AI Tools for Employee Wellness Leaders: Work Smarter, Not Harder

10-minute read

Do you wonder whether Artificial Intelligence belongs in your work and, if so, where to begin?

Organizations continue to advance workplace wellness and overall well-being through innovative strategies that leverage technology. AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini (called models or chatbots) are changing how these wellness industry approaches work. They can efficiently handle common tasks – freeing you to focus on approaches, collaboration, and the creative problem solving that requires your expertise.

The technology’s increased integration into processes across industries makes familiarity with AI tools essential for career development and job performance. Whether you’re skeptical, curious, or have already taken the plunge, understanding how AI can support employee health and wellness programs will help you make more informed decisions. 

Using AI in employee wellness program management can:

• Strengthen your program’s impact on well-being
• Drive success by aligning wellness initiatives with broader organization outcomes
• Enhance employee engagement by enabling more personalized and timely wellness communications, helping to foster a more connected, motivated workforce.
  
  

First Steps: AI Tools for Starting Out

(You can skip this section and jump to whatever level feels appropriate to your needs.)

If you’re new to AI, like many professionals in the wellness industry, the best place to begin is with tasks you already know well. This lets you evaluate its output against your own expertise and build confidence in the technology’s strengths and limitations. 

Examples of beginner use cases:

• Streamline wellness communications. AI can help draft emails, newsletters, and social media posts, then refine them based on your feedback. It’s particularly useful for adapting the same message for different audiences – like turning a formal announcement you’ve written into a casual instant message.

• Brainstorm. Rather than staring at a blank page, you can prompt AI to generate initial ideas for you to evaluate, combine, or customize. The key is to provide context about your organization’s unique needs and wellness program goals.

• Summarize documents and reports. Once you upload lengthy vendor reports, health research studies, or survey results, AI can extract key findings or create summaries. (Be sure to see the section below on navigating risk and ethical considerations.)

• Learn new skills or refresh old ones. AI can provide step-by-step tutorials for software you use regularly, explain statistical concepts relevant to health and wellness data, or help you understand new trends in fitness, nutrition, and mental health support.

• Get personalized help with familiar tools. Whether you need Excel formulas for tracking wellness goals, PowerPoint design suggestions, or help organizing data, AI can tailor recommendations to your needs.
  
  

Beginners: Try This

A prompt is the question or instruction you give to the chatbot. 

Start with a basic brainstorming task using this sample: “You’re a wellness manager at a technology company with 10,000 employees – some remote, some at 50- to 100-person sites. Suggest 20 fun, evidence-based programs to promote physical health and fitness that accommodate different work schedules and locations. Include ideas related to onsite and virtual fitness classes, gym memberships, active commuting incentives, and challenges that encourage physical activity. Tailor program ideas to different fitness levels to ensure inclusivity and motivate all employees.”

You can even provide information about HES challenges and ask AI to suggest a selection or create a wellness program calendar.

Always diligently confirm AI-generated information. It sometimes produces incorrect responses (known as hallucinations) that are very convincing.

Next Steps: AI for Intermediate Users

When you’re comfortable with basic AI interactions, you can tackle more complex wellness program tasks.

Examples of intermediate use cases:

• Create and analyze surveys. AI can help design wellness program evaluation surveys, suggest formats, and assess quantitative or qualitative responses when presented in a clear and organized manner. 

• Develop training materials. Whether you need interactive wellness workshops, learning aids, or video scripts, AI can compose initial drafts and/or provide feedback on drafts you’ve created.

• Build program resources. You can ask AI to generate health quizzes, FAQs, and reference materials for employee wellness program participants. AI can help create content on emotional well-being, fitness routines, nutrition, and other health habits in ways that resonate with different employee populations.

• Streamline vendor management. AI makes it easy to get side-by-side vendor proposal comparisons and evaluation criteria that match your organization’s wellness priorities. If policies permit, upload relevant information from proposals and ask AI to create charts highlighting important differences. 
  
  

Intermediate Users: Try This

Choose a fitness program AI suggested in the “Beginners: Try This” section above, then ask for detailed implementation guidance: 

• Request a step-by-step timeline, resource requirements, communication templates, and an evaluation plan that tracks improvements in overall health plus specific health benefits these programs provide
• Specify that the strategy should accommodate different fitness levels 
• Have AI create a workflow diagram you can share with other leaders and stakeholders; if you choose an HES challenge, your account manager can support this process.

To improve future interactions, pay attention to what AI does more effectively than traditional approaches and where it falls short.

Leaps and Bounds: AI for Advanced Users

The range of tasks you can delegate to AI is vast… expanding every day as the technology and users evolve, including wellness program problem solving, strategic planning, and developing a holistic approach adaptable to varied needs.

Examples of advanced use cases:

• Craft compelling narratives. AI technology can help identify the most persuasive ways to present data to stakeholder groups, illustrating how wellness programs play a meaningful role in organization success.

• Get AI-powered support for health and wellness program initiatives. It can help you plan chatbot implementation, create conversation flows, and produce content that makes automated wellness support more effective. Though some people’s encounters with AI-based support may seem unsatisfactory today, the technology constantly improves. Before long, participants may value the option to receive personalized service from AI-powered chatbots.

