As we get into 2025, you’ve seen it all before - fostering positive work environments and providing mental health support. The problem for People & Culture or Employee Wellbeing Managers is that your people have seen it all before too.
Most corporate wellness programs talk about work-life balance and workplace wellness. But the old adage “build it and they will come” is no longer true at this point. Organisations and leaders need to be a little more innovative with their stress management and hybrid work strategies.
From the side of leadership, the end goal is always going to be employee productivity - and why not? Today’s business world sees huge changes happen instantly, from election results to mass redundancies and a cost of living crisis affecting many bottom lines.
If you’re here, you already get the foundations: that when people like where they work, their performance escalates. When talented people bring their A-game, the results are stronger business growth.
So how can you start making that pathway a reality? What do the new generations of the workforce need to feel committed and willing to give their energetic best? Where do technology, apps and wearables enter the mix in wellness initiatives?
Start With Foundations: Mental Health Support
While innovation and being relevant to social trends is important, the start needs to be on a solid basis: mental health. However the delivery is realised, mental health and condition-specific strategies should be the core reasoning behind employee wellbeing. If the focus is solely on the end result - productivity and performance - the whole thing falls flat.
So before we get into the more creative and fresh approaches about healthy lifestyles, ask yourself: are these present, utilised and signposted benefits?
Providing Access to Counseling and Therapy
Employees increasingly expect mental health support, and providing counselling services is a straightforward way to meet that need within employee assistance programs (eaps). Offering free or discounted access to therapy can help employees manage stress and feel valued, leading to a positive shift in workplace culture. With convenient teletherapy options, workers can access support without leaving their home, making counselling a practical part of any corporate wellness programme. Flu vaccination drives, health assessment and regular health screenings are basic needs in this area.
Implementing Mental Health Days
Mental health days and return-to-work procedures are a small change with big benefits. Allowing employees to take time off specifically for mental wellbeing shows they’re respected as whole people, not just workers. This strategy can ease stress, reduce burnout, and encourage employees to recharge when needed, leading to greater productivity in the long run. When corporate wellness programmes include mental health days, the message is clear: employee wellbeing matters.
Training Managers to Recognize Mental Health Needs
Managers are often the first to notice when an employee is struggling, which is why mental health training for managers is essential. Training can cover recognising stress signs, knowing when to offer support, and understanding resources available. A manager skilled in mental health awareness can help address issues before they escalate, supporting workplace wellness and showing a proactive approach to employee wellbeing.
Reframing the Purpose of Wellbeing
Simply putting on a wellbeing event or activity and hoping people will show up can lead to post-event questions of why the turn out wasn’t as expected. Simply getting people aware of and then showing up to the event is a big success, let alone if it can improve their health and let them feel more energetic and capable during the day.
This is where total worker health innovation comes in - and it doesn’t have to be anything especially incredible - the innovation and value on investment (voi) comes in the reframing of the benefits.
Employee Engagement via Virtual Wellbeing
On-site fitness and physical health - not event themes that are going to get anyone excited. For condition-specific strategies in employee engagement, think ‘pay off’: what’s in it for anyone getting involved? Is diversity, equity and inclusion (dei) related too? Are you customizing wellness programs?
If people focus on their health and wellbeing via educational resources and colleague connection: their health can improve which can lead to improved productivity. But their own, individual goals may be motivated by different payoffs; payoff meaning a result or takeaway. People are better motivated by things like building their professional network, having more opportunities to connect with colleagues, increasing visibility in the company, and raising money for good causes. Workplace wellness can combine all of these payoffs using the latest in tech, and virtual workouts doesn’t have to mean just exercise. It can be meditation and yoga classes, conversations around acts of kindness, arts and craft supplies and more.
Incentivized Wellness Challenges
Sustainability and social responsibility initiatives can combine workplace wellness trends. Corporate wellness programs often forget flexibility policies and incentivisation beyond ‘good health’ and employee productivity. Mental health resources are important and Wellness challenges sound fun, but people are very busy with their day job!
Incentivisation is crucial, not only for the sheer delight of winning prizes and benefits, but also for recognition. People are more likely to put their effort in and show up if they feel recognised for a positive effect on culture. People are smart - they can feel if they are putting effort into a team activity while others are not - yet they are not seen and recognised with gratitude. Next time, they might think ‘why bother?’.
Wellness initiatives and wellbeing events should have built-in incentivisation that rewards, and also recognises effort and good will to a team culture.
Partnerships for Added Value
Employee wellbeing doesn’t have to be insulated from the outside world. Wellness programs can have local gym partnerships, local good causes and communities. People are more likely to get involved and feel a benefit if it’s not just about physical health, if you combine workplace wellness with charity donation, CSR, sustainability and local community groups who need fundraising and attention.
It makes the entire experience more worthwhile and with a higher interaction rate if people think they are helping others. Acts of kindness and gratitude go a long way to refreshing the concept of organisational culture.
Positive Work Environment Means Retention
It doesn’t take much to get people browsing online for other jobs. If it’s not a supportive work environment, then people feel it. If there are no events, activities or emphases on culture, colleague connection, morale of wellbeing, people see other companies building such a culture, and they think ‘why not here?’.
Building a Culture of Recognition
People want more employee recognition than simple call outs on team meetings. Workplace wellness and corporate culture go hand in hand. Productivity only happens when people feel like their boss or company deserves their skills and expertise to be unleashed.
Recognition means a strategic structure of appreciation - and reward beyond nice words. The recognition of employee engagement needs to be highly visible, fair, structured and transparent.
