How to tailor work wellness programmes to your team

Every workforce deserves a tailored always-on wellbeing programme, rather than a one-size-fits-all onetime approach to wellbeing. Just as each company has its own workflow and workforce, KPIs and output, processes and placement in the industry it works within, each workforce has its own particular needs. Even more granular than that – each employee will have a different mode of working and a different requirement from a wellbeing service.

To assess what type of services a team might need, it’s important to weigh up all the variables. The first thing to do is assess the size of the workforce, the pace of its growth and the work it does. From there, though, it gets personal – for good reason. To assess the needs of the workforce, it’s important to delve into the details of how each person, each individual, functions, and most importantly, what they need to feel good while doing so.

To tailor a wellness program to you workforce you need to find out:

• What sort of work does an employee have?
• What sort of commute do they have? Is this impacted by strikes?
• How does the employee process information and learn? Are they more intuitive and feeling or are they more driven by facts and logic?
• What are the challenges an employee may face?
• What are any anxieties they might have around the working environment? Is the cost of living crisis weighing heavily on them? Are they concerned about returning to work after post-pandemic working from home or hybrid working?
• What do they want from work? Are they getting it?

Involve your team in tailoring wellness programmes

And most importantly, simply ask: how are you? Checking in with employees in a consistent way, listening to their concerns and discovering the challenges they will face in the day-to-day are the most important ways of making them feel validated. From there, wellbeing services can be tailored to suit the needs of this workforce. There’s not much point in organising after-work events to boost morale if parents need to rush off to sort out childcare at 5 on the dot. Similarly, if one-to-one counselling is desired, anonymity around this may be necessary to not lead the individual to feel required to discuss sensitive matters in the workplace.

A workforce of people driven by fact and logic may not immediately be as up for a session in gong baths as a workforce of people driven by intuition and feeling. By tailoring the wellbeing programme, employees feel that much more part of its intention and that in itself will make them feel good, before they even begin using any of the services provided to them.