Ali Fitzsimons
Employee wellbeing initiatives are essential if you’re looking to create a cohesive, well-functioning and happy team in your organisation. Here we outline exactly what employee wellbeing initiatives are and why they’re so important. We’ll even give you 18 ideas of the best initiatives you can implement this year.
What are employee wellbeing initiatives?
Employee wellbeing initiatives are actions organisations take to improve and maintain the wellbeing of their staff.
They can include a large range of initiatives designed to help employees in different aspects of their lives, including their health (both physical and mental), financial stability and social lives.
Why are employee wellbeing initiatives important?
Employee wellbeing initiatives can bring a wealth of benefits to your organisation and the people who work there. These include:
Increased retention
Holding onto good staff is important for any organisation. But if a member of your team is worth holding on to, there’s a good chance that recruiters and competitors have noticed their abilities as well. It won’t be long until they’re being offered new roles and potentially higher salaries elsewhere.
Implementing an employee wellbeing strategy demonstrates that you consider their happiness and comfort an important part of your company strategy, giving you a much better chance of retaining your best talent.
Improved productivity
By looking after the wellbeing of your employees, you’re naturally creating a happier and safer environment for them, and any good business leader knows that happy, content staff are more productive in their work.
By helping to reduce concerns around health, finances or social lives, you’re allowing your team to remain focused on their work.
Enhanced employee engagement
To truly engage with the organisation they work in, employees need to feel valued. Setting up an employee wellbeing initiative does exactly this.
Work will quickly become more than just a place to earn a pay cheque, it will become a place where (depending on the type of initiative you implement) they can improve their social life, learn new skills, or even kick-start their fitness journey. This will quickly lead to an uptick in employee engagement as people will feel a new close-knit relationship with their organisation.
Decreased burnout and stress
No matter how resilient your workforce is, stress and burnout will always be a potential threat to your team. One of the best ways to tackle this is with an employee wellbeing initiatives.
Holding team-building evenings or office parties to celebrate jobs well done can give your team some respite from demanding deadlines. You can even take it one step further and set up a stress-reduction initiative like lunchtime yoga classes to create a zen-like environment in your office.
Now that we’ve gone through their benefits, let’s look at some different employee wellbeing initiative examples you could set up in your organisation.
Physical wellbeing initiatives
Stop-Smoking Programmes
Two-thirds of smokers in the UK want to quit, so what better wellbeing initiative to offer your staff than one that helps them kick the habit?
A initiative to help your people stop smoking or vaping can help them make a healthier choice while reinforcing your commitment to supporting their wellbeing.
Health screenings
Offering health screenings as part of an employee wellbeing initiative can give your employees peace of mind while also demonstrating that you care about their physical health. This is almost guaranteed to build a stronger bond between your team and their workplace.
Healthy office snack options
Everyone appreciates office snacks – they’re the perfect little ‘pick me up’ treat during a long day. But they don’t always have to be cake or biscuits.
A simple but effective employee wellbeing initiative is to promote better snacking in your office by providing healthy alternatives such as fruit or low-sugar snacks. This shows you care about promoting healthy habits and can be more inclusive for colleagues who are trying to stick to a healthy diet.
Workplace fitness challenges
These kinds of challenges can help your staff get in shape while offering a great team-building opportunity. You could set a goal of collective steps taken in a month? Or hold a friendly competition of who can clock the most miles on their bike in a quarter?
Just remember to keep things as inclusive as possible. Challenging your staff to each run a marathon might leave some feeling out of their depth!
Nutrition and fitness resources
Healthy snacks and fitness challenges are great, but you’ll also do well to equip your staff with the knowledge to improve their own fitness.
By offering the ability to learn about nutrition and fitness you are giving your employees the agency to formulate their own fitness journey – something they are sure to appreciate and recognise as a positive employee benefit.
Mental wellbeing initiatives
Employee Assistance Programmes
An employee assistance programme (or an EAP) is a benefit programme that offers employees the chance to find support for any challenges they are facing, whether personal or professional, in a confidential manner. They can also include the offer of counselling sessions to help the employee through the issue, if needed.
This is a fantastic mental wellbeing initiative as it ensures employees know their workplace will support them with any issue they have, even if it isn’t work-related. It’s important to offer this kind of care as it can help employees remain the best versions of themselves, while feeling supported by their workplace.
Mental health days
These are becoming more common as businesses recognise the importance of maintaining good mental health in the workplace.
By offering mental health days as an employee wellbeing initiative you’re telling your staff that you believe mental health should be a priority, and that you support them in keeping their own mental health in shape.
