How To Create An Effective Strategy For Health And Wellbeing At Work

Creating a health and wellbeing strategy isn’t only a crucial aspect of a successful business, it’s also important for cultivating a healthy work environment for employees.

Companies spend significant budget on employee wellbeing initiatives, helping to look after employee mental health both in and out of work. But to get the most value from your efforts, these initiatives need to be part of a cohesive employee wellbeing strategy.

To help employers, we’ll cover seven steps you can take to create an effective strategy for health and wellbeing in the workplace.

What is a health and wellbeing strategy?

A health and wellbeing strategy is a framework you can put into place to identify and improve any physical or mental health concerns that may be affecting your workforce.

By putting clear actions and goals in place to target such concerns, an employee wellbeing strategy can help improve the function of your business. Plus, it gives you an opportunity to improve the wellbeing of your employees both in and out of work.

Many companies offer a collection of benefits to their workforce – reduced gym fees, private healthcare insurance, or workplace pension schemes. However, a health and wellbeing strategy is about combining these initiatives with measurable goals.

As such, a health and wellbeing strategy can not only help you support your workforce better, but it also helps your business achieve and grow.

6 ways to implement a health and wellbeing strategy at work

1. Think about your goals

Before we get started on creating a strategy for health and wellbeing at work, it’s best to sit down and plan out exactly what your goals are.

You need to have a good idea of what you want your strategy to achieve. Do you want to reduce employee absence? Are you looking to boost retention rates? Having clear goals in mind gives you the best chance of achieving them.

Once you’ve highlighted your goals, writing them down helps to keep them front and centre throughout the process of creating your strategy.

2. Use internal data to inform strategy

Since every company is different, take the time to research the specific employee wellbeing issues in your workforce - and how they might be impacting business objectives.

This can be data you already have to hand, which can be used to guide your employee wellbeing strategy, such as:

• Sickness records: Sickness records from previous years can show you if absence records are increasing or decreasing, the main causes of absence, and whether long or short-term absence is affecting your company the most.

• Workforce demographics: Age and gender can influence employees’ wellbeing needs. Also, look into their circumstances, and how the workforce demographics might change. For example, are you planning to hire more graduates?

• Exit interviews and employee surveys: Data from recent interviews and surveys can help you identify any themes or trends relevant to employee wellbeing at your company. For example, ex-employees may have cited poor work-life balance as a key reason for leaving.

• Review usage data: Look at how any existing employee wellbeing initiatives are being used. For example, if your company offers counselling through an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP), then an increase in people using this service could indicate more employees are stressed or struggling with mental health.

Once you’ve collected this data, use it to address each individual concern head on within your strategy.

3. Align objectives with existing business initiatives

The best employee wellbeing strategy aligns with your company’s overall business initiatives.

For example, if you want to promote a healthy lifestyle to help improve employee mental and physical health, then encouraging walking meetings is one staff wellbeing idea you could try. Instead of sitting at a desk, employees can go for a walk around the office as they talk – promoting healthy activity during working hours.

4. Check in with your employees

Checking in with your workforce throughout the roll out process – as well as after implementation - is crucial to the long term success of your employee wellbeing strategy.

For example, if your goal is to reduce mental health absence, then don’t just rely on the absence target for results. Instead, focus on creating the right office culture where people feel comfortable to talk about mental health. In this case, your target could be to reduce the stigma around mental health and raise awareness within a year.

Similarly, check-in with employees who are neurodiverse to ensure that your wellbeing support is truly inclusive and effective. Ask for feedback on what’s working and where improvements can be made. Whether it’s around communication styles, sensory-friendly spaces, flexible working options, or access to mental health resources. These conversations help create a more supportive environment and show that your wellbeing provisions are designed with everyone in mind.

Subjective objectives like creating an open office culture can be difficult to measure. As such, it’s important you keep asking for feedback from your employees to see whether your employee wellbeing strategy is working as it should.

Consider utilising 1-2-1s or focus groups if employees feel comfortable to discuss their views in this setting. Alternatively, you might find it useful to create an anonymous suggestion box or anonymous surveys, as this is likely to encourage more honest and open responses from as many people as possible.

5. Be realistic with your timeframe

You may want to reach all your goals for health and wellbeing at work as fast as possible, but it’s important to be realistic with your timeframe.

Separating objectives into short-term, medium-term, and long-term targets will help make them easier to manage. For example, your short-term goal may be collecting feedback from employees on how they feel at work. This would help your long-term goal of improving employee wellbeing overall, as well as increasing productivity and reducing absenteeism.

6. Let the strategy evolve

The needs of your workforce will naturally shift and change over time. As such, your strategy needs to be agile, able to respond to these changes.

Make sure to regularly check in on employee wellbeing to review the effectiveness of your strategy. This can help to outline any areas for improvement and better understand how your current efforts are being received across the business.  

How can Benenden Healthcare for Business help with employee wellbeing at work?

Looking after the mental wellbeing of your employees and addressing their specific needs can be tricky. But, here at Benenden Healthcare for Business, we want to help make it that bit easier.

Download our latest Health and Wellbeing Strategy Guide for advice and examples on how you could put your employees first and create inclusive and effective wellbeing strategy.

Our Healthcare for Business helps you provide support to your employees when they need it. With day one access to our 24/7 Mental Health Helpline, your employees get access to dedicated support from professional healthcare workers.

You can find more information on supporting your workforce, such as how to support a bereaved employee or new parent at work, over on our blog.