A wellness program is a program that helps employees stay healthy or – in some cases – helps them improve their health. An employee wellness program or wellness plan is a form of voluntary health benefit that many employers provide – in one form or another – in addition to health insurance. It can be an ongoing activity or one-time events or activities.
Wellness program ideas can range from ideas that have a specific purpose, such as helping the employee to stop smoking or to lose weight; to onsite gyms or gym memberships; to incentive programs that provide rewards for participation or in achieving the desired results.
Here are some ways to get creative with your virtual wellness program ideas:
- Promote healthy activities. Healthy activities are different for different people. Not everyone wants to do yoga in their living room or participate in a daily plank challenge. For this reason, you need to come up with creative and practical employee wellness ideas for remote workplaces.
It can be developed in-house by making employee circles and taking tips from them only
Some tips to promote health and wellness
- Make an Online Library of exercise videos or sites – Ask employees to submit their favorite go-to resources like wellness and fitness sites and nutritional content. Ask them to post weekly strength training and cardio workouts this makes it easy for employees to implement the content from the channels they use the most.
- Build an online cookbook of healthy recipes – Guide your employees on healthy breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Ask for submissions and/or photos from employees of healthy meals.
- Make it easily accessible: As you see health and wellness articles you love, save them to a file for later use for newsletters or weekly health tips you email your team.
- Offer subscriptions – Consider making it even easier for them to maintain their health and fitness at home. Subscribe your team to online programs. This is perfect for both remote employees and those employees who travel a lot for work to easily stream workouts.
- Offer a fitness stipend – If there isn’t a gym nearby that is a part of your program, consider offering a stipend to pay for a local gym or online membership of your employee’s choice.
- Offer employees an annual well-being bonus to put towards anything to do with promoting their health. It is a great way to address a multitude of needs. People could choose to use this allotment for gym memberships, meditation apps and even learning a foreign language.
- Set up virtual health connection circles or even other special-purpose circles.
Remember that not everyone working remotely has a lot of social interaction. Consider setting up small virtual groups of between six and eight people that employees can join for regular interaction and a safe space to process changes in your company, their lives, and the current global reality. You can even hire a professional facilitator with experience in mindfulness and personal development to run the sessions.
You can make “Employees wellness circle”,” Running club”, “Dance lovers”, “Yoga and Mind fullness” and connect your employees with a specific purpose, you can even make them responsible for developing the wellness program themselves under some professional’s guidance.
- Talk about Mental health.
Encourage openness about mental illness. When a person in leadership speaks about personal experience with a mental health issue, it makes everyone more comfortable talking about it – and more aware of the issues. Even if team members choose to keep anxiety and depression to themselves, it can still help to know they are not alone.
Provide your people with links to stress-relief techniques like online meditation and yoga sessions. Whether you hire someone to conduct live sessions for your workforce or simply spring for logins to popular apps, you’re helping set your people up for a healthy mind and body, which will make them that much more effective at navigating stress and uncertainty.
- Create Your Fitness Challenges and Classes
Streaming workouts and fitness classes are easy to do as long as your team members have a strong Wi-Fi connection. Challenges do work, they create buzz, connect, motivate and ultimately help in habit formation. The best challenges are the ones that depend on self-reporting because they’re easy to do and require little effort on the employer’s behalf.
Start your fitness challenge like Weight loss challenge, Abs challenge, Mindfulness challenge, Healthy eating challenge, Squat challenge, Water challenge, Flexibility challenge and make it easy. Ask your team what would inspire them to participate. If they have ideas for videos, challenges, or classes, ask them to send them to you so you can compile a catalog.
- Host Good-for-the-Soul Meetings and Virtual Lunch Meetings
When employees are working outside the office, they still want to feel like part of the team. Emotional connections can keep employees engaged, a must for employee satisfaction on all fronts, but especially for remote workers. Consider hosting feel-good meetings like:
- Create a coffee shop vibe where 15 minutes are kept other than work discussion,
- Consider virtual “happy hour” or “campfire” meetings, Book club gatherings, or Game night
- Allow employees to show off their playful sides – A version of the show and tell. Anything that can help workers feel more connected.
Get Creative With Your Virtual Wellness Program Ideas. You can create plenty of virtual team-building activities through your virtual wellness program ideas. The more fun your wellness programs are, the more engaged your employees will be. Plus, remote employees who feel a part of the team will be more likely to stay engaged, informed, and be better team players.
