Source: Chapman Institute

What is this about?
Budget is usually a major challenge for most employee wellness programs.  Since employee wellness and well-being programs are completely discretionary or “optional” in terms of management decision-making around resource allocation, it makes it very hard to adequately fund these kinds of programs.  Employee wellness professionals usually must work hard to secure adequate vendor budgets. The Connections document in this edition of the newsletter is a vetted listing of no-cost or low-cost wellness program resources that can be used to stretch your employee wellness vendor budget and enhance your program’s effectiveness. The key to low-cost wellness resources is getting them to the employees (and family members) that need them and can use them.  How well we do that has a lot to do with how much value they bring to our programming effort.

Why is this important?
This issue is important for three major reasons.  First, our limited program budgets need to be stretched with good wellness resources. You can do that by careful use of the resources identified in this Solution Set document.  Second, our employee wellness programs need to address the widest range of health and wellness issues we can.  The topical or issue “richness” of our programs is important in meeting the needs of our target populations. Low-cost wellness resources can add that “richness”.  This Solution Set document identifies 57 different resources across 16 different topic areas that have been recommended either by the Chapman Institute or various WellCert graduates. (Actual contributors are recognized) The third reason this is important is that senior managers usually want to know if our programs are efficient at utilizing resources and that we are not wasting money.  When we carefully integrate no cost or low-cost resources into our employee wellness or well-being program it provides an opportunity to demonstrate our efficient management of resources.  It’s like saying…“Look how careful we are at using budgetary resources – we will use any additional funds you might want to give us to real advantage.”

What can you do with this document?

• First, look the document over to get a sense of the range of topics and interventions that are recommended.
• Next, see if you are already using any of these resources. For those you are using make sure they are made available in a way that is likely to get to the right person at the right time.
• Then, determine which of the remaining resources/interventions in the document table offer the most potential to help enhance the topic “richness” of your program and fill any recognized gaps.
• Then, decide for those resources or interventions you are considering using, how you plan to make them available to those who are likely to need them. The more “friction” you can take out of the process by making them easy to access the better.
• Then, once you have made the no-cost or low-cost resource available to your group write up a brief notice of the new program activity (pointing out its low-cost nature) and circulate it to key managers and your employee advisory members/wellness champions. If you do this 2 or 3 times a year the message od good budget stewardship will get across.
• Finally, take a look at least once a year at the list to see if new needs have arisen that can be met by any of these low-cost resources.

In summary, this document contains a large number of low-cost resources recommended by colleagues to help enrich your employee wellness/well-being program and to make it more effective at meeting the needs of your population while helping senior management feel better about the wellness budget and program.

Click here to download this document

NOTE: You will need to have an active WellCert Membership in order to download this document.

I hope this tool helps you reach your wellness programming goals!  Drop me a note and let me know your thoughts and if you found it to be helpful: [email protected].