Your corporate wellness plan is more than a health insurance benefit or free gym membership. It’s a reflection of how much you value your employees’ vitality and happiness over the long term. The best plans foster and support a culture of wellness — a culture that increases performance, promotes good faith, and provides real value to workers.
Here at Olive Branch Wellness Center in South Elgin, we have the experience, compassion, and level of accountability you need to create this type of culture of wellness in your company. We provide comprehensive support for small and medium businesses — as well as consulting services that can fit any size or type of organization. Contact us directly to set up a consultation, or read on to understand our philosophy and approach to corporate wellness in the Chicagoland area.
Applying Naturopathic Practices to Your Company
As naturopaths, we follow a general order of care when helping our patients. We get the big picture, remove barriers to success, help stimulate positive change, and nudge things along as necessary. After that, we help enact structural improvement and apply our gentle, natural techniques directly as needed.
The therapeutic order is our guiding structure for individual patient care, but it also can serve as a general guideline for organizations. As a matter of fact, as corporate wellness advisors and facilitators, we apply this therapeutic order to each plan we create. This makes sure that each company gets the same level of personal attention we provide for our patients.
But enough general talk. Let’s take a look at how these principles apply in real life.
Defining Success
What are the goals of your corporate wellness plan? As a leader, you probably already know that vague goals lead to (at best) vague success.
If you feel like you’re always stuck at square one with your wellness plan, you’re not alone. We’ve seen it time and time again, but getting personal almost always helps. Once you have a clear vision of what wellness looks like for your unique organization, it becomes a lot easier to work towards that ideal level of vitality.
Looking at Your Current Plan
Once you know where you’re going, you’ll need to know where you are. This is sometimes easier said than done. Especially if you’ve had other consultants or contractors working on your corporate wellness projects, it can be difficult to step back and take stock of everything that’s going on.
Luckily, as naturopaths, this is one of the things that we do best. Our “whole person” approach to wellness requires us to pursue a holistic understanding of each patient’s psychological, physical, and emotional state. Using our experience and knowledge of how large organizations operate, we can apply the same principles to a company.
In short, give us a call if things seem complicated. We’re used to sorting out what’s happening in the culture and operations of businesses — and giving leaders the big-picture assessments they need to make decisions.
Removing Obstacles to Success
One of the first steps of naturopathic care is removing obstacles to wellness. Of course, it’s also an important part of making a successful corporate wellness plan.
There are so many things that could act as an obstacle to the success of your plan. It would be difficult to name them all because each company has a different situation. However, at the top of most lists is a failure to really commit to long-term, integrated strategies. Here are some specific examples of how that lack of commitment might manifest:
- One-off events with no follow-up
- Paying people to comply with plans
- Unhealthy examples set by leaders
- Targeting only specific aspects of wellness
- Redirecting employees to cookie-cutter resources
You might have a great vision, but even the best intentions can’t easily overcome these types of hurdles. These types of practices tend to erode employees’ faith in your plan — mostly because these readymade approaches never really advance your goals the way you might think. Removing these obstacles could be the catalyst that your organization needs to start making progress towards wellness.
Unlocking Your Team’s Desire to Be Well
After you understand your company’s situation and remove barriers to your corporate wellness plan’s success, sometimes the individuals on your team will still need a nudge to get started creating a culture of wellness. We often see this because, frankly, it’s tough to change the old work habits that create unhealthy behavior.
As naturopaths, we believe that the body itself has the power and desire to pursue the highest possible level of vitality. Here at Olive Branch Wellness Center in South Elgin, we believe this also applies to groups.
Your team wants to be as strong as possible — your employees want to become the best they can be. What this means exactly will be different for each individual, but wellness plays an important part in it. Part of our job as strategic advisors and administrators is to show your team members the connection between these personal goals and your wellness plan.
Seeing the Plan as a Whole System
Apart from understanding and empowerment, coordination is probably the most important key to wellness plan success. One common reason wellness plans fail is compartmentalization.
In other words, the wellness plan is siloed off into its own little area of your operations. Just like your initial analysis is more of a challenge when there are too many people involved, the day-to-day operation also gets more complicated if you have multiple parties working on your plan.
It’s good to have lots of people working on a big challenge, but they need to be coordinated. If not, each will have a slightly different approach — leading to a mess of overlap, conflict, and confusion that reduces the effectiveness and efficiency of your wellness strategy.
This is where the naturopathic concept of “treating the whole person” always serves us well. We look at what we can do for your company, but also at how our services and strategies might fit in with (or replace) other wellness-plan practices you have.
Applying Naturopathic Techniques and Practices to Your Corporate Wellness Plan
We work with companies of all sizes — here in the South Elgin area, St. Charles, in greater Chicagoland, and across the country. Whether you’re looking for that secret ingredient to complete your wellness package or you want to use a gentle, natural approach as your foundational strategy, we can help you form a corporate wellness plan that fits perfectly for your business.
Please feel free to reach out to us directly with any questions you might have at 630-370-7290. We’re looking forward to hearing from you — and helping you create a culture of wellness that increases efficiency, controls health-related costs, and leads everyone on your team to the highest level of vitality possible.
1 Comment