In the modern days, it has become important for companies to take care of the health of their own employees. There have been few instances in the United States where this realization dawned upon some companies albeit after a sudden spurt in health insurance claims within a short span of time. In order to avoid such undue expenses, companies have started designing employee wellness program covering various aspects like culture, fitness etc along with health issues.

Even in case of companies that do not extend the benefit of health insurance to its employees, there is an impact due to employee’s absenteeism and lack of expected productivity. Employee wellness programs have become more prominent in small sized companies. This is because the absence of even a hundred employees in a company with thousands of employees has a lower adverse effect when compared to the same scenario in a company with a few hundreds of employees.

Irrespective of the size of the company, wellness programs can have a favorable impact on a company’s bottom-line and these programs can actually be implemented at an economic cost with good benefits on money spent.

There are a few steps that one can adopt while designing and implementing company wellness programs in organizations of any size. These steps are outlined below:

a. Garner the go-ahead and adequate support from the top management. This helps in effective implementation of the wellness programs for a reasonably long period of time.

b. Have an able individual or a team to monitor the implementation of wellness programs. This helps in assessing the effectiveness of the program and also helps in making the necessary changes in them to suit changing employee preferences and conditions. The team size may vary with the company’s employee strength

c. Gather adequate information and data to support the designing of various schemes. This helps in adopting a scientific approach in coming out with wellness programs.

d. Keep them simple is the key. It is important that employees as well as managers are able to easily comprehend the entire program and its benefits.

e. Conduct supporting measures to promote the programs among the employees. This could even be after discussions with a few employees.

f. Ensure a conducive environment to make it easier for employees to avail of the wellness programs. For instance, shower facilities or bicycle tracks in companies are necessary to ensure that the employees actually exercise more and remain fit.

g. Have an efficient assessing mechanism to weigh the outcome of the wellness programs. After all the purpose of wellness programs is to reach the employees as desired. This assessment will also help in making changes wherever necessary as per the results of the programs.

In case of organizations with less formal structure in various aspects, then wellness programs could also be designed to be more informal, including the monitoring and assessing factors. Whatever be the mechanism to design wellness programs, the companies can be sure that the employees’ wellness is their own wellness.