When it comes to business, you’ll find many ways to boost your effectiveness and revenue. Unfortunately, there are only a few options that don’t require an investment.
For businesses, the rule is often “the more you put in, the more you get out.” You can write a copy for your website yourself for free, or you can pay a professional, but guess which one gets more conversions.
Wellness programs aim to improve the foundation of every successful business: its employees.
However, business owners don’t seem to grasp the importance of employee well-being, primarily because they don’t see how it pays off. To start off, as much as 87% of employees consider wellness programs when choosing their job.
Whether you’re considering the implementation of wellness programs or unsure whether your company’s offers are compelling, you should try to measure its ROI in multiple categories.
ROI for Wellness Programs Explained
ROI, or return on investment, is a way of evaluating the profit that’s achieved after making an investment. That being said, by measuring ROI for wellness programs, you will be able to calculate whether the programs you’re offering need to be terminated or altered.
To start with the process of measuring ROI, you need to measure the amount of money that’s spent on such programs. Some programs are simply services to which your company subscribes, but others require a much more complex organization. You might have to pay for additional staff, resources, and equipment that are used.
In the context of remote work, you probably won’t have to spend money on physical equipment or resources, which leaves you with extra funds and time to research online platforms that encourage wellness.
Measuring ROI
You can reduce every calculation of ROI to how much you’ve saved or earned per dollar invested. However, money isn’t the only unit of measurement when it comes to employee wellness programs.
There are aspects such as employee satisfaction and morale that can be measured primarily by surveys and questionnaires.
1. Participation
Why is football the most-watched sport on the planet? Well, because it’s the best sport that exists. Why no one attends your wellness programs? Probably because the employees find them unnecessary or useless.
Low participation isn’t always a sign that the employees find the program pointless. There might be some barriers that you’re unaware of. For example, the programs might require them to be present outside of work hours, which they want to spend otherwise.
You can certainly consider the programs that you’ve implemented as successful if they have high participation.
2. Employee Satisfaction
You can’t rate any aspect of a human with a simple number. It’s hard to define employee satisfaction precisely, but there are some common methods by which HRs can try to grasp it.
Regular surveys, as well as surveys on satisfaction before and after participating in wellness programs, are some ways to measure whether they are effective.
Your team managers, HRs, and team leaders can also give you an insight into this by creating reports. You’ll learn the most from employees who leave your company. They won’t hold back any negative feedback, which makes their opinions very useful.
3. Employee Morale
Just like with satisfaction, employee morale isn’t something that you can tie to a single parameter and consider accurate.
Morale in the company can be manifested by how various teams are performing and whether they work at their maximum capacity. However, the problem with this is that poor performance doesn’t have to be a sign of low morale.
Factors such as inadequate management, external factors, or poor equipment are also impactful on the overall performance. To measure how employees feel about the company, its culture, and their work, you can utilize surveys and encourage them to leave feedback.
One way you can increase your team’s morale is through meaningful team-building activities. However, it’s worth mentioning that wholesome bonding activities won’t outdo poor treatment by management or low salary.
4. Absenteeism
This is one of the most straightforward ways of measuring the ROI of your employee wellness programs. If you’ve implemented some well-being programs, and your employees aren’t asking for as many sick days, they definitely make a difference.
Minimizing absenteeism can be achieved in multiple ways, primarily through offering programs that help employees improve their health. There are many mental health platforms that offer services for companies.
Such services can help employees lower their work-related stress or counsel them on other personal problems.
Studies have shown that less stressed individuals show an increase in productivity.
5. Employee Retention
The largest expense for a majority of companies is their workforce. The process of hiring workers is a daunting one for many entrepreneurs, and finding the right candidate is often hard. Well, it’s not as hard if you find an excellent recruitment agency.
Once you hire the candidate that you consider the best, the work is far from over. You’ll have to keep them in the company.
Measuring employee retention can be done by tracking how many employees have decided to quit your company after the employee wellness programs have been implemented.
The reason why someone leaves the company can be completely personal, but you should always have an interview with them to understand what they didn’t like regarding your business.
Employee Wellness Programs Offer Various Benefits
There are different choices when it comes to employee wellness programs, and the majority of them aren’t all that effective. While they might sound great and wholesome, employees simply won’t find them useful enough to utilize them.
To make sure that you’ve made the right choice for your company, conduct regular surveys and budget evaluations. Expect that the program you went for isn’t an intelligent decision and that you might want to switch to another one.
Remember that running a company is a marathon rather than a sprint. Even though it can seem like overspending at first, improving your employee retention and satisfaction will bring you many of benefits over a span of multiple years or decades.
Veljko Petrović
Veljko is not only a brilliant content writer and an SEO specialist but also the youngest member of our team. He experienced the ups and downs of the blockchain industry while working as a crypto marketing specialist for [REDACTED]. While writing is both his job and his passion, he also enjoys reading and playing video games.
