Business Wellness Program & Incentives

Corporate fitness programs not only build camaraderie and morale, they can improve company bottom lines considerably. By improving your workforce health, you can in turn lower absenteeism, improve productivity, decrease health care costs and recruit better talent. Incentives and wellness programs can also help your company increase employee participation and team building skills.

At YouCanShape, we encourage organisations of any size to join our fitness and wellbeing programme, giving their employees access to a huge range of resources, in turn incentivising them with health based goals. We want your workplace to be healthy, strong and proud!

What Is A Wellness Program Incentive

The goal of the wellness program is to help employees adopt and maintain healthy behaviors. It is best when employees are internally motivated to be healthy. But sometimes employees get stuck in unhealthy habits and they need help adopting and maintaining healthy behaviors.

The best way to do this is to provide small and ongoing health and wellness related incentives. These can be rewards to eating healthily in the workplace, taking a break to have a walk, or completing a workout out of office hours. 

By encouraging these healthy behaviours both inside and outside of work, your workforce slowly progresses towards a more healthy and mindful group of employees. 

During our workplace wellness programme, employees are encouraged to earn the chance to win, this keeps the program fun, engaging and motivating. They can complete exercises or log their food diary in order to work towards incentives. 

What Are The Incentives Or Rewards?

Employers get even greater adoption of employee health behavior with a benefits-based incentive plan. Benefits-based well-being incentive programs typically offer employees time off work, parking options, work from home incentives and many more. 

Monetary incentives include gift vouchers, discounts at popular retailers or money back offers. 

At YouCanShape, we encourage employers to offer a combination of both benefits and monetary value. When combined with simple, short-term prizes, benefits-based incentives will provide employees with enough motivation to get the wellness ball rolling until they begin to feel the internal benefits of a healthy lifestyle.

How To Promote Wellness In The Workplace

There are a few easy ways to encourage and promote wellness within the workplace:

* Encourage team building activities

* Encourage preparedness

* Encourage rest

* Encourage meditation and relaxation

* Encourage exercise inside and outside of work

* Encourage giving back

* Encourage breaks

If your organisation is new to this, or trying to take a step in the right direction, it can seem overwhelming. That’s where YouCanShape can help. Our health and wellness platform allows employees to easily report completion of incentive requirements. Most often completion of requirements are reported automatically when employees complete a workout or a challenge. Sometimes employers require their employees to provide verification that some activity has been completed.

Benefits Of Corporate Wellness Incentives

A corporate fitness program improves employee health in several ways. Workers lose weight, reduce stress, lower blood pressure and sleep better. All of these can reduce sick days, doctor visit and workplace injuries. 

Motivation

While employee education is an important part of any corporate wellness program, a fitness incentive program motivates employees to participate. Holding a team competition or offering cash or other prizes can create a buzz throughout your workplace and get more employees participating. It can also attract more healthy talent as health-conscious recruits may choose an organisation with this type of programme in place over an organisation that overlooks health. 

Team Competitions

One way to increase fitness program participation is to create a team contest. You can draw names at random to create teams, pit management against staff, place workers from different departments on teams to create more interaction or have different offices face off against each other.

Weight-loss Challenge

Weight loss is one aspect of fitness that concerns or interests many people. Create a weight-loss challenge as either an individual contest or team competition. You can award a prize or prizes based on total number of pounds lost or percentage of individual or team weight lost.

Fitness Challenge

If you don't want to focus on weight loss only, have a broader fitness competition. Track total number of verifiable hours participants exercised during the competition period, how much each person or team lowered their cholesterol or a fitness challenge, with participants or teams competing in tests such as number of sit-ups and push-ups, minutes on a treadmill or jumping rope, timed laps swum or other measurements. Work with a fitness professional and your insurance company to create a test that is safe for all participants.