For many HR leaders and teams, there is a sigh of relief once they find a corporate wellness platform that they can agree on and roll out to their staff and employees. It can be a surprising hurdle as 60 percent of employees state they want their workplace to provide wellness benefits and the ever-rising cost of healthcare for employers is pushing HR leaders to expand their definition of wellness and benefits to be more holistic.
But what happens after you choose the wellness program? How do you implement it? Does the same internal messaging work for everyone at your company? Is there a common definition of wellness with everyone being at a different place in their wellness journeys, with varying needs? How do you generate excitement and encourage engagement across all departments? Does the promotion of the program in a single language impact your entire workforce?
At Burnalong we know rollout is actually when the real work starts! In a Harvard Business Review survey, 6 out of 10 employees who were not participating in a wellness program said they would be open to participating, but 69 percent cited a lack of information or awareness as the primary reason they were not involved.
Getting all of your employees enrolled, engaged, and excited about corporate wellness solutions can be a heavy lift for your HR team. At Burnalong we are experts when it comes to the enrollment and engagement of our platform at the various companies and organizations we work with. The key factor to ensuring our clients achieve high enrollment and engagement is that they meet employees where they are!
Partnering with Customer Success to Implement a Wellness Program
One of the first actions our customer success team at Burnalong takes with each of the companies we work with is to put themselves in the shoes of an employee at that company. The team thinks through what their day looks like, what their responsibilities encompass, when they take breaks, where they hang out, how they engage with other co-workers, and most importantly how, and from where, employees receive information within their company. We want to make sure that all of your employees and teams can benefit from your wellness program so it can make the desired impact across your organization.
Certain teams can sometimes pose a challenge to inform, enroll, and engage. So with this initial exercise, our customer success team is able to choose the right avenues to disseminate information to get employees enrolled in Burnalong plus engaged in (and excited!) about company wellness challenges, competitions, and goals. You can learn some other tips and suggestions to rolling out a wellness program in our ebook too.
One particular population that we have established some great wellness program enrollment solutions and engagement tactics with is floor workers in manufacturing companies. This population can be tricky when it comes to enrollment and engagement because unlike office staff they are usually on their feet all day, without corporate emails, and rarely at a desk or behind a computer where emails from leadership are easily accessible. In some cases, there might be language barriers, as well.
Check out some creative tactics our team has created to get floor and manufacturing staff enrolled with Burnalong.
How to Enroll Your Floor and Manufacturing Staff in Your Wellness Program
1) Word of Mouth Referral
First, identify a couple of influencers within your organization who will serve as wellness champions. The number of champions you choose should correlate directly to the amount of staff at your organization. Once you have identified these internal champions (e.g. floor leaders, managers, senior employees, or simply those passionate about wellness) give them exclusive access to the wellness initiative you plan on offering to the whole staff.
After they become familiar with the wellness programming, implement a referral competition. For example, if a champion gets 10 employees enrolled within a specified timeline then they will receive an incentive like a gift card or an extra vacation day.
Once you complete this referral challenge with the champions, you can then replicate the competition on a smaller scale with the general staff. For instance, for each referral of a fellow staff member who hasn’t enrolled, the referee will be entered into a raffle for a grand prize.
2) Use a Hotline
Oftentimes, with floor staff in manufacturing companies, we have experienced resistance in adopting wellness programs due to the lack of understanding, skepticism, and lack of credibility when rolling out wellness initiatives through emails and home mailers.
In order to help employees understand the wellness initiative better, assuage doubts about enrolling, and feel confident in their decision to enroll–we invented the Hotline. Twice a week we open up a hotline for floor and manufacturing employees to call and get help from a real customer success manager with enrolling in the health and wellness initiative. Plus, we answer any questions they might have, live. We usually advertise these hotline hours through breakroom flyers as well as brochures that floor leaders give out during their weekly or monthly meetings.
3) Send a Postcard Home
Given floor and manufacturing workers are often on their feet, and not close to a computer during the workday, send a postcard home with information on how and why to enroll. Beyond the basic information and links for enrollment, highlight the benefits to their family as each employee gets four sub-accounts for their household and friends to join too.
At Burnalong, we’ve seen an increase in engagement of over 4x when an employee’s sub-accounts are also signed up and engaged. So, when in doubt, send a postcard home to make it simple and spread the information on how to pursue wellness with the new initiative as a family.
4) Posters in break rooms
While individual emails might not resonate as well with the floor and manufacturing workers, posting information about your wellness program in break rooms with large, colorful posters can capture their attention. You might consider highlighting a few core benefits for floor and manufacturing workers specifically. Some of those benefits might be sub-accounts for their families, stretching classes to take after they’ve been on their feet all day, quick meditation classes for their breaks, or nutrition classes to inspire tomorrow’s lunch. You could also use the chance to promote a corporate challenge so they can be included with the rest of your organization’s challenge.
To double up on the effectiveness of the posters, you could combine this with the postcards so they can take immediate action once they get home for the day.
How to Get Floor and Manufacturing Workers Engaged in Your Wellness Program
While encouraging enrollment is the first step, the true test and success of a wellness initiative implementation will be seen in employee engagement after you have rolled out the programming. Here are a couple of engagement tactics that we use when it comes to getting floor and manufacturing staff to Burnalong.
For each of these suggestions, keep in mind that you need to keep challenges, competitions, and goals accessible and attainable for everyone at your company. It also helps if you contextualize challenges to build off activities they might be competing daily to make sure it doesn’t feel like a huge change in behavior. Burnalong helps with this, in particular, by offering a wide range of class categories (over 45 categories and growing daily) so that everyone can find something that resonates with them and meets their needs, wherever they are in their wellness journey.
1) The Wellness Habit Challenge
The idea for this challenge is to build off of an existing habit that your employees already have but push them to go a little further. This is using a well-known, and proven, tactic to positively impact behavior called habit stacking. It essentially means that you add in a manageable amount of a new habit to an existing habit.
For instance, challenge them that after their daily cup of coffee, they add in one minute of meditation, or they take a quick walk, or they perform some quick stretches. This helps someone add a healthy habit to an existing behavior so that the new habit has a better chance of “sticking.”
Additionally, choose a wellness habit and assign an overall goal to the wellness habit. For instance, drink 5 glasses of water per day, or take the stairs at least 10x per week, or take a walk outside at least 2x per day. As individuals fulfill these goals, incentivize them with prizes if they complete the wellness goal for the week or month.
2) The “Beat Your Bestie” Challenge
This challenge is a great fit when your employees want to have fun and you want to add some camaraderie to their workday. Everyone participating in the challenge chooses a buddy or bestie at their organization. Create a deadline and then buddies challenge one another to see who can complete the most minutes of classes over a specified amount of time.
This has an added bonus of being able to also encourage additional enrollments if the “bestie” they challenge isn’t already part of your wellness initiative.
Bringing It Home
At Burnalong, we know the challenge of getting everyone at a company enrolled and engaged with wellness programming. There are sometimes specific teams that are a little more difficult to reach, such as the floor and manufacturing teams. However, we have some tested and proven best practices to help you get them enrolled, engaged, and pursuing their own wellness goals. Not only that, we have an experienced customer success team to craft customized strategies to equip you, and your teams to successfully implement a wellness program.
To learn more about how we can partner with you or aid in enrollment (or improve engagement) check out our ebook with additional tips and suggested best practices.
