How to design an engaging employee wellness program

Organizational support through the endorsement of multiple stakeholder groups is absolutely critical in order to better guarantee member adoption and participation in changing their overall well-being. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Employee engagement in health and well-being programs is a challenging goal to the majority of plan sponsors. On its face, the thought is that people would naturally prefer to be healthy versus unhealthy. So it should be easy to provide a program that focuses on improving health and getting members to participate, right? Unfortunately, the answer is not that straightforward because there are a multitude of impacting reasons that go beyond what is occurring at the individual member level.

The ultimate equation surrounding engagement is factored on a variety of forces that include leadership endorsement, committee/stakeholder development, planning, execution, and delivery methods. We’ll focus this discussion on dissecting these listed forces into more easily absorbable concepts, with the goal of providing a clearer line of sight to how to achieve and sustain higher member engagement rates.