How to Implement A Wellness Incentive Strategy at Your Company: 3 Tips

Employee burnout has risen in recent years, with 52% of the workforce reporting feeling dissatisfied with their job in 2024 versus 43% in 2020. Burnout poses significant challenges to employers, such as decreased motivation, productivity, and retention. And it can translate into financial losses as well, with studies predicting that burnout can cost companies up to 34% of an employee’s salary. 

It’s crucial for your company to not only understand and respect wellness practices but also actively encourage them at your workplace. 

This is where wellness incentives come in. Whether you’re offering a gift for walking the most steps in 30 days or are allocating a budget for workplace fitness classes, these initiatives dissuade burnout and encourage healthy habits in a fun, engaging manner. 

In this guide, we’ll explore how to implement workplace incentives that fight fatigue and keep leading talent engaged. 

1. Set Goals

Like with any successful workplace initiative, you need firm goals to lay the foundation for your wellness incentive strategy. Here are some basic steps to setting goals for your program:

• Understand barriers to employee participation. Employee participation might suffer due to employees lacking free time and the program being too complex and dull. Pinpoint the specific obstacles to your program’s success and build safeguards to prevent them from occurring.
• Establish key performance indicators (KPIs). If your end goal is to improve employee productivity, you might track metrics like total projects completed or the efficiency of project completion. Or, you might measure employee retention or satisfaction before and after the program is instituted to see if the program makes a significant difference. 
• Set a budget, timeline, and rough protocol for procuring and distributing rewards. For instance, if you have less time to allocate toward awarding incentives, you might outsource the program to a third-party gifting company that handles the disbursement of rewards for you. 
• Brainstorm incentive ideas. Will you focus on offering material rewards, or will you offer intangible rewards, like vacation time? Choose your incentives based on your employees’ interests. 

Successful goal-setting requires more than just drawing up ideas without employee input. After all, your initiatives target your employees, so you should listen to their advice and set goals together. Use a fast, convenient questionnaire with short-answer and multiple-choice questions to gather information that will help you offer rewards your employees actually want. 

2. Test Your Program

Before rolling out your wellness incentives to the entire workforce, test the strategy with a small focus group. This empowers you to proactively address any gaps so you can achieve the best results when the entire company participates. 

Keep these best practices in mind when trialing your incentives:

• Select a diverse focus group of employees from different age groups, backgrounds, and departments so you get a variety of perspectives.

• Offer multiple types of incentives to understand which ideas employees respond best to.

• Promote transparency by encouraging participants to share their honest opinions and allowing them to be anonymous if they prefer.

• Monitor the same KPIs determined in goal-setting to extrapolate the results you might see when you roll out the initiatives to the whole workplace.

• Collect both quantitative and qualitative feedback to access more nuanced insights into your incentives.

• Meet regularly with your focus group, both individually and as a group, to glean insights while they’re fresh.

Depending on the scope of your wellness program, the trial progress for incentives might take a few weeks or several months. Don’t rush the process to get the most accurate picture of your initiative in action.

3. Roll Out Incentives

It’s time to put your program to the test by making it available to all employees! The first steps of this process are crucial, so use these tips to begin well:

• Start small. You don’t need to offer a massive prize to your employees right away. Work your way up to larger projects gradually, starting with smaller programs with lower stakes. For instance, you might plant 5 trees for everyone who attends a workplace yoga class. 

• Actively promote your incentives. Employees can only participate in your workplace wellness initiative if they understand how to get started and the potential rewards on the line. Advertise your new rewards via email, during team meetings, and in one-on-one conversations.

• Communicate openly. As previously mentioned, employees may not participate in your initiative if they perceive it as too complicated. Provide resources like FAQ guides and program leader contact information so everyone can easily get their questions answered. You could even host a Q&A session so employees can ask questions live. 

• Host a launch event. Regardless of whether you’re offering participants a social impact gift or a group experience, hype employees up for your program with a fun wellness launch event. This is a great opportunity for employees to learn more about incentives in a laid-back setting.

Collecting feedback during this initial phase is essential for addressing issues proactively. Send out an open feedback form so employees can provide suggestions at any point during the rollout process. Check periodically and acknowledge as much feedback as possible, regardless of whether you decide to act on their recommendations. If you don’t decide to proceed with feedback, explain why and thank the employee for their contribution.

Once your wellness program and incentives are in full swing, start thinking about how to make it even more valuable to your business. As previously mentioned, you might choose to work with a gifting company to support long-term growth of the program. Or, perhaps you want to try different rewards as your employee community changes. Regardless of your wellness program’s trajectory, effectively offering incentives can make health and wellness fun for your entire workplace, beating burnout and promoting sustained success.

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