How To Increase Employee Wellness Engagement During the Holidays

The “Rule of 7” is a marketing concept that is based on the theory that your prospects need to hear your offer or message at least seven times before they start to take action.

At Businessolver, I try and embrace this concept when delivering wellness opportunities to our employees, especially during the holiday season. Not only do I try to deliver the offer or message seven times but also in seven different creative and innovative ways. It’s almost like sending the same message wrapped in different paper to appeal to our multi-generational workforce. Here are some of the creative ways I engage our employees with wellness:

Step it up

Every year, we do a company-based step challenge during the most indulgent holidays of the season: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year. We use the latest in wellness technologies to track the steps of our employees like Fitbits, iPhones, and Apple watches.

Here’s the breakdown: If you walk, run, or hike a minimum of 8,000 average steps a day, you get a ticket into the drawing to win a prize. To sweeten the pot, every week you average an additional 2,000 steps, you get more tickets entered into the drawing. Plus, any week you beat the wellness director’s steps (me), you get even more tickets! And…..on the days it’s hard to get steps in, like Thanksgiving day or Christmas day, if you can get 10,000 steps or more, you get a lot more tickets entered! Keep throwing that fishing line out with many different challenges to engage your employees every step of the way.

Lose it!

It’s important to support your employees during the holidays where indulgence and sloth can ruin wellness goals. Which is why we run our weight loss challenge right through the middle of the holidays with lots of supportive and educational e-mails centered around healthy choices. To set ourselves apart, we don’t wait to start these challenges January 1^st. We run them right through the thick of the battle so we can be there supporting our employees through the toughest days of the year.

Work it out – Holiday Edition

To get through the holidays, we also send out specialized workout plans designed for each holiday. For example, the Thanksgiving challenge gives you a physical and a nutritional challenge each week throughout the entire month of November. The Christmas challenge is called: “12 days of Fitness for Christmas,” and it involves a buildup of fitness challenges that are not only fun, they can be done at home or even in the office! These challenges are great to involve your remote workforce. Especially during the holidays, it’s important to think outside the box to increase engagement and makes things fun to boost participation rates.

Common Sense

Our wellness program is centered around common sense, therefore we send out communications centered on common sense strategies for surviving the holidays. These tips include, taking your own food to gatherings, drinking lots of water, and my favorite, WEAR TIGHT PANTS! I love the tight pants idea. It’s important to get your employees laughing to boost participation.

The most important thing you can do to increase employees engagement with your wellness program is to show them that you actually care about their health. While the tips above focus on creative educational methods and fun activity options that can appeal to both local and remote employees, we cannot forget the personal connection and the importance of showing empathy at work. I try to stay as engaged as I can in our employees’ lives to let them know I care about their health, plus our communication strategies are based on encouragement tactics and give many different options for difference lifestyles. I ask for input and love getting feedback from our employees about what’s working and what’s not. Just like with benefits, one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to wellness.

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