Lots of forward-thinking companies are looking for a good corporate wellness solution, and for good reason. They understand that corporate wellness programs can:

  • Boost productivity: healthier, fitter staff members work harder
  • Retain top talent: if one company provides wellness services for their staff, and a different company doesn’t, that can keep a staff member on board, even when they get scouted by a potentially higher-paying employer. Retaining talent is much cheaper, and less time-consuming than finding and training new talent.
  • Attract top talent: for health-conscious staff members, the prospect of improving their health may attract them to your company
  • Less absenteeism: healthier, fitter employees take fewer sick days, because they’re sick less
  • Better mental health: exercise is proven to reduce anxiety and depression. Plus, it helps with stress management

…and more.

Original source: here.

               So it benefits everyone – the staff get healthier and fitter. The company spends money on corporate wellness, but they save it in many other ways with a great ROI. The HR manager or executive who brings a corporate wellness solution to their company looks like a hero. Win-win-win all around.

               In this article, we’ll cover:

  • What is corporate wellness?
  • 6 different criteria for corporate wellness solutions
  • The various different types of wellness programs

But before we jump into it, who am I? My name is Igor. I’m the author of the book The Fit Executive. As well, I’ve delivered workplace wellness services (including about 400 presentations) to some of the world’s largest corporations, including:

  • American Express
  • IBM
  • Qualcomm
  • Royal Bank of Canada
  • Questrade
  • Suzuki
  • Stantec

…and others.

               If you’d like to chat about your company’s wellness needs (no sales pitch), just fill out the application form on my website.

What is Corporate Wellness?

               Corporate wellness goes by a lot of different names. Some call it “workplace wellness”, others call it employee or staff wellness. Some call it corporate fitness, and so on.

               But regardless of the name, the end goal is the same: improve the wellness of staff members. That’s usually:

  • Physical health, which entails cholesterol profiles, triglycerides, blood sugar, blood pressure, muscular strength, aerobic capacity, etc.
  • Mental health, whether that’s overt anxiety and depression, or simple stress management, which lots of people experience.

As for how a company goes about it – that can take many different forms, which I’ll discuss later in this article.

6 Different Criteria for Corporate Wellness Solutions

               There is a dizzying array of different corporate wellness programs. How do you know which one is right for your company? It starts with keeping in mind what you want it to do for your company, and having some criteria in place to do that.

               Here are the criteria that some companies have:

Goal

               What do you want the program to do for your company? Are you trying to have a measurable impact on employee health and fitness (with specific health/fitness markers that you’re looking to measure and improve)? Or are you more interested in getting the team together for a presentation, with no expectation of behavior change?

Interest

               Have your staff expressed interest in a specific program? Have you surveyed them to gauge the anticipated participation?

               After all, wouldn’t it be disheartening to spend lots of time and money vetting a corporate wellness company, only to have no uptake by your staff?

Features

               How well does the solution that you’re exploring align with your company’s wellness goals? Does the company have multiple offerings?

Customization

               Does the corporate wellness solution that you’re exploring allow customization of its offerings? Maybe they have a pre-set program, and it’s almost right, but not quite. Do they have the flexibility to adjust their offering/program to your specific company?

Anything Free?

               Does your prospective vendor have any offerings that are free of charge as a way to test-drive them, to see if you’d like to take them up on a bigger offer?

               For instance, one thing that my company offers for free is PDF copies of one of my books, either STOP EXERCISING! The Way You Are Doing it Now or The Mental Health Prescription.

               This way, the staff get to sample the approach for free, and if there’s interest, there can be a conversation about a next-level service. And if there’s no interest, well, no problem.

Reporting

               If the solution you’re looking for is indeed meant to drive some kind of measurable change (cholesterol, blood sugar, aerobic capacity, physical strength, stress, etc.), does your corporate wellness provider give reports on how your staff are doing? In other words, is the corporate wellness program doing what it’s supposed to do? Is there some kind of accountability?