• Analyze data. Even if you don’t have access to raw data, integrating aggregate values based on health risk assessments, engagement surveys, vendor reports, and participation metrics can reveal insights about employee well-being to help future wellness programs. (As always, stay current with your organization’s policies about AI use.) Proceed with caution: Consumer-facing AI tools are, to date, limited in their ability to precisely integrate and interpret large datasets. 

• Experiment with deep research AI tools. These applications act as virtual research assistants, capable of gathering, synthesizing, and interpreting information from multiple sources to yield detailed, actionable reports and insights. 
  
  

Advanced Users: Try This

• Identify a complex challenge your employee wellness programs face – low participation rates, difficulty communicating with hard-to-reach populations, insufficient mental health support, or a need for more personalized wellness programs. Start with a broad prompt asking AI to map out a multifaceted strategy with step-by-step guidance you can adapt. Use follow-up prompts to dive deeper into specific aspects and explore how to solve problems that may surface during implementation.

• Build a wellness dashboard using Excel or similar software with AI as your tutor. You’ll get help to brainstorm the most important metrics, suggest layouts that tell a clear story, and get through the technical steps. Many AI tools can advise you on how to troubleshoot problems – like error messages – as they arise.

With these exercises – or similar experiments based on your needs and interests – you’ll sharpen prompting skills and gain insight into AI’s potential. Move forward as you make the most of its contributions in: 

• Tailoring recommendations

• Anticipating issues

• Improving data integration

• Supporting overall employee wellness program management.
  
  

Navigate AI Risks and Ethical Considerations

While AI offers untapped potential to sharpen efficiency, conscientious wellness industry professionals must weigh ethical considerations and develop practices to protect employers as well as program participants. As a wellness professional it’s essential that you adhere to – and, in some cases, go beyond – regulations/organization policies governing: 

• Data privacy

• Proper use of healthcare information

• Workplace standards 

• Proprietary information and intellectual property

• Using or prohibiting certain AI technology.
  
  

Additional Risk Management Strategies

• Use only de-identified or aggregate data when working with AI tools. 

• Double-check all factual outputs against reliable sources. 

• Consider disclosing AI assistance or modify content to make it your own. 

• Seek to mitigate bias by being consistently alert. For example, information AI is learning from may already reflect biases that marginalize populations based on age, gender, race. 

• Never rely on AI for sensitive communications.
  
  

Polish Your Prompting 

The quality of AI output depends largely on the quality of your input. Effective prompting skill improves with practice and can dramatically increase AI’s usefulness for wellness program management.

Try these tips for productive prompts:

• Start with clarity, then add complexity. Begin with a clear, specific request that includes essential context, then use follow-up prompts to refine and expand the output. 

• Break complex tasks into steps. Don’t ask AI to “write a comprehensive program proposal”; instead brainstorm key elements first, create an outline, then develop each section individually.

• Use AI to improve its own work. Ask follow-up questions like “How would you improve this response?” or “Rewrite this with a more professional tone” to refine output.

• Maintain context across AI conversations. Copy primary information forward when continuing a multipart project: “Here’s the outline you provided – now expand section 2 with specific implementation steps.”
  
  

In Effective Prompts for AI: The Essentials, MIT Sloan advises: 

“The promise of AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and others, lies in their ability to adapt and learn from your carefully crafted inputs… Yet, we must remain vigilant about potential flaws, biases, and the implications of over-relying on these systems without critical scrutiny.”

Stay Ahead

Adopt AI at your own pace, scale with intention, and remain mindful of AI’s shortcomings along with the ethical considerations.

The question isn’t whether AI technology will become part of wellness program management – it’s how you’ll stay in the forefront by thoughtfully and effectively integrating this technology into your health and wellness solutions and your professional practice. 

As you build skills, you’ll harness AI’s growing capabilities while expanding your personal expertise – together creating wellness programs that produce real results. Effective AI-driven wellness program management can support employees by providing resources and initiatives that foster a supportive environment – leading to better health outcomes, higher productivity, and overall organization success.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I introduce AI into my work as a health and wellness program leader?

Start with simpler tasks like drafting participant communications, brainstorming program ideas, or summarizing research reports. Choose an AI platform and practice with basic prompts before moving to more complex applications. It can then assist in managing wellness programs that reduce workplace stress, promote work-life balance, and accommodate diverse needs through custom well-being initiatives. 

Which AI tool is best?

The best AI tool depends on your specific needs and comfort level. Start with whichever platform feels most intuitive, then explore others as skills develop. Try the free versions of multiple systems to see which interface and response style work best for your workflow.

How can AI be used for program promotion?

AI can boost program promotion by tailoring messages to specific employee groups, creating engaging content, and developing eye-catching visuals for posters and displays. For example, it can help you design fitness challenge announcements that appeal to both beginners and experienced participants or unique messaging for remote vs. onsite employees. AI also can analyze past campaign data to suggest how you can optimize timing and frequency of promotions.

How is AI changing the wellness industry?

For now, AI’s primary impact on the wellness industry is automating routine tasks while increasing the capacity of wellness professionals. In the long run, it has the potential to revolutionize employee wellness by personalizing recommendations to participants, streamlining program management, and putting advanced data analysis in the hands of leaders like you.