4 Steps To Sell Wellness To Executives

The desire for corporate wellness programs by employees is incredibly high as evidenced by wellness and fitness programs being the most requested digital engagement software. Despite this desire, employees often find their employer disinterested in wellness. Try these few helpful tips below to “sell” wellness to your executives and get your wellness program started.

Show Impact

Executives are aware that healthcare expenses are adversely impacting the bottom-line, but between endless meetings and other priorities, wellness tends to be just another initiative that sits on the backburner. To make corporate wellness a top priority within your organization, you must show the broad impact wellness has, especially beyond just a vehicle to slow the growth of healthcare premiums. Talk to executives about the impact of sitting at a desk all day on productivity or the cost of unwell employees. When you broaden the conversation beyond healthcare expenses, executives will see the enormous impact wellness can have on a business, making it a higher priority and a point of action.

Demonstrate Interest

Wellness programs will not be successful if no one wants to participate so show executives that employees want wellness, especially from their managers. Executives will be quick to act if you can show them that their employees want wellness. Also, numbers will help crystalize your point. Try collecting data on the number of employees already engaging in wellness on their own or conduct a survey to gauge employee interest.

Address Roadblocks

When done properly, wellness works! Often, mixed opinions on the efficacy of wellness deter executives from acting. The best way to manage these roadblocks is to proactively address them. The charges against wellness programs almost exclusively challenge biometric screenings. This makes sense given the cost of unwell employees of these procedures, the significant cost, and the minimal impact to employee engagement (broaden thinking beyond healthcare expenses!). Executives need to not throw the baby out with the bath water, and rather than dismiss all wellness initiatives, executives, if educated properly, will learn to embrace the good parts and ignore the bad.

Make It Personal

Numbers are great and can certainly move a data-driven executive, but don’t forget to make wellness what it truly is – personal. The best products of great wellness programs are the things that they prevent – heart attacks, diabetes, premature ailments… Showing the personal impact wellness can have on executives and employees will make wellness real to your audience.