Building sustained executive support for Worksite Wellness is often one of the most important roles of a wellness professional. In my decades working with over a thousand organizations, here are the top three best practices with the biggest impact:
Starting with number three…
#3: Dig into the details and show them the plan.
None of us really enjoy putting proposals and plans together, but I have found it to be absolutely critical to getting senior management buy-in for an employee wellness program. All managers want to be seen as good decision-makers. This means they need to be taken through the details so that they can satisfy themselves that the program will deliver results and mitigate any risks. A well-written proposal for an employee wellness program should answer all the major questions that a good manager should be asking.
Questions I hear senior managers ask are: What will the program cost? How much new overhead will it add to our costs? How will we measure its impact? What economic impact will the program have on our organization? Will employees adopt it? Will they like it? How will the program be rolled out? What policy and physical changes will be necessary? How soon can we see the results? What future actions are we going to be committed to taking? What are our main competitors doing about wellness? A well-written proposal becomes your best defense against potential critics while it also creates a blueprint for implementation. A carefully prepared proposal for a wellness program is an incredibly important strategy for building strong senior management support for wellness.
#2 Cultivate a “C-level” champion.
Your program won’t thrive without a senior executive talking it up to the organization’s top decision-making group. Most of the time this leadership comes from the VP of Human Resources, but sometimes it can be the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Someone needs to speak on behalf of the wellness program and be a credible advocate. Once I was sitting with a group of senior managers for a signature national company and I watched the CFO make a fool of himself by citing a number of deeply held, but erroneous views on wellness. Thank God the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) was well-read on wellness and easily shot down the CFO’s spurious arguments and irreverent bluster.
One way to cultivate a champion is to deliver a cadence of communications to them via email, and in-person meetings, arming them with powerful pro-wellness sound bites. By communicating high-quality independent research and the results from your own program, you can turn a casual supporter into an ardent champion. There will always be competing priorities and resource needs that will have the potential to derail support for wellness efforts. Cultivating a credible and effective wellness C-level champion is absolutely critical to the long term success of your wellness initiative, ensuring that support for your program stays strong regardless of occasional headwinds.
And now for #1…drum roll please…
#1: Three little letters: R…O…I!
The most effective wellness program leaders use a strong economic rationale and positioning for their program. The thousands of senior managers I have worked with over the years all resonated with the economic argument for justifying investment in an employee wellness program. The prospect of avoiding future health plan costs, sick leave absenteeism costs, workers’ compensation costs, disability insurance costs and presenteeism costs helped senior managers support the funding and initiation of a worksite wellness program. Most of the time a PowerPoint deck with economic highlights of peer review studies did the trick. With that said…. we all still need to be very careful not to over-promise and risk under-delivering, so make sure you make conservative estimates of economic return for your program that you can easily surpass.
Of course if you pursue this strategy you have to measure economic return and make sure your wellness program uses a broad array of programming strategies to affect economic variables. This is about more than just reducing selected health risks! In my experience, making the case that spend on wellness programs creates significant ROI has been critical to unlocking the investment and support for the kind of program structure that actually impacts employee health.
There are more than a dozen other strategies for building strong senior management support for wellness. The first session of our Wellness Certification WellCert Level 1 covers this topic in more depth. To dig into wellness ROI, check out our series of online courses on Wellness Economics.
For more Results-Driven Wellness, follow @WellnessCzar on Twitter. This blog covers topics from our five-level WellCert certification program for worksite wellness practitioners. We love your feedback. Use the comment tool below to let us know how you liked the post and any ways we could improve.