6 Tips to Reenergize Your Well-Being Program

Well-being is top of mind for a lot of employers these days and for good reason. Supporting employees’ mental, physical, and financial well-being has been shown to provide an abundance of benefits to the employees and the organization, and employers are investing accordingly.

Consider this:

Well-being programs, along with a culture that supports well-being, help employees to become aware of health issues earlier and to have the tools and resources to address them.
Employees who engage in well-being activities and feel supported by their employers are more likely to be present (sick less often), engaged, and creative.
Investing in employee well-being saves money for employers and improves employees’ health outcomes over time.

If we know all this, why aren’t more people participating in employer-sponsored well-being programs? Simply put: It’s not enough to offer great programs if employees don’t know about them or know how to make the most of them. Successful well-being programs foster participation and help people build healthier habits to improve their well-being over time. To help drive engagement, resources must be accessible, customizable, and interactive. HR and benefits teams must also effectively communicate about their benefits and well-being programs to ensure adoption.

Here Are 6 Tips for Improving Well-Being Program Engagement

1. Make it an event, and use incentives to drive participation.

Research shows that the most common reason people don’t take positive health actions is because inertia makes it easy to procrastinate—a body at rest stays at rest.

Offering an incentive paired with a deadline helps to break inertia by giving people a reason to engage and prioritize their well-being. The combination of a specific and simple action (take this quiz, watch this video, etc.) combined with an incentive (win this, receive that) to do it within a specified time frame will create a sense of urgency. Here’s how one of our clients created an annual wellness incentive program focused on driving better health outcomes by participating in routine preventive care.

2. Engage support from leaders and well-being champions.

One of my clients recently shared that they have over 65% of their global employees participating in their well-being program. Since introducing the program in 2023, the company has seen a notable uptick in their employees’ overall health, as well as an increase in engagement on the well-being platform. One of the reasons for their success—well-being champions. The well-being champions are onsite employees who advocate for the program and are the driving force for increased participation by encouraging coworkers to join, get active, and participate.

Employees sometimes feel like they need permission to use well-being programs. Having support from managers and leaders can go a long way in helping employees follow through on their well-being goals.

3. Dig into data to drive communication efforts.

Do you know what information your employees are reading when you send out emails? Did they scan the QR code on the postcard you mailed? What actions do they take after completing an online checklist?

When it comes to employee health, companies usually track areas where their organization has direct expenses or liability exposure—disability claims, utilization rate of employee assistance programs, medical claims. But why not use data to also understand what information employees are engaging with and whether your efforts are effective? For example, measuring click-through rates and QR code scans during a recent benefits awareness campaign allowed our client to determine which communications channels saw the most engagement. What they found was that Slack messaging was a good way to drive last-minute action, and there was a strong correlation between communication pushes and vendor utilization.

4. Understand what your employees value and need.

Undoubtedly, your employees want to prevent disease, lose weight, exercise more, manage stress and anxiety, and save for retirement. And you have valuable benefits that can help address all these needs and more.

When promoting these benefits, try appealing to what motivates your people. Instead of saying, “We have an XYZ weight-loss program available,” say, “Struggling to lose weight? We can help.”

When you address the needs and motivations of your people, you will be more relevant and have more success engaging and driving desired behaviors.

Consider surveying employees via traditional online surveys and focus groups. Simple, quick online pulse surveys are easy ways to get frequent, real-time data about how employees think. Even informal check-ins with front-line managers can prove invaluable. Technology has evolved, and you can now anonymously survey thousands of employees concurrently, using online platforms and artificial intelligence. (Talk to us about our online focus group solution!)

5. Brand your well-being program.

A unified benefits brand influences how employees evaluate and interact with your programs, and it creates a consistent employee experience.

Why do you need a distinct benefits identity? Because it helps with recognition and messaging, motivates employees to pay attention, and uncovers the personal value of your company’s benefits and well-being programs.

Using benefits to help employees solve problems and improve their well-being starts with thinking holistically about the employee experience. And there’s no better example of this than #lifehacks, one of Lenovo’s most successful engagement campaigns. Segal Benz helped Lenovo bring their employee-centric messaging to life by creating a new visual identity and a bold voice that reflects Lenovo’s edgy and unique external marketing brand.

6. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Employing creative approaches that improve perceived value requires communicating with the larger picture in mind—and telling your story. Both Stripe and FanDuel followed this approach to engage their employees with phenomenal results. Segal Benz helped Stripe and FanDuel tell their total rewards stories by prioritizing what their people want. Through visually exciting communications that used bite-sized, easily digestible content, employees were able to make the most of resources that supported their physical, mental, and financial well-being.

By putting these 6 tips to work, you have a game plan on how to take a page from marketing playbooks. Thinking like a marketer to convey the value of your programs can help drive engagement.

We’re proud to work with organizations that value their people. If you want to learn more, we’d love to talk.