Putting together your wellbeing strategy isn’t always easy, as you have to provide individual solutions, but at scale. This becomes more challenging as your workforce grows — both in terms of numbers and locations.
To ensure your strategy is spot-on, here are the steps you should follow.
The first step is always to see what your employees want. This should be split into two sections — an analysis of your workforce, and feedback from your workforce.
When doing your analysis, consider these key questions:
Next comes the feedback. There’s a number of ways you can do this, but a good method is to mix an employee survey with a town hall. This allows you to get hard data, whilst also giving people an opportunity to ask you questions and perhaps prompt some ideas you hadn’t actually thought of.
The survey should allow you to understand what matters to your employees. Some of the things you need to find out are:
How will you see if your strategy is working? Using the phrase ‘Return On Investment’ for employee wellbeing might seem wrong — but ultimately, HR needs to show the value of the things it’s putting in place, the same as any other department.
There are some key metrics you can look at, which are:
Some wellbeing benefits — such as the Cycle to Work scheme — may also have tax reliefs, which you can build in as it’s a cost saving to the business.
Not everything we mentioned earlier will have a major cost, but many aspects of your wellbeing strategy will. It’s important to work with your Finance team here, and make this something which is owned by all key stakeholders.
When it comes to some of the wellbeing benefits, you want to eliminate the cost of multiple piecemeal solutions. Try and use a single solution if you can. This will save you a huge amount of money, and also create a better, more harmonised experience for your employees.
Remember you're trying to provide something for all your employees, which means thinking broader if you have a global workforce. Collaboration is really important here — look for wellbeing partners which have a truly global presence.
For example, Perkbox’s Wellness hub is location-agnostic, used by employees from Boston to Berlin. This allows HR teams to consolidate spend and focus their budget in other areas.
Following on from the previous point around collaboration, you’ll need to look for a partner to help you. But what exactly do you need to look for? It’s not as easy as Googling and picking the first one you see.
Fortunately, we’ve put together a handy checklist of things you should look out for. Check this out in the next chapter!
Plan your employee wellbeing strategy today with our easy-to-use template. It'll help you:
