Admittedly, big data is probably not what comes to mind when you think about corporate wellness. You’re used to discounting gym memberships, yoga classes, and company softball teams. The truth is, the global corporate wellness market is expected to be worth nearly $62 billion by 2023, and employers are increasingly relying on sophisticated wellness analytics to save money, save time, and promote a healthy work environment.
To stay competitive in the modern workplace, a data-savvy wellness program must include four key components: risk assessments, mental health services, effective metrics to measure impact, and personalized wellness and rewards.
Risk Assessments
The old saying goes that an ounce of prevention is cheaper than a pound of cure, and perhaps nowhere is that as true as healthcare. Simply put, people with underlying health conditions that are left untreated pay more for healthcare, as do employers who provide them health insurance. For instance, issues like high cholesterol and high blood pressure are inexpensive to treat when caught early, but not when they lead to heart disease and other serious conditions down the road. What if your corporate wellness program could identify similar risk factors organization-wide, allowing you to institute large-scale interventions ahead of time?
With Woliba, every user completes a risk assessment upon enrolling. This allows admins to gather anonymous data on employee health to understand organization-wide areas of concern, from smoking to sedentary lifestyles. Our clients have seen over 80 percent of employees enrolling in our wellness platform, leading to health claims dropping by up to 400 percent for engaged users. Our analytics have helped users achieve goals including weight loss, stress reduction, improved cardiovascular health, and diabetes management—with countless success stories the result of savvy admins harnessing the power of analytics to identify problem areas and create company-wide health interventions.
Mental Health Awareness
The modern workplace caters to the needs of its employees, and never has this been more true than during the Covid-19 pandemic. With proper analysis, HR departments can paint a clear picture of what’s happening under the hood of their organization. Employees who aren’t well physically or mentally won’t be working at their full potential. Severe stress and anxiety can lead to absenteeism and lost productivity, which, if left unchecked, results in substantial costs to business in the long term. Put simply, successful organizations value healthy and happy employees.
Analytics from corporate wellness programs like Woliba can provide decision-makers a bird’s eye view of what is happening in countless areas of employee performance, especially when it comes to mental wellbeing. The initial Woliba risk assessment paints a broad picture of how well employees are coping with stress and anxiety, but admins can also seamlessly create instant polls and questionnaires that collect critical employee health data on a granular level. By identifying key areas and policies negatively impacting psychological wellbeing, you can head off serious problems and improve the employee experience.
Measure Program Impact
Before the widespread use of analytics, it was hard to gauge the ROI of a corporate wellness program. Until recently, wellness programs were seen as a nice perk, never a strategic imperative. Today, such programs are seen as essential to chipping away at ever-rising healthcare costs. One study profiled in the Harvard Business Review, for example, found that every dollar invested in wellness interventions yielded $6 in healthcare savings.
Key to these staggering figures is the ability to measure a program’s impact. In the old days, corporate wellness amounted to a gym membership, a few lunchtime yoga classes, or maybe a salad bar. With today’s analytics, you can deploy same-population comparisons, in which you monitor a cohort of employees who have participated over time to gauge which health initiatives work and which do not.
The truth is that some corporate health programs take a while to yield results. Fortunately, there are numerous metrics you can use to gauge success. From instant polls that empower employees to be actively involved in the decision-making process to satisfaction surveys that identify problems before they grow into serious problems, HR professionals can keep their finger on the pulse of their organization, ensuring employee needs are addressed swiftly and organically.
Personalized Wellness and Rewards
Your organization is incredibly diverse, and the last thing it needs is a one-size-fits-all wellness program that appeals to the lowest common denominator. If employees believe their wellness program is tailored to their unique needs, they are far more likely to take advantage of it.
At Woliba, for instance, each enrolled employee takes an initial wellness assessment so the software can build an individualized approach for his or her goals, whether it’s a marathon, a Spartan Race, or simply to lose weight. The wellness library is stocked with informative articles and videos for every fitness level. Gamification features allow employees to set personalized goals, while company-wide challenges encourage friendly competition. As employees use the software, they earn points and unlock rewards, which promotes morale by acknowledging individual accomplishments.
All of this can be performed automatically with robust AI software, which frees employers from the tedium of wellness management and solving the issue of decreased employee engagement. Woliba’s advanced social-networking software encourages individuals or teams of employees to compete among themselves, as well as entire organizations to compete with other companies on a global scale, fostering a sense of inclusion all while freeing company resources.
Is your wellness program merely a perk? Or is it harnessing big data to save your company time and money while actively improving the employee experience? Your workers are your most valuable asset, and investing in a robust wellness program means investing in the people who define your organization at every level.
Employee wellness placard -DepositPhotos
