January 09, 2020

Socializing Tips

To drive success in your company’s global wellness efforts:

• Identify all potentially relevant stakeholders related to employee health within your organization. Stakeholders should be reflective of the entire organization - geographically, departmentally and hierarchically. Convince the key stakeholders of the value of employee health and its relation to productivity. As culture change cannot be dictated from the top, local staff members have an integral role to play in establishing and sustaining corporate wellness efforts. Without their physical, emotional and financial support, a culture of health cannot become pervasive.
• Delegate real responsibility for employee health and wellness across the organization and make individuals accountable. Don’t do everything by yourself in headquarters. Allocating more responsibility to local staff may encourage participation, promote their buy-in and result in more culturally relevant solutions.
• Establish global health vendors as corporate wellness partners. A basic challenge for developing global wellness programs is limited human capital for managing initiatives. In some geographies, companies have personnel dedicated to employee health promotion programs. Yet, the same resources don’t exist uniformly around the world. Companies can partner with their vendors to build effective global programs, but should not expect vendors to do everything. Employers are experts of their own organizations; establishing or managing a culture of health cannot be subcontracted.
• Focus on employee communications. Selling health and wellness to employees is like selling any product; it is important to know the customer (i.e., the employee), what they want (i.e., their perceived health needs) and their willingness to spend (i.e., engagement level). Marketing targets important elements. When talking to employees about health, be creative, target specific users, test and retest both language and content, leverage a variety of communication mechanisms (emails, intranet, text messages, etc.), and never assume you are finished. The key is getting the right message to the receptive employee when he or she is ready for it.

Appetite

Successful health promotion initiatives are conceived strategically. When conceptualizing, developing and rolling out a new consumer product or service, it is vital to understand true market demand. Does that product or service meet a given need or want? Similarly, when a company decides to pursue wellness globally, it is important that those initiatives be designed with the consumer (i.e., employee population) in mind. What specific health needs do employees have? Of those identified needs, what problems matter most to employees? Finally, wellness programs should be designed to exceed employee expectations. Tailoring programs that more than solve true employee problems generates loyalty to and confidence in one’s employer. This goodwill is invaluable when promoting and sustaining an organizational culture of health and for attracting and retaining key talent.

Appetite Tips

When developing wellness programs:

• Create the demand among employees for health promotion programs and do more than meet that demand. Ultimately, wellness programs must be designed to address the needs perceived by employees before addressing the needs of the business. If employees think stress is a bigger problem than cardiovascular disease, start there! To sustain initiatives long-term and build camaraderie across the organization, employees have to want to be involved and see value from doing so.
• Strive to make health make sense. Avoid compensation and benefits jargon. No one has an appetite for what they don’t understand.
• Think critically about how corporate health and wellness initiatives and messages will resonate with individual employees. Health is by nature personal. Employees in one country will likely not respond to health programs in the same way as personnel in another location. Similarly, different employee populations (men/women, young/old, varying ethnic groups, etc.) have different health associations and needs. In health programming and communication, one size doesn’t fit all.
• Organize a network of health champions at work. A health champion is an existing employee who is given additional organizational responsibilities to foster a culture of health by providing local-level (individual facilities, campuses, countries, divisions, etc.) health leadership, encouraging engagement in corporate wellness initiatives and programming, and providing voice to peer needs and values. A wellness champion’s role is to be a cheerleader for health.

Infrastructure

Employers offer wellness and health promotion programs to assist employees in adopting healthier lifestyles and to encourage them to make healthy choices. Making a healthy choice isn’t always the easiest choice. The best way to boost healthy decision-making is to make the right selection the default one. Over the course of the day, people will make healthier decisions (to exercise, get recommended preventive screenings, etc.) if the desired endgames are considered cultural or organizational norms. Establishing those customs of good health and well-being requires more than just promoting positive defaults; it takes structural and conceptual support.

Infrastructure Tips

Build the necessary and supportive foundation for global wellness by:

• Considering the impact of the wider environment. Culture and society shape individual, organizational and/or community health. Employer wellness initiatives should be cognizant of and shaped by these factors.
• Leveraging your governance structure to promote health. To do so, clearly articulate roles and responsibilities across the entire organization – from headquarters to local sites and senior leadership through line management. For health to pervade, all employees need to be accountable for prioritizing and promoting it.
• Outlining short- and long-term wellness goals that are informed by and driving toward data. If company specific data are unavailable for informing goals or measuring success, turn to country-level statistics. When defining targets, try to be realistic; employee and corporate health status won’t change quickly. If ambitions are set too high, initiatives may be deemed unsuccessful prematurely or inaccurately.
• Developing formal communication systems for discussing employee health, benefits and wellness initiatives that span every level of the organization. Employee health is addressed at site, regional and corporate levels. To the extent possible, initiatives across a company should be supported by communication infrastructure so they can be informed by the successes and failures of other programs rolled out around the world.
• Developing the conceptual framework for global wellness efforts that provides both program scope and direction. That structure can be established through clear branding and defined program pillars and/or slogans.
• Build formal systems for assessing the capital demands of, resources available for and successes from global wellness programs. Consider developing a formal, global committee of relevant internal stakeholders representing local, regional and corporate perspectives. These invested personnel are an invaluable organizational resource for brainstorming and decision-making.

Alignment

Companies have many mechanisms for impacting employee health–directly through health benefits, wellness or occupational health and safety programs – or indirectly via the organization of work or prevailing company culture. These various mechanisms should strive to promote shared health goals, whatever they may be. They should not work at odds with each other.