Encouraging Open Communication
Open communication from the perspective of workplace wellness means more than being asked opinions on virtual calls. Anonymous suggestion boxes are one thing. Open communication in a supportive work environment is all about skills development andmultiple structured channels of communication, where employee wellbeing can be talked about openly, giving a culture of transparency and with better employee perspectives.
Engagement strategies and feedback mechanisms need to include safe spaces away from Teams or Slack, and people should be able to both trust feedback anonymously and privately. Management and staff and people’s different needs should be taken into consideration with mutual respect, as some are more willing to speak up, while others don’t see the point. This is also where one-on-one discussions and DEI strategies blend in with wellbeing strategy, and there are openly explained channels where differently abled and located people have a fair opportunity to communicate in the way more realistic for them.
Creating Safe Spaces for Feedback and Dialogue
By safe spaces, this means more than anonymous feedback. Corporate wellness and communication mean that people need a place to feel like they can be their real selves, to unleash their creative ideas. Feedback culture needs somewhere that isn’t the usual place of Zoom calls or Google Meets, but somewhere that people can do things like praise colleagues, share experiences and learnings, mentor others - all beyond the day job, but a vital way of building a culture of employee engagement.
Cross-cultural exchanges from different cultural backgrounds are a must. Cultural festivals, heritage days work well. Imagine an in-person or virtual version of an event with interactive booths, stories of local cuisines and more bringing mutual appreciation and mutual understanding to the table. A sense of community can become real as people talk about traditional activities in DEI + Wellbeing events.
Employee Development
Continuous learning is another angle to drive employee engagement initiatives and employee wellness strategies. Intrinsic motivation comes from an urge to experience leadership development, with purpose-driven experiences igniting self-motivation and a hunger for new skill sets. Stress management, time management and training on public speaking can involve wellbeing in the mix as a solid basis for confidence and courage.
Financial Wellbeing Initiatives
Value on investment (voi) also comes through financial wellbeing education. In a cost-of-living crisis, people appreciate debt management resources as part of employee health and employer support. Financial education and financial stress are innovative benefits to wrap up into the wellbeing mix. Job performance can’t be high with money worries in the back. Retirement planning assistance and student loan repayment programs - nothing fancy, but there are ways to bring wellbeing into the topic, relevant to awareness, acceptance and accountability.
Flexible Working Arrangements
Career changes are more commonplace these days, with people finding creative solutions to employee retention. Hybrid working gives better job satisfaction and people appreciate clear performance goals in this instance. Skills shortages are rife and hiring new people costs a lot. Costs can actually be reduced by spending on stress reduction tools, or considering if perks like unlimited annual leave are right for the company. Work-life balance always scores at the top of surveys in employee needs.
Work-Life Balance
Email blackout periods, employee wellness strategies and right to disconnect are all being talked about now. People don’t only require but expect boundaries, consideration given to burnout potential, as well as caregiving and flexibility. It’s all part of emphasising openly that your company is one that does care about the mental health and physical health of staff, especially during remote work. Stress is inevitable to a degree, yet work-life balance is a proven way to offset this - if leaders are sufficiently educated and the company has a structure in place to address this, more than words in a meeting.
Leveraging Technology for Wellbeing
Technology is seen as too much work to integrate to existing systems, or just 3rd party apps. The ideal piece of tech can make many things a reality: employee engagement, motivation, wellbeing, CSR, rewards and benefits, alongside safe spaces for communication.
The ideal tech can run in the background, doesn’t need extra work from HR, brings data and measurement to wellbeing, and is also affordable. It needs to be in line with the naming and design of your company so that it feels like an intrinsic part of the employer branding, EVP and employee engagement experience.
Wearable Technology for Health Tracking
Health tracking means that people need to be able to sync up their device with the app in just a tap. Wearable technology used in wellness initiatives needs to be so easy to use that the people actually enjoy opening the app and seeing their activity, see where they are in a league, but also earn points and be rewarded. This kind of incentivisation directly leads to employee productivity and importantly, the CFO can see that wellness initiatives are affordable and meet multiple business objectives.
Wellness Apps for Personalised Plans
Personalised wellness plans and personal wellbeing is a must: people need to feel like there are a range of options to suit their diverse needs - again bringing DEI into the equation. It must be inclusive, give people confidence in their work-life balance and build employee wellbeing through more than mere step challenges.
Corporate wellness programs that work are the ones where people get individual feedback and education on how they can live and feel better, with a user journey that gives them both nudges toward better health and also a pathway that delivers step by step micro-courses.
Integrating Wellness Portals into HR Platforms
Anyone in HR, People & Culture, and team leads have enough on their plate. Wellness portals and HR platforms should be corporate solutions that integrate seamlessly. HR aren’t IT staff - the support needs to bring them a hassle free corporate solution that is fully taken care of, practically launches itself and then is self-sufficient.
Workplace wellness and employee wellbeing don’t work unless there is support, launch comms, onboarding journeys, prompts and pushes, and a mobile-first experience that feels more like a social and fun thing to do. to make that a reality, HR shouldn’t do any extra work and the tech should make work easier, not harder.
Why Choose Stayf for Your Workplace Needs?
Stayf was built to make the work of HR and team leads easier. It was made to allow business owners and founders to build a culture where people can easily see they are being considered, recognised and respected.
It is loved by deskless workers and remote teams as it gives them a community feel. Heads of CSR and sustainability use Stayf to align charitable initiatives and fundraising for good causes with employee engagement and wellbeing.
Stayf allows you to get your employees building a people-powered culture. As it syncs with existing rewards, existing HR platforms and the employer branding, Stayf delivers solutions to a variety of business needs - in an affordable way.
Particularly for SMEs and high-growth companies, Stayf means that the founder and CEO know that they have a solution to build employee wellbeing and performance, as well as culture, collaboration and engagement.