How to make the most of your wellbeing budget

After more than 14 years supporting organisational wellbeing, here are some of the most effective ways we have found to make your hard won budget for wellbeing work hard.

Create wellbeing information hubs

Whether an ‘old school’ notice board, or a suite of digital wellbeing pages make it easy for people to find wellbeing information.  If you work in a multi-site organisation, look to replicate this across each local site so that messages are consistent and shared.  If you have a mix of office and field-based workers, the combination of a tangible and a virtual wellbeing notice board can help ensure everyone feels included.

Help your Wellbeing Champions to stand out

Wellbeing Champions help individual employees, teams and leaders to prioritise wellbeing.  As normal members of staff, they are ideally placed to become a go-to contact.  By providing them with colour-coded lanyards, or even T-shirts or caps, they will become more widely known to their colleagues.  Why not create a photo board with their details, so people can put faces to names?

Link to national initiatives

Plan your wellbeing focus around national awareness days. Not only will you benefit from the wider media coverage, but you can also often request organisation information packs for free. By reflecting health messages from the wider community you will also help underline the role that health and wellness have in the workplace.

Speak up

Annual conferences and away days are a great way to target a large audience with a shared message.  There’s always the option to commission a professional speaker, and this can help kick-start a programme and inspire individuals to take action to support their resilience and wellbeing.  There might be someone in your organisation who is already well-versed on a particular aspect of wellbeing. How could you make them heard at events?

Make the most of your managers

Reaching all corners of your organisation can be tricky, particularly if you operate across multiple sites.  Managers are key influencers of the microclimate in each team. Once they start to role-model healthy behaviours, their team are more likely to do so, too.  Consider supporting your managers to understand more about wellbeing and how to nurture a positive environment in their team, and then allow the ripple effect to take hold.

When we work with organisations, identifying how to make the most of what they have already got is central to working out how we can best support them.  How could you make the most of your wellbeing budget?