Promoting work-life balance
Long days and evenings are fine for the occasional big project, but now more than ever workers are looking for a good work-life balance. Rather than offer this begrudgingly, view it instead as an employee wellbeing initiative to promote.
By championing a work-life balance you’re demonstrating that staff mental health and happiness is one of your priorities. In return you’ll get well-rested, focused team members who feel secure working in a place that values their personal time.
Stress Management Workshops
Stress can be hugely detrimental in the workplace, leading to a loss in productivity, increased staff turnover, and even foster a negative working environment.
By offering an employee wellbeing benefit in the form of a stress management workshop, you can tackle the problem head-on, helping your staff manage their stress and become the best versions of themselves. It also shows that you recognise work can be stressful, but that rather than lowering expectations, you’re instead investing in your team and helping them handle professional challenges effectively.
Social Wellbeing Initiatives
Team building activities
You might have devised a rigorous interviewing process and filled your staff with top talent, but if these individuals can’t work well as a team, you’ll struggle to get the best out of them.
Team building activities can solve this issue. Whether it’s a full day of activities to bring employees together, or just some fun exercises you carry out sporadically, team building initiatives will forge bonds between staff and improve productivity as people become more familiar with each other.
Team outings and events
Creating non-work-related bonds between colleagues is an essential part of building a strong and effective team.
Knowing what your colleagues are like outside of the office give you a better understanding of them, making collaboration much smoother.
This is why team outings as employee wellbeing initiatives are so important. The key thing here is to make sure that any outing or event is inclusive. Don’t always choose activities that are centred around alcohol or sport – they’re simple but not everyone will enjoy them. Instead find something that encourages conversation and a friendly atmosphere, and you’ll guarantee that employees will start to form new connections with one another.
Professional development and mentorship programmes
Of course, not every social wellbeing initiative needs to be about forming or improving relationships with colleagues. Social bonds can also be utilised for professional development.
Mentorship programmes are a fantastic way to share skills and knowledge with the more junior members of your team, while giving mentors the satisfaction of knowing they are helping shape careers in their wake.
Recognition & Reward programmes
Seeing recognition of strong work is one of the most important aspects of developing a high-achieving team. This is why more and more organisations are realising the value of employee recognition and rewards programmes.
Tailored platforms such as ours make this process easy to navigate and truly worthwhile for your organisation, empowering people from every level of your organisation to recognise each other and celebrate achievements while delivering meaningful rewards that are sure to boost employee satisfaction.
Financial wellbeing initiatives
Financial assistance programmes
These are a different kind of employee assistance programme to those mentioned above in the mental wellbeing initiatives section, but they operate in a similar manner.
Financial assistance programmes are EAPs set up to help employees deal with financial hardships or queries. This initiative can offer financial advice, information on budgeting, or just general knowledge on financial health and how to avoid falling into unnecessary debt.
The benefits of a financial assistance programme are obvious – financial issues are often large contributors to stress, which in turn can negatively affect the morale and productivity of your staff. Knowing that their workplace provides assistance in this area, without judgement, will be appreciated.
Savings and investment plans
Leading on from the previous point, this is another easy way to demonstrate that you care about your team’s long-term financial health. Offering savings and investment plans to your workforce helps them make smart decisions with their money and develop their long-term financial plans.
Emergency financial assistance
Emergency financial assistance offers employees a short-term, usually interest-free, loan from the organisation they work for. This will sometimes come with an agreement that the repayment of the loan will be taken from the employee’s monthly pay packets over the course of six or 12 months.
They can be offered to employees facing extreme financial hardships and will save your staff the added stress, confusion and cost of turning to less favourable external schemes like payday loans.
Regular salary reviews
Holding regular salary reviews is an important employee wellbeing initiative for two reasons.
Firstly, it creates a system where employees are regularly able to put their case forward for any salary bumps they believe they are due. This leads to a fairer process that both current and potential employees will notice.
Secondly, it demonstrates that your organisation knows the importance of rewarding hard work and strong results, which will in turn lead to an increase in productivity as employees are eager to prove themselves before the next salary review.
Employee discounts
This is a great employee wellbeing initiative to bring in if your budget doesn’t currently allow for large raises. Offering your employees discounts and perks will give them a chance to make their money go even further.
By implementing a trusted employee discounts platform you can even tailor your platform to make sure employees are aware of the discounts and perks to brands they love. This means your team won’t be receiving meaningless vouchers, but rather access to gifts and experience they truly value.
If you're considering implementing one or more of these employee wellbeing initiatives, one of our employee experience experts can help you get started.
