Your stakeholders are engaged, now for the plan

Now that you have engaged your stakeholders, gathered some evidence & have an idea of your priorities as well as areas for focus, you can start planning! Having a wellbeing plan will save you money and provide sustainability for your project. Throwing money at wellbeing in an ad-hoc way can be wasteful and you’ll never know if the interventions have the impact you want.

Now that you know the right interventions you can target your priority areas. You can think about how to communicate your strategy and how you might implement it. You can review it on an ongoing basis and use the data to assess what is working. Your reports to Senior Management will also be much more meaningful.

Your whole workplace wellbeing journey could look something like this

Get initial management buy-in

You will need to data that you gathered during the initial stages to be presented in a way that presents a business case. It is vital to have the leadership team fully behind the strategy. It not only help promote the strategy but employees need to see that the leaders walk the talk.

Create your strategy

This stage is worth putting the time into. You need to consider building in national wellbeing days and different methods of adding your company’s spin onto those. Your wellbeing group can be tasked with coming up with ideas they think will work. There is nothing worse than no-one turning up to something the team have worked really hard to prepare for. Involve your Internal communications team and definately line managers. Your wellbeing strategy needs to be embedded across all sectors and levels of the organisation and be throroughly planned out by month, quarter and year. You need to set some targets against all the interventions to measure their success.

Find the right partners

Who are you going to need to bring in to help you deliver your plan. You might have a budget for training so you could perhaps consider partnering with a Mental Health First Aid instructor to deliver some in-house training. Use someone with good testmonials who understand your business thoroughly. Use a partner that understand what other wellbeing services and benefits are in place and how what they do interact with those.

Find your champions

If you dont already have a wellbeing group, you need to find, train and prepare your wellbeing champions. They can be an extension of the wellbeing commitee or simply just the commitee themselves. They will need to be clear of what is expected of them and ensure they have time to commit to the role.

Communicate regularly

How will you communicate your wellbeing plans to the employees and who is going to take responsilibity for this. Ideally you need to consider communication across many different channels and from as many different sectors within the busienss. Plan your communications as part of your wellbeing strategy.

Empower don’t preach

No employee wants their employer to tell them to be more healthy or more happy in their job. Workplace wellbeing has to be about inspiring and empowering the employees to want to get invovled in whatever activities are on offer. If you have something for everyone, they will get involved with whatever suits them best.

Monitor efficacy report return on investment.

You will want to keep your wellbeing plans alive and in order to attract budget year after year, you will need to give the board ongoing evidence that this is a good return on their investment. They will want to know that the company employees are more productive perhaps and that your scheme has met its targets. You need to treat the wellbeing strategy just like any other business plan.