Wellness Blog

The corporate work atmosphere is one of the most stressed out domains today. No wonder, the employees’ breakdown quite often or their productivity and efficiency suffer over a period of time quite consistently. The only way out of this conundrum is to initiate an effective stress management plan – a corporate wellness program in a bigger sense – that could take care of the employees’ emotional and physical health and help them to cope with the increasing demands of the corporate work culture. The relevance of a corporate wellness program will become evident if considered the results of certain studies done on the pattern of illness that affects employees in today’s corporate domain. The studies have shown that above 60% of the physical symptoms relating to emotional distress in the working class are attributed to work pressure, lack of sleep, and bad diet.

So, when a company should have a health and wellness policy in place? Ideally, every company should have one by default, and it must be there strictly if employee strength is more than few tens, and the company is working on tight schedule projects and is on a recruiting spree. If there is an efficient wellness program in place, the sick leaves and medical claims of its employees will naturally come down significantly. Conversely, if, even after installing a health and wellness program in the workplace, the employee absenteeism is not coming down, and the productivity is not improving sizably, it can be safely assumed that there is something seriously wrong with the wellness program or the employees are not using it in the way it should be. The latter could happen if the wellness program has been conceived without taking the opinion of the employees who eventually are the people to use it. If the program does not offer what they want, naturally they’ll turn their backs towards it. In an ideal scenario, a corporate wellness program must take care of all the health aspects and its various dimensions of the employees, and it should be appealing and interesting to the employees. It must be fun and educating at the same time. And in order to design one, it takes lots of research and professional assistance.

Some companies wrongly assume a wellness program to just having a state-of-the-art gym in the office and nothing more. That is a big mistake for a gymnasium alone cannot ensure the ‘wellness’ of its employees. For example, if it is bad diet, smoking, or stress is their problem, the reason for their low productivity/frequent illness, few sessions working out is not at all going to help them in any counts. As it is observed, 8 out of 9 corporate wellness programs are found to be failures, due to the above mentioned reasons. They just don’t have the right corporate health and wellness program in the workplace.

In short, the success of a health and wellness program in the workplace depends entirely on the merit of the program. It is the wellness program that must cater to the employee’s requirements/needs and not the other way around. And employees embrace the programs only when they realize that it is really useful to them/their well being. Therefore, it is the duty of the management to design a program that pleases all and that yields results.

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