often seek, and love most about Myzone corporate wellness, is the ability to bring workers together and build a community. Those disconnected employees working from home will soon feel part of something special – a community with a shared goal, where everyone has their back.

Team challenges are a great route for creating community; transforming wellness into a game and allowing organisations to reward employees for their effort. The key here, however, is inclusivity and ensuring that the challenge is fair, fun, and accessible.

Implement the above and you’ll be well on your way to a healthier and happier workforce, where people feel valued and supported and are motivated and productive.