You probably have a strategy or some kind of plan for most areas of your business. However, when it comes to workplace health and wellbeing, this important piece of work is often missing. Aon’s 2022/23 Global Wellbeing Survey identified that UK organisations have a wellbeing strategy gap.

74% of UK respondents said wellbeing had increased in importance for their organisation and 92% said their organisation had wellbeing initiatives. Yet only 29% said wellbeing was fully integrated into their overall business and talent strategy.

The largest reasons given as to why wellbeing wasn’t prioritised in these organisations was due to ‘leaders having other focuses’ (29%) and that ‘it hadn’t been thought about’ (14%)!

Whatever your reason for not taking a strategic approach to wellbeing, it’s clear that those that don’t act soon will be the ones that lose out in the war for talent.

I get that it can be overwhelming and starting is often the hardest place to start.

So here are some things for you to consider when starting or reviewing your workplace health and wellbeing strategy:

Leadership Buy-In

For any strategy to succeed senior leaders and managers need to be bought in to developing and delivering a good strategy. Role modelling is a key component in employee adoption and for creating organisational behaviour change.

Communicate

Employees at all levels of the business should be engaged in all stages of the development and rollout of your wellbeing strategy. Poor communication often results in poor employee buy-in to initiatives.

Start Small

Reduce the risk of overwhelm and information overload, focus on one or two areas of health and wellbeing at a time. This can be more beneficial than trying to tackle lots of areas at once.

Individual Wellbeing Action Plans are a great tool to embed wellbeing conversations and support into your culture. You can read my previous Pro-Manchester article ‘How Wellbeing Action Plans can help create healthier, happier and more productive teams’ here and you can click here for my free Wellbeing Action Plan Template that comes with A Manager’s Guide too.

Measure, Measure, Measure

If it’s not measured, it can’t be managed! Consider your business objectives and what you will measure to ensure your strategy is impacting both employee health and wellbeing and your business outcomes.

The UK has a disjointed approach to wellbeing, although many organisations implement wellbeing initiatives, few use a data-informed approach to tackle specific issues that are relevant to them and their workforce.

Using data gives clarity and confidence to make better decisions, deliver education in a strategic way and enable measurement of results.

A strategy is a live document, and not something that gets done once and filed away. Wellbeing strategy is a constant work in progress and should always evolve if it’s being effective (if it’s not, that’s a whole other conversation and blog).

If you need help with benchmarking and measuring, I know someone who can support with that 😉

Remember that a workplace wellbeing strategy will not have an impact on your people, performance and profit overnight. However, you will see gradual improvements in the long term.

A workplace wellbeing strategy is a crucial and worthwhile investment, particularly at a time when health concerns have risen to the top of employees’ agendas. So what are you waiting for, get planning today.