What is an employee wellbeing strategy?

An employee wellbeing strategy is a comprehensive action plan aimed at ensuring the health and happiness of your workforce. This strategy goes beyond traditional benefits that many companies offer, like pension schemes, extra leave or private healthcare. Depending on your focus areas, the strategy could include initiatives like fitness or wellness activities, mental-health or stress-management support and social and networking opportunities.

The four pillars of employee wellbeing

Employee wellbeing is a comprehensive concept comprising several aspects of a person’s work-life. These can be broadly broken down into four pillars: physical, mental, financial and social. Let’s take a close look at these and explore what changes you could make.

1. Physical

This pillar of wellbeing relates to your staff’s physical health. This can include the impact work has on an employee’s ability to avoid or recover from illness, manage chronic conditions or disabilities, maintain a good level of fitness, get sufficient sleep and follow a healthy, nutritional diet. Here are some ideas for improving this wellbeing metric:

• Check that workstations are ergonomically designed and don’t place undue stress on the body. You could also consider installing standing desks and offering remote or hybrid employees an allowance for purchasing high-quality home office equipment.
• Ensure adequate airflow and natural light in office spaces and offer outdoor breakout spaces where possible.
• Offer in-office fitness classes or subsidise memberships to local gyms or studios. You can also encourage employees to fit exercise into their working day by providing amenities like showers and bike racks.
• Organise optional health screenings for employees. This can include tests like blood pressure and cholesterol levels and eye exams.
• Create a culture that prioritises everyday movement. This could mean holding walking meetings, starting a corporate sports team or launching fun fitness or wellness challenges that encourage healthy competition and camaraderie.
• Provide easy access to filtered water and free healthy snacks. You can also consider offering talks or workshops on topics like nutrition and healthy cooking.

2. Mental

Your employees’ mental wellbeing is just as important as their physical health. This can include fostering a supportive, positive and inclusive working environment, offering support for employees experiencing mental-health challenges and looking at ways to reduce and manage work stress. Here are some actions to consider:

• If your company is large, consider offering in-office counselling or mental-health services. For smaller companies, you could subsidise external counselling or therapy for employees who are struggling.
• If you aren’t already doing so, consider incorporating flexible working policies. For employees who don’t need to be physically on-site, offering remote or hybrid working can be a great way of improving work-life balance, especially for those who have care duties, physical challenges or long commutes. Including mental-health leave as a form of sick leave is also very important.
• Offer activities that can boost mental wellbeing, like yoga or meditation sessions or seminars on mindfulness and stress management. You could also host workshops that raise awareness about mental health conditions and empower employees to support colleagues.
• Schedule regular check-ins and monitor employee workloads. Regular one-on-ones between management and team members can help tackle any issues when they arise and prevent struggling employees from falling through the cracks. It’s also important to make sure no employee is overburdened with responsibilities and that duties are fairly assigned and delegated.
• Show appreciation for employees and recognise achievements. Publicly commending your team members for their contributions can help foster positivity and boost morale.

Related: A guide to job satisfaction

3. Financial

Financial compensation plays a key role in retaining employees and attracting new talent. Outside of offering competitive compensation packages, there are other ways you could go above and beyond to improve your employees’ financial wellbeing. Let’s take a look.

• Review your compensation packages. You can consider adding benefits like student-loan repayment assistance, stock options, bonuses or performance-based incentives.
• Offer workshops on financial education and literacy. These can include information about savings, retirement planning, debt management and how to make savvy investments.
• Consider going beyond your legal obligations when offering packages like parental leaves or long-term illness cover. You could also offer incentives for long-serving employees like a paid sabbatical or sponsoring their further education in your industry.
• Help your employees review and optimise their insurance options, including health, life and disability coverage, to ensure they have adequate protection. You could also consider covering these as benefits or partnering with relevant institutions to offer discounts for your staff.

