Introduction
Employee wellness portals provide employees with opportunities to stay active, reduce stress, build connections with coworkers, and improve their general health. When it comes to supporting technology, employers face a crowded landscape of workplace wellness platforms.
The best wellness portals start with modern software. With so many applications in their personal and professional lives, employees will only use a system that has an intuitive, user-friendly design. Simplicity is key - the highest performing employee wellness portals take a mobile-first approach and don't complicate the process with unnecessary steps.
When searching for wellness portals, it is important to identify your program must-haves. Below is a comprehensive checklist of the most important features to consider when evaluating employee wellness platforms.
Wellness Assessment
Get to know your employees. Before launching a new wellness initiative, identify the areas of health and wellness that they are looking to improve. Workplace wellness portals should provide personalized wellness assessments that gauge how employees are feeling across multiple dimensions of well-being. The most effective assessment tool goes beyond physical health and delivers meaningful insights on the mental, emotional, and financial wellness of employees.
Wellness Challenges
What better way to engage your employees than with some healthy competition? Inclusive wellness portals promote healthy behaviors through team and individual challenges across a wide range of topics. Industry-leading wellness platforms offer diverse libraries of turnkey challenges, as well as the option to customize each program to incorporate organization-specific events, activities, and behaviors.
Device Integrations
Highly engaging wellness portals allow users to connect the apps and wearable devices that they already know and love. Solutions that integrate directly with leading consumer wellness technologies, such as Apple Health, Fitbit, and Garmin simplify data tracking for employees. If you can sign up for a free trial, test out the integration process for wellness portals with your own applications and devices.
Fitness Classes
Employees want fitness solutions that are applicable regardless of their location, lifestyle, or preferences. Within wellness portals, employees should be able to choose from a wide range of on-demand fitness classes with a diverse group of instructors. They also want the ability to filter classes by duration, intensity, equipment, and other ways to personalize the experience. The most advanced wellness platforms allow employees to stream workouts and offer live classes for a dynamic, shared experience.
Health Education
The journey to better health starts with education and awareness, but with so many internet sources─good and bad─it can be difficult for employees to locate credible information. The best wellness portals improve well-being literacy by providing reliable, evidence-based health information on a wide breadth of topics. In addition to regular health tips, wellness portals can feature direct access to educational webinars.
Health Coaching
Health coaching is designed to guide and motivate employees to become advocates for their own health. Coaches help individuals make positive behavior changes and engage in healthy lifestyle habits, such as exercise, stress management, and goal setting. Forward-thinking wellness platforms utilize a new coaching model that allows employees to interact with digital coaches on apps like MyFitnessPal and MapMyRun. This approach offers more consistent support and makes a larger impact on employee health.
Rewards
Most successful wellness programs offer participants rewards or prizes to incentivize engagement in the program. Since goals, objectives, and budgets differ significantly with each organization, wellness portals need to offer a varied selection of reward and prizes. Wellness platforms that support curated reward options are recognized as delivering the greatest impact on participation. This feature should provide you with the flexibility to offer gift cards, fitness goods, benefits-based contributions, and more.
Customizable Communications
Wellness program promotion is a key success factor for organizations that want to drive higher employee engagement. Best-in-class wellness platforms offer pre-drafted communications to increase program awareness and communicate to participants. All communications should be branded to your organization and personalized for each employee. Wellness portals that allow for direct customization of communications and content are the easiest to use for program administrators.
Reporting
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) for a wellness program is a top priority. Data-driven wellness portals offer simple and relevant analytics to provide actionable intelligence on wellness program ROI. This information helps optimize programming, deliver desired results, and achieve wellness goals. Real-time insights should be available to all wellness program administrators through on-demand dashboards and exportable reports.
Social Feed
Wellness programs can be designed to promote positive social interactions, boost team cohesion, and improve engagement. Rather than pushing employees to adopt yet another communication tool, progressive wellness platforms are encouraging the use of enterprise collaboration tools. Connecting your wellness platform with Microsoft Teams or Slack empowers employees to socialize and share their wellness experiences as a natural extension of existing workflows.