How to Get Your Wellness Program Unstuck

You’ve found a portal you’re happy with, checked many boxes on best-practice lists, and obtained support from the C-suite. But you still feel like you’re running in place. Participation is stagnant, engagement is a wish, and those employee testimonials you cherish so much have slowed to a trickle or dried up completely. You’re convinced your strategy isn’t working.

If you’ve been in wellness for a while, this and similar feelings probably aren’t foreign to you. It’s okay. Take a deep breath; you’re not necessarily doing anything wrong. First, acknowledge that changing health behaviors of even 1 individual is hard. Changing behaviors in a work population is exceptionally challenging.

Having said that, it doesn’t mean you should sit back and wait for the tide to change. It won’t. In fact, mental, emotional, and physical demands are likely to become more taxing, not less… meaning employees will need even more help down the road than today. To break out of the rut and prepare for that future, get started now with these steps:

• Question everything. This is the hardest thing for many of us to do. You’ve worked tirelessly to put the pieces in place and questioning your strategy at this point feels like admitting defeat. You’re not. In fact, it’s likely your organization exists (and you have this job) because somewhere along the way leaders asked if they were doing the right thing in the right way at crucial moments, understood they weren’t, then changed course. Take time to confirm this and 2 things will happen:
  • You’ll feel immediate relief that you’re not supposed to know exactly what to do all of the time
  • You’ll be able to pull up that tidbit when you need it to support changing directions.
• Crowdsource solutions. If vulnerability scares you, this won’t be easy either. You’re supposed to be the workplace well-being expert, right? Seeking answers from those you serve could be perceived as an admission that you don’t know what you’re doing. Again, turn to your organization’s experience. Every company on the planet worth anything solicits feedback from their customers and prospects. Why wouldn’t you? That doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all. But if you narrow the focus to specific concerns, provide detailed background, and seek input on well formed potential solutions, you’ll be surprised at the untapped well-being innovation.
• Get boots on the ground. The blessing and curse of a digitally centric wellness program is you can reach a lot of people without many people. The too-common outcome is a program that has great branding, but lacks a soul. Changing a health behavior is a deeply personal choice, supported and reinforced by those around us. These go a long way toward putting some swagger back into your offerings:
  • A robust wellness champion network
  • Buddy and team components
  • Personal relationships with supervisors
  • Processes in place to capture and share individual as well as group successes
  • Live, face-to-face awareness and education
  • Highly visible wellness management team (even if it’s just you).
• Try, test, learn, change. If you’ve completed the first 3 steps you’re holding a lot of ideas that can help you adjust your approach. Pick 1. It may be as simple as stopping something you’re doing that’s not working so you can exploit something that is. Or maybe it’s something more foundational like jettisoning the incentive/disincentive strategy you implemented several years ago that morphed into a financial carrot/stick but has no impact on well-being or health risks. Consider a model similar to how your organization rolls out a new product or service. You can be sure leaders don’t bet the farm on something they’ve not tried on a smaller segment of the market, tested various configurations, and modified rollout based on what they learned. Whatever you do, do it quickly. Then do it again.

Paradoxically, breaking out of a wellness program rut is more about looking inward than out. Try not to be seduced by the next shiny thing; it’s a tool, not the solution to a dynamic, growing wellness program. Success starts and ends with you and, in part, on your ability to recognize when you’re stuck — then having the courage to change.