The following is from WellRight:
August is National Wellness Awareness Month. It’s easy for lines between personal and professional lives to blur in today’s fast-paced and demanding work environments, explaining why burnout, stress, and reduced productivity continue to plague organizations across industries.
To put that into perspective, Gallup estimates that employee burnout costs organizations an estimated $322 billion in lost productivity and turnover. And while this work-life imbalance is clearly bad for business and employee wellbeing, it often stems from one simple problem—employees not knowing where or how to seek help for their health struggles.
It’s easy to build a library of benefits that are carefully crafted to help with specific employee health issues, but when those benefits are hard to find—or worse, tied to only one digital medium, like a desktop—employees lose interest. On the other hand, when benefits are streamlined, customized for various employee populations, and available 24/7 through multiple access points, employers see tremendous improvements in a number of areas:
- Improved health outcomes: When employees know how to seamlessly take advantage of their health benefits within their company’s wellness platform, their own personal wellbeing no longer takes a back seat. Making it easy to access health insurance information or mental health support are shown to boost health outcomes, platform participation, and engagement.
- Enhanced company culture: Employees who come to work happy and healthy are also more collaborative and productive. Not to mention, employees who are empowered to take control of their own wellbeing are also more loyal to their organizations, improving retention and slicing turnover in half.
- More enticing recruitment: Employers who stand behind their health and wellness initiatives are more attractive to candidates than those who don’t. Over half of job candidates—most notably younger candidates—consider holistic wellness programs an extremely important factor when making a job decision, and are more likely to stay at their jobs for at least two years.