Delighted workplace wellness participants are repeat participants. Some ways to delight them:
- Treat long-time wellness participants as prospective participants
- View them as partners — working with you toward a common goal
- Invite complaints instead of waiting for them
- Reward constructive criticism by going beyond resolving the problem and rewarding feedback
- Role-play complaints that could come in so you’re prepared if they do
- Ask other service groups in your organization to critique your workplace wellness participant satisfaction approach
- Contact participants a month after their initial involvement to thank them for participating and ask if there’s anything you can do to help with their health and fitness goals
- Maintain a workplace wellness participant interest database and forward pertinent articles, titles of new books, names of new participants with similar interests, etc., as they come across your desk
- Issue a 1-year warranty or money-back guarantee with your services. Then, contact workplace wellness participants at 11 months as a reminder of your commitment and ask if there’s anything you can do to assist them
- Surprise new participants with a valuable, free service a few weeks after their initial involvement
- Help workplace wellness participants connect with each other in person through lunchtime walking groups, book clubs, produce-based potlucks, and more — social connections make everything more fun
- Encourage workplace wellness participants to submit brief success stories and photos to feature in a central location like a break room, internal blog, or e-news; people love seeing themselves in print, and others are inspired by seeing what’s possible.
To sum it up, workplace wellness participants are your raison d’être for workplace wellness challenges. If you make their day, they’ll keep coming back for more. And best of all, they’ll create a buzz about how terrific your program is. And they’ll probably even urge coworkers to join in the fun.
Dean Witherspoon
Chief collaborator, nudger, tinkerer; leads the most inventive team creating well-being and sustainable living programs. Reach out if you’d like to talk about employee well-being, emotional fitness, or eco-friendly living.
