what are workplace wellness programs?
Believe it or not, the earliest forms of Workplace Wellness Programs date back to the late 1800s. But, they didn’t really start to take over American workplaces until the 1970s. There are lots of reasons for the rise of workplace wellness programs, which we get into in our book.
If you’re unsure what exactly they are, let’s start there. As we researched them, we found it rather difficult to nail down a definitive explanation. But we did find a 2013 evaluation that stated workplace wellness programs entail:
“Employee wellness programs are an organized, employer sponsored program that is designed to support employees as they adopt sustainable behaviors that reduce health risks, improve quality of life, enhance personal effectiveness, and benefit the organization’s financial position.”
They’ve given us quite a laundry list of benefits and goals that, unsurprisingly, shift toward how employee wellness can eventually benefit the corporate bottom line. When any wellness practice is deeply embedded in a corporate setting, there will always be financial considerations to contend with. We are not saying that is inherently a bad thing. But if we look at the stated goals of workplace wellness programs, then we might better understand why they can cost you employees.
what are the goals of these programs?
We found several sources that agree upon the three main benefits of an employee wellness program. These benefits are:
1. Lowering the direct health care costs to the organization,
2. Increasing productivity, and
3. Reducing absenteeism.
Notice anything missing from that list? How about improved health and well-being? When you’re motivated to implement employee wellness schemes because it will save you money and increase productivity, you might not be delivering the best program for your folks.
Now that we have all this information, let’s get to the main course of this blog: how workplace wellness programs affect retention and turnover.
How employee wellness programs can lose you employees?
Basically, by not addressing the health and well-being needs of your people, you risk losing them. Whether it’s burnout or a competitive company, people won’t stay where they aren’t valued. When we, as a society, view human beings as productivity machines whose real value is in their ability to stay healthy so that they can work more and harder, then we develop a perspective on wellness that is more concerned with cost savings than happy and healthy employees.
What we learned from our research is that employee wellness programs are primarily concerned with the bottom line. They are designed to use all available methods to determine if the workforce is working hard enough. They are designed to evaluate if the workforce is healthy enough to do the job and keep the investors happy. From our perspective, they treat wellness as a slogan, not as an authentic method to improve the health and well-being of their folks.
Workplace wellness programs can cost you employees because they don’t treat employees as individual humans with real health and wellness concerns. Enforcing these metrics does not show your folks that you have an inclusive or welcoming workplace. We know from recent data that people are leaving jobs and workplaces at high rates because they don’t feel included or cared for.
In this way, workplace wellness programs become just another piece of evidence that you are more concerned with the bottom line than encouraging real health and wellness. And those cultures are the ones that people will always want to quit.
If you want to learn more about workplace wellness programs, we wrote a whole chapter about their impact in our book, which you can find HERE.
