August is National Wellness Month—and while employee wellness should be celebrated all year long, there’s no better time to make it a top strategic priority in your organization.
With summer winding down and parents gearing up for the back-to-school season, National Wellness Month serves as a golden opportunity for employers to be intentional with their wellness initiatives. Providing employees with fun, empowering, and motivational activities all month long gives them the boost they need to approach the latter half of the year with confidence.
And as an added bonus, it’s a seamless way to showcase the impact a holistic wellness program has on eliciting long-term lifestyle change.
The Business Case for National Wellness Month
It’s easy for lines between personal and professional lives to blur in today’s fast-paced and demanding work environments, explaining why burnout, stress, and reduced productivity continue to plague organizations across industries.
To put that into perspective, Gallup estimates that employee burnout costs organizations an estimated $322 billion in lost productivity and turnover. And while this work-life imbalance is clearly bad for business and employee wellbeing, it often stems from one simple problem—employees not knowing where or how to seek help for their health struggles.
It’s easy to build a library of benefits that are carefully crafted to help with specific employee health issues, but when those benefits are hard to find—or worse, tied to only one digital medium, like a desktop—employees lose interest. On the other hand, when benefits are streamlined, customized for various employee populations, and available 24/7 through multiple access points, employers see tremendous improvements in a number of areas:
- Improved health outcomes: When employees know how to seamlessly take advantage of their health benefits within their company’s wellness platform, their own personal wellbeing no longer takes a back seat. Making it easy to access health insurance information or mental health support are shown to boost health outcomes, platform participation, and engagement.
- Enhanced company culture: Employees who come to work happy and healthy are also more collaborative and productive. Not to mention, employees who are empowered to take control of their own wellbeing are also more loyal to their organizations, improving retention and slicing turnover in half.
- More enticing recruitment: Employers who stand behind their health and wellness initiatives are more attractive to candidates than those who don’t. Over half of job candidates—most notably younger candidates—consider holistic wellness programs an extremely important factor when making a job decision, and are more likely to stay at their jobs for at least two years.
4 Ways to Champion Employee Wellbeing During National Wellness Month
August is the perfect time for a renewed focus on wellness. And with a holistic wellness program at your employees’ disposal, the excitement around wellbeing can extend beyond August 31st and last all year round.
So what are the key elements of wellbeing to focus on this month? Here are some areas to get you started:
1. Gear Up for Fall Preventive Care
Coincidentally, August is also National Immunization Awareness Month. With the cold weather months bringing unwanted diseases, now is the perfect time to spread awareness and encourage employees and their families to get vaccinated. A popular way to do this is by incentivizing employees for completing preventive care tasks like flu shots, eye exams, or annual physicals, but organizations can take it one step further by allowing employees to select rewards that are meaningful to them.
2. Host an Office Olympics
The excitement around the 2024 Paris Olympics may be winding down, but the momentum doesn’t have to stop once athletes return home. Organizing an Office Olympics is a topical and engaging way to bring teams together in the friendly spirit of competition. Simple activities like relay races, mini golf, or scavenger hunts are fun ways to get employees moving and connecting with one another—even if it’s all through a computer screen.
3. Go All In on Education, Learning, and Development
Having the ability to learn new skills while on the clock is quickly becoming an in-demand perk for employees. Providing more efficient ways to upskill and engage has been crucial for improving productivity and performance, and housing all educational courses and materials in one centralized platform that is accessible across devices is a game-changer. To spur on utilization of resources, employers can shout out employees who complete a course or earn a new certification.
4. Help Employees Practice Smart Saving with Easily Trackable Activities
With back-to-school spending and holiday budgeting on the horizon, now is the perfect time to ease employees’ financial stress little by little. While school supply prices may be out of an employer’s realm of control, designing daily activities that teach money management and saving can help employees take ownership of their finances. For example, WellRight’s HoldOn challenge prompts employees to wait three days before making an impulse purchase, all the while tracking progress and earning points for every penny saved.
Let National Wellness Month Guide Your Strategy All Year Long
Themed times of year like National Wellness Month are great opportunities to reassess the effectiveness of any workplace wellness strategy. Seizing the moment to create impactful, personalized programming is all it takes to set employees up for success long after National Wellness Month is over.
And with leadership participating in and advocating for meaningful wellness initiatives, inspiration cascades from the top-down across the entire organization. To learn more about how leaders and managers can set themselves up to effectively support employees, get a copy of our Mental Health Toolkit: How to Lead with Empathy.