Alignment Tips

Developing a corporate culture of health demands a unified front. To that end:

• Avoid fragmentation in your health and health-impacting benefits and programs. Given constrained health budgets and competing demands for attention, companies should not confound and confuse their initiatives. For example, before educating employees about the value of prevention, be certain recommended services are adequately covered, available and accessible.
• Consider how the employees’ work environment impacts physical, emotional and psychosocial health. Think about the work environment broadly to include the permanent structures, daily interactions with managers and colleagues and a person’s regular patterns of work. Each of these offers implied health messages. Are work stations ergonomic? Do managers look for signs of employee stress or burn-out and intervene? Are employees expected to be on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week? To the extent possible, make sure the environment’s implied messages promote healthy behaviors.
• Audit the full spectrum of employee benefits (e.g., health, retirement, etc.) your company offers. Does the design of benefits (e.g., covered/excluded benefits, etc.) promote desirable employee health behaviors?
• Allying corporate health and safety objectives for mutual support. Consider developing clear and formal strategic partnerships between the various divisions of the organization with a role in promoting employee well-being (i.e., medical, safety, operations, human resources, etc.).
• Review the objectives and goals of corporate, regional and local health promotion initiatives alongside each other. Be sure these various initiatives are appropriately coordinated to forward business goals and not functioning at cross purposes.

Authenticity

The ultimate objective of global wellness initiatives is to improve employee health by promoting better health behaviors. We know that lasting behavior change is difficult to achieve, though. Despite the best of intentions, individuals often retreat – actively or passively – from their positive health choices. Knowing this, a company’s commitment to health needs to be visible and constant every single day. It should be embedded in all aspects of the business as an important part of ‘how things get done.’ It can’t be just a benefit, or a set of programs, or an HR initiative. An authentic commitment to health is one that is wide and deep inside the organization.

Authenticity Tips

Embed health into the DNA of the enterprise. To do so:

• Engage organizational leadership in health initiatives. Think broadly about who is considered a leader – to include members of the C-suite, mid-level managers and peer influencers in the U.S. and globally. Employees should be able to look around and see managers and corporate leaders reflecting and endorsing a shared company commitment to healthy employees. Health should matter to the people leading the business. The voices and actions of these managers, mentors, and role models can go far to building a health conscious and health-promoting work environment. In the end, role models do matter.
• Identify and articulate specific health objectives and their importance. Health initiatives should be designed around well-defined and frequently discussed goals. Authenticity includes transparency and constancy. The more employees know and the more regularly they are reminded of why health and wellness matters, the more they will see a corporation’s health interests as genuine.
• Audit the work environment and offered benefits for how they promote health objectives. If an employee works in an environment that presents health risks (e.g., limited dining options, unsafe vehicles, poorly lit staircases, etc.), it is difficult to believe that a company’s interest in employee health runs deep. Global scorecards are helpful.
• Develop global health initiatives that strike a chord throughout the workforce. Successful drivers of behavior change need to resonate at every level of the organization.

Impact

Employers have reasons and rationale for taking time and resources away from core business objectives to address and invest in employee health. The business case for global wellness and health promotion rests on the organizational costs incurred due to poor employee health. Because employers often do not bear the direct costs of employee health care in many countries, the argument for selling wellness to individual business units and locations is more challenging. It depends largely on the projected near- and long-term productivity losses that result from employees not feeling well. Future viability of employer health initiatives depends on how successful those programs are at truly changing employee health behaviors and altering health trends. For that reason, measurement and data are key and should be considered right from the start of any new program.

Impact Tips

Use data to engage your global organization in promoting health and well-being.

• Build and manage a wellness strategy cognizant of end goals and objectives. What does the company hope to accomplish through wellness programs? Is the purpose to drive corporate productivity, improve safety and/or encourage better employee health? Specific, transparent and informative answers provide a sound structure for all wellness efforts.
• To promote sustainability, identifiable indicators should be directly linked to specified wellness goals and objectives and monitored regularly. The purpose of measurement is to understand progress toward achieving a goal. Five measurement types exist: process, attitudinal, impact, outcome and return. Globally, not every metric is possible nor is it necessary. It isn’t about having a lot of measures, but rather the right measures that are leading indicators of how health programs are performing.
• Create data and metrics expectations. Demand data-informed programs and services, continuous quality improvement and regular communication from and with all internal and external stakeholders.
• Set appropriate and realistic data goals. It is hard to change human behavior. People make health decisions for a variety of reasons - societal, familial, personal, geographic, etc. A one-off gym class or email message will do little to unravel those various components. Be wary of any data showing unequivocal and/or easy success.
• Establish global data standards. What data have the most utility for determining program success? What information does the business need to understand employee health? Can vendors meet these needs or are alternate measurement policies, procedures and systems required? This is new territory for global employers. Start modestly and expand systems, capacity and capabilities over time and with experience.

Conclusion

Global health trends are clear; the world’s population is increasingly suffering from chronic disease. This disease burden will only be exacerbated by aging, globalization and modernization. By developing a strong foundation for wellness globally, companies can play an important role in stemming this tide of poor health and make a difference in employees’ lives. There are seven key ingredients for a successful global wellness initiative: socialization, appetite, agility, infrastructure, alignment, authenticity and impact. When companies address these universal touch points, they can build a solid structure for promoting health to employees around the world.

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