Are you passionate about pursuing a culture of health in your organization, but struggle to ignite that same passion in key stakeholders? C-suite support is not only a financial necessity; it’s essential to the overall success of a corporate wellness program.

Depending on where leadership is with their own wellness journey, it can be challenging to get the buy-in you need. Revolutionizing workplace culture confronts legacy beliefs about what it takes to succeed, which often results in chronic stress. To pursue a culture of health, leadership must be persuaded that taking care of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health enables individuals to be even more ambitious and hard-working than peers that neglect their well-being. This article breaks down how to get senior leadership buy-in for a corporate wellness program.

Tips for Selling the C-Suite on a Wellness Program

In this post:

1. Define Goals & Objectives

2. Connect the Dots

3. Secure Their Support

4. Present the Numbers

5. Leveraging Strive to Design & Implement a Wellness Program

Define Goals & Objectives

It’s crucial to bring defined goals and objectives for the wellness program to C-suite leadership, as this will ultimately guide its success and sustainability. First, identify the overarching goal of the program, such as pursuing a culture of health, employee retention, or reducing presenteeism. From there, specific objectives should be established to achieve that goal, such as reducing stress levels, increasing physical activity, or improving nutrition habits. These objectives should be measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound, so progress can be tracked and adjustments can be made as needed.

The goals and objectives should be aligned with the business’ values and mission, as well as the needs and interests of the employees. Incorporating employee feedback and involvement in the goal-setting process can also increase engagement and buy-in for the program. By clearly defining the goals and objectives, a wellness program can be focused, effective, and contribute to the success of the business.

Connect the Dots

It’s critical to help leadership understand how the goal of the wellness program ties into the business’s mission. Demonstrate how the program objectives help achieve the goal. For example, if the goal is to help employees be more engaged at work, describe how participating in stress management or fitness classes together forms connections that translate into a happier, more collaborative workplace. Having a long-term and well-thought-out initiative bolsters your case for leadership support.

Emphasize the impact introducing wellness initiatives has on workplace culture.

Bonus: Get simple, effective tips for selling the C-suite on a wellness program in one convenient place.

Secure Their Support

Since the success of an employee wellness program is largely dependent on leadership endorsement, it’s important to start working with C-suite executives to secure their support up front. Ask them questions like:

• Are you supportive of understanding employees’ needs?
• Are you committed to providing wellness opportunities to them?
• Is it important to you that we demonstrate care for our employees’ well-being?
• What does an initiative like this mean to you?

This conversation helps gauge to what extent leaders are willing to commit to participating. They may be all in, getting involved in wellness offerings, modeling healthy behaviors, and engaging in open dialogue. Or, visible support may look like sending out communications from their email, or attending a webinar once a month. Whatever C-suite support is for your organization, how employees embrace a wellness program relies on this commitment.

In one case, a wellness expert from Strive helped humanize the wellness program for a C-suite executive by helping them understand their own well-being. By uncovering the aspects of wellness they were interested in pursuing, we could tie the goals of the wellness program back to what they value in their own company. Do they want to walk into a campus of happy people, or chronically stressed out? They began to understand the wellness program as the vehicle to transform company culture.

Present the Numbers

Leveraging data-driven insights where possible, provide detailed information and facts about the program’s projected costs, potential ROI, and overall benefit to the organization. Help leadership envision a corporate wellness program as a strategic, long-term move that can start small and evolve. Consistency and sustainability are key to lasting behavior change.

Conclude with a summary of the benefits of workplace wellness programs, and remind leadership there is also a cost involved in neglecting to prioritize employee well-being.

Leveraging Strive to Design & Implement a Wellness Program

Strive wellness programs are designed for ongoing engagement and sustainability. While corporate wellness programs are a vital business strategy, they can be administratively taxing and inconsistent if implemented without leveraging wellness experts.

Our programmatic approach makes wellness easy for employees to participate in and for the internal team to administer as we take care of:

• Quick registration
• Liability waivers with the click of a button
• Class/event reminders
• Marketing communications
• Data collection & analysis
• Programmatic recommendations

Book a discovery call to explore how you can leverage Strive’s wellness consulting, advice for taking the initiative to your leadership team, or a turnkey approach to wellness program implementation.