How to communicate your employee wellness program

Most employee wellness programs take months of planning and organization. Often times many different team members are involved even before the employee wellness program is begun. It is important to keep in mind that one of the major components of your employee wellness program will be how you communicate it to your employees. If you cannot communicate your employee wellness program in a way that gets your employees excited and involved in the program then the months of planning and effort that has been put into the program will be for nothing. Here is what you need to know about how to communicate your employee wellness program-

- Be clear and concise-If your employee wellness program is going to succeed it is critical that the information that you send out is clear and concise. Your employees already have their regular jobs to do and will not want to take extra time to read extensive literature about the employee wellness program. You will need to make sure that you attract and keep their attention in a short amount of time or you will most likely find that they will simply toss the communication into the trash or delete the email from their computer. Take the time to carefully go over any information that you send out and make sure that the parameters of the employee wellness program are completely understandable and easy to follow. The first step is to get the employees to read the literature and the second step is to get them to want to be a part of it. If the communication that you send out is to long or to complicated you will not have accomplished your goal of letting your employees know what you can offer them through the employee wellness program.
- Be sure that you are sending the communication where your employees are-Another crucial component of communicating about your employee wellness program is to make sure that you place the communication where your employees will come across it. If you choose to put out fliers on the company bulletin board but no one really stops to read it then you are not effectively communicating about your employee wellness program. The team that designs the employee wellness program should take the time to consider where the best locations are for contacting the employees about the employee wellness program. Whether that is on the website, through mailings sent to their homes, or holding company meetings the method(s) that has the best chance of reaching the most employees should be used. It is also important that the communication methods that are used are reevaluated on a periodic basis in order to make sure that the right methods are being utilized.
- Be consistent in your communication-Many times businesses will put together an employee wellness program and then a make a big push to get it out to their employees and then that will be it. The initial effort to get the employee wellness program rolled out will be all the communication that takes place. This is hardly effective. Keep in mind that not everyone will be reached the first time you send out communications about the employee wellness program. In addition, you will continue to have employees leave and be hired so it is also important to maintain communications about the employee wellness program. All too often even long term employees are surprised to find out that the business they work for offers an employee wellness program. In order to have effective communications about your employee wellness program it will need to happen on a consistent basis in order to really keep the program going.