With a looming recession, inflation, and layoffs, you’re already facing an uphill battle as an employer. However, fighting that battle on the current landscape of post-pandemic employment where you struggle to retain talent makes the situation seem even more grim.
However, you can give your company its best shot at retaining top talent for good — while boosting your bottom line — by providing employees with their most in-demand benefits.
Here’s how.
What Do Your Employees Want Most?
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) conducts an annual study that looks at the most in-demand employee benefits, as well as the most prevalent employer-offered benefits.
In 2022, health-related benefits topped their list.
Employee demand for more and better health-related benefits isn’t new. In 2017, Harvard Business Review published an article on the most desirable employee benefits and noted that better health, dental, and vision insurance was the number one benefit jobseekers considered when choosing between a job with a higher salary and a job with a lower salary, but better benefits.
But “health related benefits” go beyond health insurance in today’s work world — and there are other benefits your company can provide to make a difference in the eyes of potential employees.
3 Ways to Incorporate Wellness into Your Benefits Plan (and Company Culture)
In many ways, increasing your employees’ wellness benefits is also about incorporating wellness into your overall company culture. You can do this by…
1. Providing Individual and Team Health Coaching
Your employees have individual health concerns and needs, so no standard benefits package is going to address every single one of them — no matter how robust that package may be.
However, one way you can individualize your company’s health benefits as much as possible is by hiring a health coach to work with employees one-on-one to address their individual lifestyles and goals — from weight loss to balanced nutrition to better sleep.
On a team level, team health coaching can both help employees improve their health and also serve as a team-building activity based on activities and coaching that work for a broader group.
2. Make Healthy Choices Accessible
One incredibly easy way to support your employees’ health journeys is by making healthy choices more accessible and readily available. Provide free virtual fitness classes or yoga studio memberships to employees or bring in fitness pros for in-office classes. If that’s not possible, you can also provide health-related education via webinars and other similar mediums.
3. Host an Employee Wellness Retreat
Most companies host an employee retreat on an annual basis, so give your retreat a wellness slant this year. Immersive wellness retreats can run as long or short as your employees need and can allow them to return to the office feeling invigorated and ready to take on their health goals.
How Does This Benefit Employers?
Providing employee health-related benefits isn’t just beneficial to your team; it’s also beneficial to your bottom line. Studies have shown that health-related benefits in the workplace lead to…
Increased Productivity
This is the case both on the individual level as well as the team level. In one Harvard Pilgrim Health Care study, researchers found that, as employee well-being improves, so does productivity.
The study found that employees who ranked their well-being as “poor” completed about 64% of potential work tasks, while employees who ranked their well-being as “excellent” completed about 83% of potential work tasks. On a team level, those numbers went from 61% to 81%.
Better Company Culture
If you’ve been looking for a way to enhance your company culture, you’ve found it. As an Inc. writer has reported, employee wellness programs have been shown to improve company culture, especially if those wellness programs incorporate a team-building aspect. The article pointed toward activities such as group yoga classes or an office boot camp-type outing. It also mentioned that setting group wellness or health goals could likewise increase cooperation and teamwork.
Reduced Turnover
If employees are actively looking for the best health-related benefits from employers, you’re not going to have much of a leg to stand on when your current employees begin to consider their other employment options if your benefits aren’t up to par. Turnover is costly, so reduce yours by providing your employees with the benefits they want and need.
Reduced Burnout
Even if you don’t think that your benefits (or lack thereof) are going to lead to employee resignations, providing more, and more robust, benefits can at least help you to reduce burnout, which as Inc. reported, is currently impacting more than half of all workers. Promoting wellness — including a healthy work-life balance — can reduce burnout among teams and prevent the lowered productivity that comes with it.
Increased Job Satisfaction
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care found that job satisfaction can more than double when well-being increases. Less than half of employees who ranked their well-being as “poor” also reported being satisfied with their jobs, while nearly 90% of employees who ranked their well-being as “excellent” said they were satisfied with their current employer.
The Bottom Line
Employees want better health-related benefits and giving those benefits to your employees will, in turn, help your organization prioritize energy management and wellness, build a better workplace culture, and boost your bottom line.
Not sure where to start? Arootah offers a range of corporate wellness resources to help you build a company culture centered around improved wellness. Our holistic programs focus on a variety of elements that impact employee performance, from sleep to nutrition, stress management to disease prevention. Book a call today to learn more about these programming options, our wellness retreats, coaching, and more.