Why Employee Well-being Programs Are Essential for Workplace Success

Well-being programs are increasingly being integrated into companies' benefits offerings, providing employees with incentives, resources, social support, privacy, and strategies to encourage and sustain healthy behaviors.

FREMONT, CA: Employee wellness has become a crucial focus for organizations, as it plays a key role in improving productivity, preventing burnout, fostering a positive workplace culture, and delivering significant benefits to the business. The pandemic, in particular, highlighted the increased importance of prioritizing employee well-being and implementing diverse wellness and healthcare initiatives.

Businesses have initiated new approaches and facilities to ensure that workers are safe and healthy, physically and mentally. All these efforts and well-being programmes are introduced because they are the most significant basis for deriving greater business success.

Improves Employee Health Behaviour

A better well-being programme, including the right education, skills, motivation, skills, tools, and social support, results in behavioural change in employees. These initiatives help them to adopt and maintain healthy behaviours, which is a huge advantage for organisations.

Healthy behaviours lead to fewer health risks, which leads to fewer chronic diseases. Ensuring that workers are participating in a good well-being programme helps them to adopt and maintain healthy behaviours for the future as well. Maintaining food and drinks, adhering to traffic rules, and smoking less enable employees to control their stress. Well-being initiatives, therefore, alleviate the symptoms of depression and also improve life satisfaction.

Reduce Health Care Costs

Studies on the financial impact of well-being programs have shown that employee behaviours will have an effect on mitigating healthcare costs. The ability of a well-being initiative to reduce healthcare costs depends on the effectiveness of its implementation. A comprehensive worksite well-being programme will discover that the savings from programme participation will be greater than the actual cost of the program. Moreover, there will be a positive impact on return on investment.

Improve Productivity

The cost associated with presenteeism due to poor employee health is higher than health care expenses. Although presenteeism is expected to be more expensive than health care, companies are more focused on reducing the direct costs of employee illness than they are on presenteeism.

Lack of knowledge to use equipment, distraction by other employees, being unaware of the functions, tiredness, over usage of social media during working hours are some of the reasons for workers' showing low productivity. On the other hand, poor health is the main cause of presenteeism.

Recent research on presenteeism has highlighted that employees with unhealthy diets are more likely to have high presenteeism than those who maintain healthy food habits. This also demonstrates that poor health behaviours are strongly linked with high levels of presenteeism. Thus, unhealthy individual lifestyle choices result in higher levels of lost productivity and work time.