How To Create And Maintain A Thoughtful Wellness Plan

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

Over the past several years we’ve watched wellness plans evolve from simply health insurance packages to also touch on other areas of employees’ lives: mental health, financial health, social health, and much more. Being thoughtful about what your organization puts together for a wellness program is key. How do HR teams know where to start to build a thoughtful wellness program?  And where can they learn more? We invited Amy Roy, Chief People Officer at Namely to join one of our podcast episodes to answer those questions and more. Let’s first start with finding out more about Namely.

What Is Namely?

In 2012, Namely was founded to create an HR platform as intuitive as social media, but powerful enough to support the complexity of today’s workforce.

Since then, they have been hard at work solving the biggest HR challenges that mid-sized companies face–from talent management to time management, benefits administration to payroll. 

Their vision is to empower everyone to make data-driven decisions about people. From HR to the C-Suite to employees, Namely believes that accessible data has the power to make us all more strategic and impactful.

Who Is Amy Roy?

I had a great chat with Amy Roy on our podcast. Here’s a little bit of information about Amy’s background and present role.

I asked Amy how she ended up in the wonderful world of HR. She was working in retail and wanted a way out. She didn’t love the hours and the negative impact on her work/life balance. While she was prepping for graduate school programs, she read a lot about human resources, learning and development, legal and compliance, and negotiations. Every area was interesting to her, so she got an HR generalist position and started her career in HR.

Amy’s current role is Chief People Officer at Namely. She is a strategic business leader adept at setting direction for an organization and infusing a people approach tailored to meet the values of today’s workforce within a complex business context. Amy is an impactful project manager experienced at implementing large cross-functional change efforts in sales, marketing, and HR across a global landscape. And she is skilled at balancing visionary thinking with implementation excellence while communicating, influencing, and building trust with stakeholders to drive impactful and positive change.

Now, let’s dig into the topic of the podcast…

How To Create And Maintain A Thoughtful Wellness Plan

What Is A Wellness Plan?

A wellness plan involves looking at the whole person and the things that impact them personally and professionally. At Namely, we look at five ares:

1. Social
2. Financial
3. Physical
4. Spiritual
5. Mental

Each of these five areas impact employees in their day-to-day lives. We look at how as an employer we can have a positive impact in these areas. However, we know we can’t put 100% effort into each, but we do think about each.

Where Does Employee Accountability Come Into Play?

Employers are limited on dollars, and we want to provide the best variety of programs that employees will use. So, we ask employees for feedback on what they would like and what they would use. Employees appreciate options and the ability to choose from a wide selection. When we provide a well-rounded mix of selections that our employees are looking for, then the chances are they will use them. 

What Are The Steps For HR Leaders To Make A Plan?

1. Get buy-in from leadership. When leadership participates, approves, and puts budget behind the wellness program, then you have more success.
2. Form a wellness committee. Ask employees to volunteer to participate in building and maintaining the programs, how to structure survey questions, and how to prioritize the areas of wellness.
3. Ask the larger workforce for thoughts/feedback. Ask employees to provide their thoughts and feedback on wellness programs. 
4. Keep consistent to sustain the program. Meet monthly with the wellness committee to look at:
   1. Prior month – review the participation rate, how well-received the programs are, ways to improve, and a debrief on lessons learned
   2. Next month – cover the different events scheduled, ensure communication is working, and that everything is covered with organization and roll out
   3. Budget – make sure you’re staying on track and within budget, consider if budget will last for the rest of the year
   4. Health plan – review to ensure you’re taking advantage of everything provided by your vendor

Discover More

There’s much more we cover in the podcast, such as:

• How do you know what’s a good adoption rate?
• What questions should employee surveys ask?
• How do you find out what your vendor is tracking/measuring?
• What benchmark numbers should you look at?
• And much more! 

Listen to the whole podcast here: How To Create And Maintain A Thoughtful Wellness Plan

This is a quick, easy listen at just 22 minutes. It is packed full of useful information and will challenge you with thoughtful steps to set up your wellness program.