Employers that utilize wellness programs provide their employees with the opportunity to focus their attention on their health and overall well-being. In doing so, you are able to turn opportunity into action.

There is an inherent mix of employee engagement, as some of your employees may already exercise regularly and partake in healthy lifestyle habits. However, your wellness program must tend to the needs of both active employees and disengaged employees.

There are a variety of strategies you can employ to optimize employee engagement in your wellness program, including the following tactics.

Key time periods

In order to develop good habits, you must be committed and dedicated. Therefore, when trying to optimize employee retention rates of your wellness program, you must set key time periods. Typically, if an individual can adopt a good habit for six weeks, they will incorporate this new habit into their daily routine. Try setting a team challenge to encourage others to want to stick through the most challenging weeks.

Goal setting

In order to increase participation rates and encourage your employees to make the commitment, you must set goals. This can mean having the entire group participate in a charity walking event or even setting individual achievable goals.

Buddy systems and team goals

There is a social aspect of health improvement that yields successful results. Often, you can set buddy systems that will yield increased participation rates since employees will be doing it together, as opposed to by themselves. You may want to develop your wellness program around teams and partners for optimal results.

Team campaigns

Team campaigns must be voluntary, but if you can convince some teams to promote the movement, others will be encouraged to join in on the active lifestyle. However, it is important that you make this voluntary to ensure that others are not discouraged from working their way up at their own pace.

Incentives

Everyone loves something to entice them to do something they would not normally do. Since many of your employees will be stepping out of their comfort zone, you may want to offer cash or health insurance incentives to increase participation rates. Employee engagement can be maximized with this tactic.