While organizations will vary in size, diversity, location, goals, and mission, the most successful companies share a common focus: their employees. As organizational leaders, you already have a sense of the snowball effect that can happen when you have unhealthy and unhappy employees. Low morale and disgruntled employees lead to lower productivity, higher turnover, more absenteeism, and rising healthcare costs.
On the other hand, an organization that is able to implement a wellness program will see a much more positive snowball effect and benefit from happy and healthy employees. This leads to:
- Better performance and higher productivity
- More loyal employees creating less turnover and lower hiring costs
- Reduction in absenteeism and sick days
- Lower healthcare costs
In fact, Gallup reports employees who feel their employer cares about their well-being are 4.1x more likely to be engaged at work. Beyond choosing a wellness platform, organizations who develop successful programs, like those that implement Burnalong, also see:
- Better cohesion and connection between employees
- Decreasing healthcare costs from employees’ family and dependents
- Preventive measures taken for potential employee healthcare issues
The Value of Internal Wellness Champions
Wellness champions are people within high-performing organizations who help accelerate the adoption of wellness programs and initiatives, serving as on-the-ground connectors to ensure the long-term success of wellness among their colleagues. With an effective wellness champion network in place, organizations see amplified effects of their wellness initiatives in the workplace and are able to expand the scope of communication across locations, departments, and functions.
We recently launched a guide for HR leaders to guide you through the tactical steps and strategies for building a health and wellness champion network within your organization, what comes after implementing a successful wellness program for your employees, and how to leverage tools (such as those offered by Burnalong) to augment the wellness outcomes for your organization. Let’s take a brief look at the reasons why building a champion network is a key next step after initiating a wellness program in your organization.
Why Build a Health and Wellness Champion Network?
As a leader, you know that simply launching a new wellness program or initiative is only the beginning. You want to also ensure its adoption by your workforce. A successful program is one that is able to reach all eligible employees and generate excitement, plus measurable enrollment and engagement. To increase the likelihood of success, you need a team within your organization who will serve as your wellness champions.
As you and your leadership team develop initiatives, company wellness challenges, and campaigns to impact your employees’ and their families’ health you need a team on the ground within various departments and locations who will:
- Communicate these initiatives, challenges, and campaigns to employees
- Motivate employees to participate in the wellness program
- Foster collaboration between employees around their health and wellness
- Coordinate and facilitate health and wellness activities for individual departments or teams
- Track progress and measure success of the wellness initiatives, challenges, and campaigns they are helping develop on the ground
These champions can be a part of the leadership team or a unique wellness committee that contributes to the activities that impact your employees’ health and wellness. Having a champion network in place when implementing a wellness program for your organization is critical because they become a valued resource. They can serve as a bridge to connect the employees they are close to during their day-to-day and leadership to provide direct feedback about what they need when it comes to their health and happiness at your organization.
To learn the five steps to establishing and empowering your wellness champions, download the full ebook now.
