Employee wellness isn’t just an extra perk or incentive; it is a strategic initiative with quantifiable value. At MJH Life Sciences^®, driving a culture of wellness and well-being helps us foster healthy behavioral changes for our associates, but it also boosts recruitment efforts and increases retention. In addition, it improves productivity and morale. Just look at the stats from Cigna:

• Highly engaged workforces produce 20% higher sales, on average than their disengaged counterparts.
• Employees experience 18.1% greater engagement at work when given time for healthy activities.

These sound like great reasons to focus on wellness, right? Well, just hosting programs doesn’t cut it; it’s those that are championed by internal leadership teams that achieve the greatest level of success. Therefore our leadership team at MJH Life Sciences^® has their skin in the game not only by participating but working together, to develop engaging activities and programs for associates to participate in. To provide well-rounded educational resources, they also ensure there is a focus on one of the five areas of health and wellness: physical, emotional, environmental, financial, and social.

If you’re ready to revamp or start your program, the best place to begin is with an employee survey. Ask your associates what areas of health they want to focus on so you know where to start that will drive the biggest impact. Things you can determine are what types of health and fitness are important to them, the satisfaction of current resources, how they prefer to digest content, preferred regularity of communications, and gauging a sense of their feelings in and out of the workplace. While physical wellness is important and often an easy focus, be sure to take as much time to gauge their emotional well-being. This has moved to the forefront, especially these last few years as people battle the effects of COVID-19 and isolation.

Truly impacting an organization’s employees does not happen overnight, but we’ll discuss our success in these areas and ways you can jumpstart your own program. Be sure to check out the next article in this series, where we’ll talk about emotional wellness and the ways you can target this within your organization.