The WellRight Blog

If you talk to most enterprise-level executives about lessons learned in 2020, don’t be surprised if employee wellness is mentioned—often.

According to the HR.com 2021 State of Employee Health and Well-being study, 63% of organizational leaders agree that mental health is among their Human Resources department’s top five priorities moving forward. And 75% of HR professionals reported in the same study that employee wellness has become more of a priority.

To put it bluntly, if your organization isn’t prioritizing employee wellness, you might soon find yourselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Regardless of your industry, COVID has clearly taken a toll on employee well-being. In a recent study, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that more than 1 in 3 U.S. adults struggle with pandemic-related anxiety and depression. A WebMD study also reported that the pandemic has had a negative impact on 77% of the employee respondents’ well-being.

How else has the stress and strain of the pandemic affected your staff and their health care needs? And more importantly, what can your organization do to help?

Information overload isn’t a new concept, but the stakes have gotten higher over the last year.

In early 2020, the pandemic forced entire companies to go remote or downsize in a matter of weeks. Employees took the brunt of the stress, having to suddenly juggle work and home responsibilities at the same time.

Add to that the mother of all information overloads—a constant stream of data about the deadliest global pandemic in over a century during one of the most politically divisive times in U.S. history—and it’s no wonder your employees are overwhelmed.

Hope is on the horizon. The spring of 2021 brings new promise—not only for the renewal of nature, but the possibility of life reaching some level of normalcy again.

This time of rebirth is a great time to get employees amped up for fun new wellness challenges. But with many employees still working at home, wellness challenge ideas for remote workers might be hard to find. You’ll need to be creative and find ways to connect people regardless of where they are.

As companies continue to navigate remote working scenarios, one of their biggest challenges is maintaining employee engagement and well-being from a distance.

For some employees, this has been their first time working from home. Many still haven’t quite gotten the hang of it. They may feel isolated, disconnected, and overwhelmed by the competing priorities of work responsibilities and the demands of home life, especially if at-home schooling is thrown into the mix.

You already know how a workplace wellness program can benefit your company and why more employee engagement creates a happier, healthier workforce. Where you may be struggling, however, is in the execution. It’s tough to make organizational changes when your team is overtasked, inexperienced, or just unable to find more hours in the work week.

We get it. Wellness program management is one of the biggest challenges our clients share with us when we help them create their workplace wellness programs. They often struggle with not enough expertise, not enough bandwidth … or even both.

Let’s get real for a moment: launching, maintaining, and growing a successful wellness program isn’t easy. After all, you’re asking a group of people to do one of the hardest things for anybody to do: change their habits.

Whether you’re doing this by yourself or as part of your HR team, you may feel like you’re trying to move mountains, as you send out emails, put up posters, and do everything you can to create some momentum.

But what if you had a certified expert in your corner helping to ensure your success?

Teamwork makes the dream work.

A common phrase, but what does it really mean? Put simply, an engaged team working towards a common goal can overcome any obstacle. When a team participates in a team-building exercise, they build the tools for real-world scenarios that demand cohesion.

But now that many are still working from home, how can this sense of teamwork translate into a remote world?

It’s early 2021, and everyone is thinking about wellness.

The results of a recent global survey by marketing icon Ogilvy prove it. When Ogilvy polled 7,000 consumers across four continents and 14 countries, 77% of respondents said wellness is “very or extremely important to them.”

So many of us let our health goals fall by the wayside in 2020, and for understandable reasons. The pandemic has disrupted life in so many ways that it has been difficult to focus on making healthy choices. Plus, gyms and fitness classes have been off-limits for most of the past year.

It’s not surprising that America’s top New Year’s resolution for 2021 was “exercise more,” followed by “eat healthier.” (By comparison, 2020’s top resolution was “manage finances better.”) When it comes to wellness in 2021, Americans are itching to make up for lost time.

One way in which they’re doing this is by turning to wellness coaching.