How Much Should We Invest in Employee Wellness?

When a CEO asks me how much they should invest in employee wellness, my honest answer is this: you could spend a ton and not need any of it, or you could spend very little and not put it in the right area. So the place to start isn't the number. It's taking a deep look at what's actually happening inside your company.

Big doesn't mean better. It means it should be thoughtful.

Whether you ever work with me or not, I hope this gives you some ideas for running a better business.

Wellness isn't a nice-to-have anymore

I think we hear the word wellness and think it's really light. Let's go get a massage, or let's have an extra day of holiday. Those things are lovely and important, and they can sit under the wellness umbrella. But it's so much more than that. It's your cognitive overload. It's the relationships you have with people. It's how you see yourself. It's the purpose you feel when you're at work.

Wellness isn't a standalone department. It's a part of your business. It's like a net across your business, or more like a heartbeat within it.

So treat it like any other business problem. If you were trying to get more sales or solve something big, you wouldn't just randomly come up with an idea. You'd look at everything you've already tried, how much time you have in front of you and how much budget. You have to do the same thing with wellness.

What I learned from a program that worked, and then didn't

My company is seven years old. A couple of years in, I had my first really big, successful contract: an 8-week stress management program. It covered mental, emotional and physical stress, relationships, how to move the body and breathe, and starting to learn a little about meditation.

It went so well I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Participation was through the roof. It was the most successful thing I had created online so far.

So I packaged it and put a price on it. It looked very appealing on the outside. The next company that booked it had a few hundred people, and only a couple of people were coming to the sessions.

It happened again with some webinars that had over 100 people attending and so much participation, sometimes a cooking class, other times dealing with conflict at work. We thought other companies would have the same success rate. It didn't work.

What I pieced together is this. Anytime the CEO or the leadership team chose what to run without asking people in the company if they were interested, they didn't always get the answer right. Even CEOs with the very best intentions think, oh yeah, everyone's really stressed. But that's not necessarily what people want to be spending their time doing or learning about.

Nobody wants to be told what to do. And nobody wants something extra on top of their job that has nothing to do with why they're being paid to be there. When you ask people how they're feeling, what they want and whether they'd appreciate something, it gives them a chance to say yes or no. People are often too shy to tell you what the issues really are.

If I had all my time back, I would never work with a company unless they agreed to some way of asking employees what they want. Making a sale isn't what's important. Being able to go back and show that you helped is what's important. I know what it feels like to run a successful program, and I know what it feels like to sell something and not have anybody attend. Your bank account might say thank you, but it's not the kind of business you really want.

Why you need a diagnostic before you invest in employee wellness

Don't just load something on top of what's already going on in your business. Do a diagnostic and understand what's happening underneath.

You don't have to do it a certain way, but a few things matter. You need to uncover what's really happening in the business. You need to give people an opportunity to share in an honest way. Even senior people don't always want to say what's really on their mind to the CEO, because it could jeopardize their position. And whoever is doing the diagnostic needs to work in the best interest of the company. You're not looking to spend money unnecessarily. If something is already working, there's no need to replace it just so you're the one doing it.

A good diagnostic should help you answer questions like:

• What have we already tried, and what worked?

• Are the issues around emotional exhaustion? Unhealthy bodies? Communication? Motivation?

• Is this just for leaders, or for the broader team?

• Will it overlap with anything we're already paying for?

From there, you want a proposal for the future: what the program looks like, how often it runs, the topics it covers and the delivery style that works for your company, whether that's remote or in person. It should be built knowing ahead of time what you're able to spend, so it's not something you can't afford, but something that's actually going to work. Then you bring it to your employees, in big ways or small ways, so they have a say before it rolls out.

At WELLOGA, I have my own way of doing this. After several iterations, I've got it down to something I feel comfortable with, and I know that it works.

Every company is unique. Not only because of what you do and what your goals are, but because of the people inside it: their ages, their lifestyles, their marital status, where they live, and what the company is already running. Just because something is hot and trendy in the world doesn't mean your company needs it. It doesn't mean you need an app. What do your people actually need and want to learn?

Build the program around the soft skills you need

The backbone of my work at WELLOGA is a well-being matrix. If you can figure out what soft skills a company needs to develop, you can build a wellness program around it. Then it's no longer something you check off to say, oh, our company has a wellness program. It's education and experiences that help people with their job and with life, and help the business move forward. That makes it a lot easier for owners and CEOs to put money towards it.

The matrix has 10 soft skill groups. Five are about how we manage ourselves: work ethic, creativity, time management, attention to detail and adaptability. Five are about how we manage ourselves with other people: communication, interpersonal skills, problem solving, teamwork and leadership. These connect to wellness blocks for the body (breathing, movement, nutrition), mental health (awareness, words and thoughts, habits and change), emotional health (feelings and emotions), spiritual health (life purpose), connection (relationships) and environment (lifestyle).

When I talk to leaders, their answers aren't identical, but you can usually find the top two, maybe three soft skills people have a challenge with.

Say the team needs to develop communication. We might teach people how to build relationships and how to speak to different people, because communicating with your boss is different from communicating with a client. We might help them develop confidence for selling, presenting or speaking. We might look at their words and thoughts: what language they're using and how they're getting people on side. You can know all the information in the world about a product and not use the right language, and not even know it. And then there are obvious things like learning how to breathe and take time before using a new skill.

People are more engaged because they understand they're not doing it just to appease somebody. It's something that's going to help them with their job.

Give people variety, time and a say

When I first opened the company, I was the only person who delivered the education. We quickly ran out of things to teach. People started asking for more, and because I wasn't an expert in those areas, I had to go out and find other people. It also became very obvious that people like to see different faces and have different experiences. You want to be able to see yourself in the facilitator, and different people connect with different people: someone more senior or someone younger, men or women.

That's why programs need to be varied. You'll never run one thing that satisfies everyone. People learn in different ways, need different things, and are at different stages of their wellness experience and their careers.

A few other things I've learned:

• Bigger problems need longer programs. It's not one session and move on. Each session builds on the last so you're all headed in one direction, and every month and every year can build on the next.

• One-on-one training is a really good way to learn, but a lot of companies can't afford it. There are lots of ways to do education that's one-to-many.

• Give up company time instead of asking more of people. People feel like you care about them.

• Keep it live. We don't do recordings. When we offered them, so many people opted out of the live session thinking they'd watch it later, with the best intentions, and just didn't. Think about the last course you took. Did you finish the whole thing?

• Get employees involved in choosing. We run an office retreat where people get mini experiences of what live education is really like, so they help decide what's rolled out.

  
  

So how much should you spend?

In a lot of cases, a diagnostic plus a full year of corporate wellness program pricing can cost about the same as losing one employee. And that program ends up helping hundreds of people.

If you take a pause and decide what you want to invest in, overall it's going to save you money. It also helps you understand that solving this problem is going to take time. And it gets everybody involved: oh, this is coming, they're asking our opinion.

Your return on investment can be tremendous if you take the time to look at where the holes are and what the programming should be. If you want to test what you're already running, here are six questions to ask when corporate well-being initiatives fail.

If this sounds like your company, take a look at my corporate well-being strategies, or I'm happy to talk.