The raging pandemic of lifestyle diseases like obesity, diabetes, and hypertension has led to decreased employee productivity and rising healthcare costs for businesses. Lifestyle diseases can easily be prevented and managed by making certain lifestyle changes like consuming a balanced diet, getting proper sleep, and adequate physical exercise. All this has forced businesses to roll out corporate wellness platform that help employees in maintaining fitness and adopting healthy habits. A Corporate wellness platform is a software tool or a web app used to implement and execute such wellness programs.
How do employee wellness programs work?
Employee wellness programs are executed with the help of a software that allows an administrator to chalk out a wellness program, set goals, incentivize a healthy behavior by using a plethora of tools like fitness-tracker, e-learning modules, assessments, and diet-guidance. The success of a wellness platform depends upon its ability to keep the participants engaged. Such employee engagement is achieved by incentivizing a good habit like taking a walk, following a proper routine, and consuming a healthy diet. Every time a participant performs some physical activity, he is rewarded points that can be redeemed later. Another component that makes these platforms so engaging is the presence of other fellow participants which keep an employee motivated and foster the spirit of camaraderie amongst employees.
The gamification feature offered by such platforms inculcates a healthy competitive spirit amongst employees by making them compete against colleagues in performing everyday tasks thus making monotonous activities like taking a walk thrilling and exciting.
How Businesses Benefit from Such Programs
Businesses have to incur massive financial losses on an annual basis due to the rising number of insurance claims, low productivity, high turnover of employees, and rampant absenteeism. Various studies have shown how claims related to lifestyle diseases form the bulk of all insurance claims in various companies. Such costs can easily be avoided if employees adopt a healthy lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle along with adequate physical activity can improve energy levels, focusing ability, and productivity of an employee. Such an employee would feel more invigorated and motivated to complete his work. Besides, the esprit de corps fostered by such wellness programs further add to the loyalty of employees to the organization’s goals and objectives thus blurring the lines between organizational and individual objectives.
A large number of businesses that adopted employee wellness programs saw a decrease in insurance claims, high turnover, and absenteeism of employees. The health and productivity of employees increased after participating in wellness programs thus creating more revenues for companies. What makes such programs more popular in today’s age is that they can be effectively executed and monitored at a very low cost with the help of a corporate wellness program on smartphones without incurring any extra cost of setting up new infrastructure. All this makes such software platforms a much sought after thing amongst big businesses.
