What Are The Benefits Of An Employee Wellness Programme?

These days, you want to be doing everything you can to ensure the financial wellness of your company, as well as the wellbeing of your employees, and a corporate wellness programme is just the thing to accomplish these two goals. The National Coalition on Health Care states that employee health care costs are rising at a rate of 6.9% every year, which is double the rate of inflation.

As an employer, much of the burden for covering the cost of care for employees falls on you, but other, more inventive employers are actively looking for alternative ways to reduce health care costs and corporate wellness programmes are quickly becoming the solution of choice, as on average they return you three times the money that you initially put in. Fully-insured corporations tend to see higher returns on investment because they are self-funded and every penny saved will literally go straight into your pocket.

Also, if your employees are healthier, they will spend less time away from work. Therefore, any products or services your company delivers will be done so more efficiently, you will spend less on paid time off, and you will need temporary employees less often to cover for sick employees. In addition, you will reduce the amount of ill employees coming into work and infecting other employees. This presenteeism affects morale, and can become a vicious cycle that harms the whole office, unless there is a corporate wellness programme in place to reduce the likelihood of people becoming ill in the first place.

Finally, the healthier your employees are, the more productive they will be, and implementing a corporate wellness programme can also help then to de-stress, concentrate, communicate better and experience a higher level of job satisfaction. By showing your employees that you care about their wellbeing, you will increase their sense of loyalty to you. Though the programme will benefit you financially, and makes good business sense, your current employees will perceive it as a benefit that’s purely for them, and future employees will be easier to recruit. You may even find that it gives you the extra edge in keeping current staff members from switching companies or working for competitors.