Developing a well-being program: How to get started?

As my TriHD colleague Magaly De Bruyne put it in her blogpost: “The days when well-being equaled a weekly fruit basket and an ergonomic desk, are long gone.” Effective employee well-being strategies target physical, mental, social, economic, and environmental factors and optimize working conditions.

But where do you begin when you decide to improve the well-being of the employees within your organization? Wouldn’t an evidence based step-by-step guide help you to structure your efforts and get stakeholders on board?

How to get started?

The Intervention Mapping approach is an evidence-based approach with a strong foundation in health psychology used by health educators and health promoters.

The approach starts from the idea that health and well-being are the result of the individual and the environment in which the individual spends its time. Targets are therefore behavior, daily activities and work environment.

By following the step-by-step approach, you will be able to create an innovative, evidence-based, practical well-being strategy that is tailored to the needs of your company's employees.

A step-by-step plan

Let’s put the theory into practice in this example. Leadership greenlights the idea and a team is formed.

Step 1 - Needs Assessment

The project team consists of a member of the HD department, a team member with project management skills, and employees from your company. The needs assessment you’ve conducted to identify well-being issues shows you that a significant part of your employees has difficulty with managing work-life, especially parental responsibilities.
You and your team continue to gather more information through focus groups, individual interviews and surveys. You want to understand the specific challenges consultants are faced with while trying to balance their work with being a parent.

Based on all this information the team formulates a program goal: to support employees in effectively managing their parental responsibilities while maintaining work satisfaction and productivity.

Step 2 - Change Objectives

The corresponding change objectives target both the individual behaviors and the environment of the employees. These objectives include implementing family-friendly policies, providing resources for work-life integration, and creating a workplace culture that values and supports working parents.

Step 3 - Design

The team starts to search for theories and evidence-based methods that could positively impact the change objectives formulated in step 2. The group decides to base their program on aspects from family-friendly workplace policies, time management strategies, and parenting support. The program they design includes flexible work schedules, family events and programs, parental leave benefits, time management strategies, and workshops for stress management and work-life integration.

Step 4 - Practical Applications

Now the team is ready to create program materials. These include: guidelines for parental leave policies, an annual family and friends company event, and internal or external training for work-life integration and stress management. These materials are pilot tested within the target group of employees who are also parents. They get the chance to give feedback on the materials. This will give the team an opportunity to make the necessary adjustments to certain program elements that do not communicate the right program message.

Step 5 - Implementation

The team has a finished product. Now they have to strategize how to influence the behavior of key stakeholders like managers and colleagues - to enhance understanding and support of consultants with parental duties.

They get back to the drawing board and formulate adoption, implementation, and maintenance change objectives based again on theory and evidence.

They might have an objective to include company wide communications and awareness campaigns, and target leadership and management through training. The materials should include an evaluation of the potential positive impact of such a program on employee well-being overall, and work productivity.

Step 6 - Evaluation

When the program is implemented, the team is now tasked with the responsibility of evaluating its effectiveness in supporting working parents, while maintaining job satisfaction and work productivity. To do this they assess changes in the perceived work-life balance, stress levels and job satisfaction. Partially similar to step 1, through surveys, polls, and interviews. In this step, the team also assesses whether they’ve followed steps 1 through 4 correctly. They look for strengths and improvements in program design and implementation, and use this feedback to improve all future well-being efforts.

Ready to create a well-being plan for your organization?

By following the evidence-based approach of Intervention Mapping, you can create an innovative well-being strategy that truly addresses the needs of your employees, and thus creates the right return on investment.

I encourage you to use this information and get the conversation going within your organization, to advocate for effective well-being strategies.

Curious about more ways TriHD’s professionals can help your organization with Human Development? Be sure to have a look at our Portfolio of Services.