The Various Different Types of Wellness Programs

               There is no shortage of wellness programs. In this section, I’ll list the most common ones, along with the pros and cons of each.

               In no particular order:

On-Site Personal Training

               This is by far the most high-touch, high-impact service around. There’s no greater personalization than on-site personal training, because inherently, it’s usually a 1-on-1 service (sometimes going up as high as 4-on-1).

               It starts with an assessment of each individual client’s goals, and on the basis of that, the trainer comes up with a personalized exercise and nutrition program.

               The most common reasons for personal training are:

  • Fat loss
  • Toning/muscle gain
  • Decreasing lower back pain, and muscle stiffness
  • Managing chronic conditions, like high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes

The greatest advantage of this is the impact. Nothing causes greater behavior change, and improvements in health than a knowledgeable professional waiting for you (taking care of accountability) with a personalized program in hand to improve the outcomes that you stated.

There are also a few disadvantages to this:

  • There are lots of bad personal trainers. In fact, that’s the majority. I’ve written about this extensively in articles like the 5 biggest mistakes that personal trainers make. Fortunately, in this day and age of virtual everything, you can have personal trainers from outside of your city, training your staff within your city over zoom or a similar platform. The virtual option is a particularly good option if your staff are in different parts of the city, in different cities, or different countries.
  • Price: it’s high impact, but it’s also the highest priced option.

If you’re thinking “what about a gym? Don’t we need to have a gym on-site?” The short answer is “no.” There are a couple of different solutions to this obstacle:

  • Solution 1: your staff member goes to an off-site gym, but the company pays for it. Or it’s split between the company and the staff member.
  • Solution 2: if you want to do it on-site, you can do a lot of very effective exercise with very little equipment, like just dumbbells and resistance bands. It takes very little space, too.

Virtual Health Coaching

               With this option, like personal training, it starts off with an initial assessment, to be able to personalize the plan (ideally, both exercise and nutrition).

               After that, the health coach delivers that plan to the client (your staff member), and the client executes it on their own. As they’re executing it, they’re recording their exercises, sets, reps, weights and nutrition. This adds accountability.

               Every week, the client and the coach meet for a quick, 10-15 minute coaching call to look at the data/results from the previous week, and make adjustments to the following week.

Advantages:

  • Impact: because of the degree of personalization, the impact is also very high
  • Location-independent: because it’s virtual, it doesn’t matter if your employees are in different cities or countries.
  • Results-oriented: the goal is to improve a certain marker of health or fitness, so it gets measured all the time.
  • Very time-efficient: only a 10-15 minute meeting per week.
  • Lower cost than personal training

Disadvantages:

  • As with personal training, lots of health coaches are just bad. One common mistake they make is providing meal plans, which are just diets rebranded. And we know that diets don’t work. I write about better approaches in my articles, You Don’t Need a Diet – You Need a Therapist
  • Price: it’s certainly lower-priced than personal training, but it’s higher priced than some of the other options.

The following paragraph was contributed by Charmaine Nava:

Another innovative approach to corporate wellness is utilizing digital wellness platforms like the Sensa app. This user-friendly app offers a range of features to support employees’ well-being, including personalized exercise and nutrition plans, mindfulness exercises, and progress tracking. With the convenience of virtual access, employees can easily engage with the app’s resources, fostering a culture of well-being in the workplace. The Sensa app provides an effective and accessible tool to promote employee health and overall wellness.

Personal Wellness Assessment

               With personal wellness assessments, a company comes in, usually for one day to assess staff in different markers of health/fitness, such as:

  • Cholesterol
  • Triglycerides
  • Blood sugar
  • Blood pressure

And sometimes, additional fitness testing, like strength and aerobic capacity.

               Advantages:

  • It’s interesting to see your baseline levels of health
  • You don’t have to take time out of your day to schedule a doctor’s appointment
  • If a marker of health is not so good, it might spark your staff member to take action.
  • Lower priced than the previous 2 options.