Read more: A guide to setting a financial wellbeing policy

4. Social

Humans are social creatures, and the need for connection usually remains prevalent in the workplace. Succeeding in fomenting a positive company culture can depend on how your employees relate to one another and the opportunities they have to collaborate with colleagues at all levels. Let’s look at how you can achieve this.

• Social events and team-building activities. These can take place inside or outside of the office, or even virtually to include employees who work remotely. Such events can encourage employees to communicate in a relaxed setting and build rapport among diverse teams.
• Flexible seating plans. Allowing employees to ‘hot-desk’ can enable them to get to know different team members instead of sitting next to the same person every day.
• Ensure your company implements and maintains robust diversity and inclusion policies that help all employees feel welcome and accepted.
• Consider encouraging formal or informal mentorship programmes between junior and senior employees.
• Adopt a culture of open communication and provide digital spaces, like dedicated employee social media channels or chat platforms. This enables employees to connect with others from different departments or who work remotely.

Benefits of a well-crafted employee wellbeing strategy

A successful employee wellbeing strategy can bring many advantages to your company. Here are a few:

• Fulfils ethical obligations. As an employer, you have an ethical duty to look out for your staff’s wellbeing at work and protect them from harmful experiences. A well-crafted employee wellbeing strategy can foster a positive, balanced working environment and an inclusive company culture.
• Boosts productivity. When employees feel content and aren’t burdened with problems or unnecessary stress in the workplace, they are likely to be a lot more productive and motivated.
• Increases company loyalty and employee retention. Employees who feel valued and supported can be more likely to stay in their roles for longer and seek any promotions within the same company.
• Helps attract new talent. A positive company culture can be a big draw card for sought-after talent. When your company has gained a good reputation for employee wellbeing, you could see your candidate pool increase during recruitment periods.
• Provides support for remote and hybrid workers. Because the societal shift towards remote or hybrid working is only a few years old, looking at how you can support these employees can put you ahead of the curve.
• Encourages innovation. Open communication, encouragement and showing appreciation for employee achievements can inspire your workforce to be more creative and take greater risks.

Six steps to creating and implementing your strategy

Once you know what a comprehensive employee wellbeing strategy looks like, there are a few steps you can follow to implement your own.

1. Consider your objectives and goals

This phase involves reviewing your business objectives and determining what kind of work culture you want to create or maintain. Once you’ve laid out your objectives, you can develop individual goals to form the foundation of your strategy.

2. Identify areas of focus

Alongside goal-setting, it’s important to identify which areas you want to focus your employee wellbeing strategy on. Although all the pillars we’ve examined are important, your company may already be strong in certain areas and weaker in others. Specific pillars may also be more relevant to your business objectives at this point in time.

3. Reach out to employees at all levels for insights

It’s a good idea to involve your employees in planning your employee wellbeing strategy. Not only can they potentially offer useful insights or flag overlooked issues, but reaching out to them can help them feel valued and included. You could do this in the form of surveys or even focus groups.

4. Decide what changes to integrate and involve leaders

Once you’ve planned your strategy, you can decide what changes to make and actions to initiate. Bringing management, team leaders and stakeholders on board with your plans can help ensure any transitions go smoothly and that new ideas are met with enthusiasm.

5. Work to bring all employees on board

While leaders at your company can set an example by being receptive to changes and new initiatives, it’s also important to look at other ways of bringing your staff on board. You can examine how new offerings are being promoted to employees or find ways to incentivise employees to join in. For example, you could offer an extra half hour to the lunch break if employees want to participate in an office yoga class instead of them having to take those 30 minutes from their own free time.

6. Monitor progress and seek feedback

It’s important to monitor how your new employee wellness strategy is being received and make any adjustments where necessary. You can do this by collecting data on participation levels and seeking feedback from employees, either in person or with anonymous surveys.

A considered employee wellbeing strategy makes your staff’s needs a priority while still benefiting your business in numerous ways. Implemented carefully, and with open communication, it can lead to a workplace where all employees feel valued, motivated, supported and ready to steer your company to success.