How Would Gmail Categorize Your Company’s Wellness Program?

On May 29th, Google announced a small but significant change to Gmail.  Google introduced a newly formatted inbox that automatically sorts emails into separate tabs.  According to Google, the new Gmail “is organized in a way that lets you see what’s new at a glance and decide which emails you want to read when.”  This new feature is great for users, but creates new challenges for businesses vying for your attention.

To the chagrin of many online marketers, this new, “smarter” inbox essentially separates emails that are important, from emails that are less important.  If you are a Gmail user, you are familiar with three of the categories or tabs: Primary, Social, and Promotions.

Like Gmail’s new inbox, corporate wellness can also be divided.  Wellness programs exist in many corporations across America, but companies approach wellness very differently.  What happens if we apply Gmail’s new auto-categorization feature to the current state of corporate wellness?  It would probably look something like this…

Promotions Wellness

Wellness is offered but it is not taken seriously.  Employees are presented with wellness resources, but the resources are limited and receive low employee engagement and participation.  Similar to Promotions emails, wellness is not an important part of the employee culture and tends to be deleted.

Social Wellness

The company dabbles in wellness, but only when it’s fun and convenient.  For example, a few of the younger employees organize a company softball team and play a game once a week.  The turnout for the post-game happy hour is often higher than the game’s.  Like Social emails, wellness gets some attention by a subset of the employees, but other employees could care less.

Primary Wellness

Wellness is core to the company’s culture.  The company invests in their employees’ health and wellbeing through a high-engagement wellness solution.  Wellness is not a once a week event, wellness is encouraged daily and takes a number of different forms.  Wellness includes healthy snacks in the kitchen, a Health Risk Assessment, and offering a wellness program that has customized and personalized wellness action plans for each employee.  Wellness is not a nice to have; it’s a need to have.  Like the primary tab, wellness is a must read.

How would Gmail categorize your company’s wellness program?

For more on Gmail’s new inbox: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/05/a-new-inbox-that-puts-you-back-in.html