Are you ready to up the ante on your virtual wellness program ideas?
If your company is like most businesses, your leadership team likely is getting creative with how to engage remote employees. For some companies that includes incorporating virtual team building activities or more beneficial mental health wellness perks.
It’s also a great opportunity to increase awareness about any current wellness benefits your company has and extending those more freely to remote workers.
Remote employees tend to be the most "out of the loop," but with remote work becoming the new normal, it's time to invite them back in.
Below, we dive into how to incorporate virtual wellness program ideas that are refreshing and exciting for employees both in-house and outside your workplace.
Here are some ways to get creative with your virtual wellness program ideas:
1. Start a Healthy Well-Being Hub
Make it easy for your remote team to access healthy resources at any time. Below, you’ll find ideas for digital resources that you can easily pop on a Slack channel or in a Google Drive to share with your team.
A few ways to build up your healthy library:
Make it easy: As you see health and wellness articles you love, save them to a file for later use for newsletters or weekly health tips you email your team.
2. Host Virtual Lunch and Learns
A lunch and learn is a presentation or training session offered to employees in a laid-back style. Styles and formats vary, but it generally includes coverage of a single topic during a lunch hour. Employers can choose from an array of topics from personal financial wellness to stress management techniques that can be taught by local experts or even someone in your company’s benefits department.
Tips for hosting lunch and learns virtually:
Make it easy: If your entire team is still working from home, you can host lunch and learn events with those who are interested. Consider asking local experts like psychologists or personal trainers, for example, to teach content that can help employees stay healthy through the COVID-19 pandemic.
3. Remind Workers of Gym Memberships
Staying physically fit can be a challenge for anyone who works at home. There’s more sitting, plus a fridge that’s like a 24/7 buffet sitting in the next room. Encourage remote employees to take care of their physical health by working out. Weekly strength training and cardio workouts are recommended for adults by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Here’s how to get remote employees to move more and sit less:
Make it easy: Send out a list of wellness benefits to your employees once a quarter. It will remind them to use their hard-earned employee perks. If you consistently see a perk go unused — like gym memberships — consider cancelling it and saving the money for another team wellness benefit.
4. Create Your Own Fitness Challenges and Classes
Streaming workouts and fitness classes is easy to do as long as your team members have a strong WiFi connection. The best challenges are the ones that depend on self-reporting because they’re easy to do and require little effort on the employer’s behalf.
How to create engaging fitness challenges:
Make it easy: Ask your team what would inspire them to participate. If they have ideas for videos, challenges, or classes, ask them to send them to you so you can compile a catalog. Check out our 6 Easy Fitness and Wellness Challenges for Any Workplace.
5. Host Good-for-the-Soul Meetings
When employees are working outside the office, they still want to feel like part of the team. That doesn’t mean unnecessary meetings should be a requirement, but it also doesn’t mean they should miss out on fun ones, either. Emotional connections can keep employees engaged, a must for employee satisfaction on all fronts, but especially for remote workers.
Consider hosting feel-good meetings like:
Make it easy: Get in touch with your employees to see what they would like to see implemented into team meetings or playful gatherings. Make an anonymous survey on a channel like SurveyMonkey to get honest feedback.
Get Creative With Your Virtual Wellness Program Ideas
You can create plenty of virtual team building activities through your virtual wellness program ideas. From virtual happy hours to intriguing lunch and learn events, you have the power to invite your remote employees into your workplace wellness culture however you wish.
Remember, the more fun your wellness programs are, the more engaged your employees will be. Plus, remote employees who feel a part of the team will be more likely to stay engaged, informed, and be better team players. Check out The Ultimate Resource Guide for Remote Teamwork & Wellness Success from TotalWellness.