The Big Five Workplace Wellness Mistakes

Workplace wellness is a great way to improve your bottom line, but your efforts could fall flat if you make any or a combination of the big five workplace wellness mistakes.

#5: Inability to Elicit the Support of Upper Management - 38% Failure Rate

Your employees need a strong example to follow and they look to the upper management team as their guides. If your upper management isn't interested in improving their health, it is a rare occasion when anyone else is either.

Ways to avoid this mistake: The best way to avoid making this mistake is to commit your upper management team to support your workplace wellness initiative before it is put in place. Have at least one of your upper management team as part of your wellness committee. Upper management should at the very least encourage employees to take responsibility for their own health.

#4: Failure to Engage High Risk Employees - 48% Failure Rate

Which of your employees are costing you the most money? High risk employees are costing you three to five times more than average employees. High risk employees could include those who are obese, addicted to smoking, etc. If you fail to engage high risk employees in a workplace wellness program, the program will not have nearly the return on investment it should and could altogether fail.

Ways to avoid this mistake: The key to engaging high risk employees in your workplace wellness program is incentives. Incentives could be rewards for improving health or penalizations for disregarding the workplace wellness initiative, either way you will give the employees that are costing you the most a reason to lower their costs to you.

#3: Inadequate Funding - 48.2% Failure Rate

When the budget for a workplace wellness program is too small, the program can only do so much. Workplace wellness programs are an investment. You may not see returns up front, but if you look at the tract record of most large corporation workplace wellness programs that had adequate funding to begin with, you will see that the returns are phenomenal two to four years after the program was implemented.

Ways to avoid this mistake: The simple answer is to provide adequate funding. Adequate funding is more easily determined when the program is specifically tailored to the needs of your employees.

#2: Insufficient Staff Resources - 50.1% Failure Rate
When your employees or your wellness committee don't know how to lead a healthy lifestyle and you don't have the resources to tell them how, they will get lost and your workplace wellness program could flounder.

How to avoid this mistake: Providing your employees with resources is a large factor in whether your program will succeed or not. They need information, people in the community they can go to with questions, a guide for how the program should be set up, and training on how to go about the business of implementing a workplace wellness program. You may be better off hiring a workplace wellness expert to help you than handing it over to your employees without any resources to fall back on.

#1: Lack of Employee Interest - 63.5% Failure Rate

The success of a workplace wellness program is determined by how healthy your employees become and stay due to the efforts of the program. If your employees simply aren't interested in improving their health, then there is nothing you can do to make it successful.

Ways to avoid this mistake: The key to employee participation in a workplace wellness program is communication. Educate your employees on health and healthy living before you introduce them to a workplace wellness program. When the program costs something, it is inconvenient to their schedule, and the benefits to your employees are not fully explained, issue and lack of interest arise.