There’s no one way to be well. And every employee’s path to well-being will be different. That’s why the most effective workplace well-being programs are personal. This week’s blog shares best practices for creating meaningful and relevant experiences to ensure participants are getting the most from your corporate well-being program.
Why are personalized workplace health and wellness programs important?
Participants are more likely to interact with and gain benefits from a workplace well-being program when they see that it has their best interests in mind. Providing a personalized experience allows you to create and reinforce loyalty in your well-being program—making individuals feel like it’s all about them—because it is. Finally, personalization allows you to build relationships with your population through one-to-one interactions that provide unique value to each participant—with just the right tool, intervention, or the program as a whole.
What does personalization in an employee well-being program look like?
Workplace well-being programs become personal when they shift from one-size-fits-all offerings to experiences, resources, and human-centered support that reflect individual needs, preferences, life circumstances, organizational culture, benefits, business structure and more.
How to create a personalized well-being experience for all employees.
Consider your culture.
Personalization starts with creating a well-being program that is aligned with the organization’s values and culture. When a well-being program feels authentic and true to what the company stands for, people are more likely to engage with it. For example, if you have a connection culture, you’ll want to include group coaching and community events. An organization with a performance culture might make stress management, resilience training and meditation classes available.
Address whole person well-being.
To be truly personal, a workplace well-being program must focus on the whole person—encompassing their physical health, mental health, financial wellness, social connections and workplace well-being. The program must also recognize that the dimensions of well-being are interdependent—and offer ways to connect the dots. For example, a health coach doesn’t support someone’s health in silos. They look at the whole person. Through careful questioning they may discover that chronic stress and caregiving demands are behind recent weight gain, not necessarily poor nutrition.
Meet people where they are.
A well-being program needs to understand where people are on their well-being journey and provide the right support at the right time. Individuals who are just starting out might need beginner-friendly support, like health coaching, to jump start better well-being. People who are already healthy benefit from preventive care nudges and wellness challenges keep them on track. And those managing a chronic condition need targeted programs and tools to prevent their illness from worsening. As people progress on their health journey, these personalized insights need to be adjusted so the well-being program progresses with them, providing new and different resources and information.
Support well-being needs across life stages and generations.
It’s important to think about how employees of varying ages, life stages and generations get the well-being support they need. For example, early career employees may need financial wellness support for paying off student loans. Parents may benefit from caregiving support. Older generations need support for healthy aging and menopause, as well as retirement preparation.
Offer human-centered support.
Improving well-being is easier when people don’t have to do it alone. And, as we know, most people need reminders and nudges to keep them on track. Having a well-being program that integrates digital with human-centered support—health coaches, dedicated well-being staff, program managers and well-being champions—gives your people boots on the ground support, helping them navigate their personal well-being journey and celebrate each step forward.
Choose a corporate well-being platform that supports your desired level of personalization.
Once you understand what truly makes a workplace well-being program personal, you’ll need a well-being platform that can support it. Workplace well-being platforms vary in terms of their ability to personalize interactions with participants. We typically see three levels of personalization:
The basic level: Showing that you know the user and leveraging basic profile and biometric data. An example might be addressing an individual by name in an email or sending an article about nutrition to someone with high cholesterol levels.
The next level: Making recommendations using expanded profile data. For example, allowing each participant to choose the topics they’re interested in—eating better, reducing stress, getting more exercise—and then serving up programs, tools and content related to those topics.
The highest level: Refining interactions within a given context, intelligently blending demographic data, user behavior and device or other imported data. In other words, taking personalization to the next level to create a relevant well-being experience—one that gives people what they want as well as information they didn’t know they needed, but are glad to receive. This might look like encouraging an employee who has enrolled in a healthy pregnancy program to check out the Employee Assistance Program for help locating childcare, or directing them to the financial wellness program to get information on budgeting for childcare needs.
As we’ve outlined, there are many types of personalization, and some are more sophisticated than others. Your goal should be to deliver as personalized an experience as possible given your organization’s current resources and program. Whether you’re just starting up your corporate well-being program or looking to improve your results through greater personalization, we can help. Contact us at connect@webmd.net or request a demo today.