Disadvantages:

  • If someone is not exercising, and they see that their health is fine without exercise, it might be a deterrent from exercising and eating right.
  • As I write about in my article on Medcan, you get a bunch of results, but the next question of “what do these results mean, and what do I do about them?” is not answered.

Virtual Wellness Challenges

               There are tons of virtual wellness challenges, from:

  • Water drinking challenges: can you drink either the right amount of water everyday, or for the ignorant water challenges, can you drink as much water in a day as possible? The reason I say “ignorant” is because everything in the body needs to be in the middle. Not too little, not too much. There is such a thing as too much water, and the risk is diluting your electrolytes. This causes problems with lethargy, focus, dizziness, and in extreme cases, death.
  • Step challenges: how many steps can you take throughout the day?
  • Stair challenges: how many stairs can you climb throughout the day?

…and others.

Advantages:

  • Very low-priced, and sometimes, free
  • Among those participating, builds a sense of morale and camaraderie
  • Hopefully improves health/fitness for the duration of the challenge

Disadvantages:

  • Usually, a huge drop in participation after the end of the challenge, and a return to pre-challenge levels
  • Can be taken to an extreme. For example, if someone goes from climbing 10 stairs per day to suddenly 500 stairs a day, they can develop tendonitis, and end up worse off than before the challenge. Or as with the water drinking example above, if the challenge is “more is better”, some people’s health will decline as a result of drinking excessive amounts of water.

Health Fairs

               Health fairs are usually 1-day to 1-week events, where different vendors come in to advertise their products and services, that your staff may benefit from.

               Vendors can be:

  • Personal trainers
  • Local gyms
  • Chiropractors
  • Massage therapists
  • Meditation apps
  • Rehabilitation facilities
  • Spas
  • Yoga studios/instructors
  • Wellness authors

…and others.

Advantages:

  • Either free, or potentially, you can charge the vendors for exhibiting
  • Builds some novelty in the workplace
  • Exposes your staff to products/services that they otherwise not have encountered

Disadvantages:

  • Time-consuming to find the vendors
  • You have to decide whether or not you want to vet the vendors, and how serious your vetting process will be. After all, if one of your staff members decides to use a vendor’s services, and are disappointed, will you feel responsible for that?

Workshops, Seminars and Webinars

               I have extensive familiarity with this one, since I’ve delivered over 400 of them. You can find a speaker to present on various different wellness topics, from:

  • Weight loss
  • Exercise
  • Mental health
  • Stress management
  • Ergonomics
  • Back pain and neck pain
  • Nutrition
  • Supplements

…and others.

               And they can range from the highly interactive, where people are exercising, to where they’re just listening, and enjoying the presentation.

Advantages:

  • Low commitment. Typically, these are anywhere from half an hour to half a day (lunch and learns are typically an hour).
  • Price: can be as low as free (for speakers who have services to sell besides speaking), to around $20,000 (for very high profile professional speakers, where that’s all they do for a living).
  • Novelty.
  • Entertainment. A good workshop/seminar/webinar should be not just educational, but also entertaining.
  • Practical. Ideally, it should deliver some actionable takeaways.
  • Builds morale, and gives the company more of a team atmosphere

Disadvantages:

  • Very unlikely to lead to long-term behavior change in the vast majority of audience members
  • Free speakers can sometimes make the entire session a pitch for their services, if they have additional services to sell. Other free speakers can be very dry and boring, because they work for another company, and this is simply part of their job – and they don’t like that part.
  • Professional speakers (the ones charging in the $5000+ per presentation range) are heavy on the entertainment side, and very light on the practical application side. It’s fine if you’re just looking for entertainment, a few laughs, a tug at the heartstrings, but not the best if you want your staff members to walk away with valuable, actionable takeaways.

There you have it – a pretty comprehensive guide on corporate wellness solutions. I hope this helps you make a good decision in terms of which direction to go.

If you’d like to explore the possibility of working with me (in whatever capacity), feel free to fill out the application form on my website, and we’ll chat (no sales pitch).