Corporate health and wellness programs offer opportunities to raise awareness of the need to create a healthy work environment. A healthy workforce goes a long way in building organizational resilience. Corporate health and wellness programs have been around for a long time in India. Many organizations adopt it to align with national health and safety policies, running their programs like a checkbox, while many others adopt it to fulfill their duty of care and use it as a competitive advantage to increase productivity.
It should be noted that while quick fixes are simple, successful health and wellness programs require commitment, long-term planning, and alignment with company culture and values. As we have come out of the shadows of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have seen an increased focus from organizations on employee health and wellness initiatives. International SOS has been at the forefront of providing health and wellness services to large organizations for 30 years. However, we have seen some marked changes on this front in recent months.
We propagate the emphasis on designing and integrating health and wellness programs in organizations that are tailored to help managers and employees identify problems before they become large-scale problems by providing access to qualified support and professional. While there is a lot of literature on this topic in terms of ROI and benefits of such programs, we want to focus on some current trends and a roadmap for successful design and adoption of health and wellness programs in Indian organizations.
We list some of the roadmap milestones that are essential for any organization before embarking on this journey:
1) Define the purpose of the wellness program: Think of it as a journey rather than a race to implement. Find the right experience to define the path towards the well-being of your organization. Today many companies focus on performing an annual medical check-up. Is it so? Well, not at all. Chances are if you are an IT company in India with an average age population of
premium “freebie”. To add to this, much data collected on employee health is wasted because it is treated as a “transaction.” Neither the organization gains any knowledge nor does the employee gain the benefits of their past health check records.
2) Find a trusted partner to consult, design, implement and govern: Medical programs that include wellness need medical expertise. A non-medical person cannot design or direct a medical program.
3) “Delivery less”, efficiently instead of “deliver more”, cheap: I always ask my clients; Will you be taking your loved one/dependent to the doctor you’ve hired or the clinic you’ve set up at your workplace? If the answer is no, say so out loud. Providing employee health and wellness at low cost or inefficiently is worse than providing nothing at all. I make this statement, setting aside the fact that, as an employer, you are subject to medicolegal liability for providing substandard or substandard service to your employees through your contract with a service partner.
4) Find an orchestrator for your wellness program: A big learning from the IT industry was the importance of governance for any large and complex program. While wellness may not have huge budgets, with its targeted mix of medical and wellness services and scope of programs (for your employees and their dependents), it better be well orchestrated.
Some current trends in setting up health and wellness programs, which are being discussed in large organizations in India are;
a) How should employee health and wellness programs be geographically defined? When you are a global organization and think of this as a global benefits program, you will need to come up with a global construct that addresses local cultural and regulatory needs.
b) Who should be eligible for the corporate health and wellness program? Is it the employee or is it the employee’s family or the employee’s extended family? This is the question that has arisen since the start of the pandemic, especially in countries where the medical infrastructure is not up to date.
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