Looking at Health and Wellness in a New Light

April 29th, 2013

Have you thought about how Health and Wellness Programs can help your business reduce costs, increase morale and increase retention?

Today?s post is by Mark Davis; Sr. Vice President and COO at SafeSourcing

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal headlined the methods by which Safeway expects to have a strong 2nd half of the year due to emphasis on new programs like their health and wellness initiative.? Safeway?s ?Live Life, Live Long, Live Well?? program has helped its employees and their families manage of the pieces of a healthier life and now they are expanding a variance of that program to their customers with all new healthy food options.? The Simple Nutrition, which will soon be available online, will allow customers to create a dietary program on their own focusing on characteristics like lowering their sodium or cholesterol.

Increasing profits, however, is just one of many reasons to explore a health and wellness program and in today?s blog we will be looking at a few areas that companies can begin exploring to source for their companies in order to achieve a healthier balance for their customers and employees.

Retailer Customer Wellness ? Retailers are choosing to focus on the types of offerings that will benefit their customers first, recognizing that by taking care of their customers, the rest of the business will fall in line.?? With Health and Wellness programs being a strong way to demonstrate this commitment it is no wonder that more companies are embracing them.? The keys to making the program work are to establish buy-in at the executive level that will help you organize a team that learn what is important to your customers.? Surveying your customers to find this out is a good method to learn this information.?

Once you know what is important to your customers you can tailor a program to meet those, whether it is new products, discounts, marketing, in-store cooking demonstrations or finding a 3rd party to partner with to help you develop the program.? Communicating this program effectively to your customers is the key to the success with success being measured by previously established metrics in advance.? All of these things can be done internally or with the assistance of 3rd party consultants.

Corporate Programs ? Focusing on your employees is just as important as focusing on your customers and is why many companies are looking at the long-term cost benefits of having a healthier team.? Whether you are partnering with your health insurance provider or a 3rd party medical consultant, there are many entities who are capable of working with your HR team to develop staged approaches to achieving a stronger and healthier group of employees.?

At the center of all of these programs is usually an internal website for employees to utilize resources developed to help them with weight loss, tobacco cessation, heart health, or even stress management, but the commitment to health and wellness goes beyond an intranet site.? By providing incentives for employees to get healthier, companies can drive down health care costs, increase productivity and morale and improve overall retention.? Companies like Lifeworks.com are available to help employers develop these types of programs.

At SafeSourcing we support many companies how are striving to develop health and wellness programs and vendors who can assist them in doing this and routinely help retailers and other industries in finding the right mix of services and vendors for their needs.? For more information on how we can help you, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.? We have an entire customer services team waiting to assist you today

We look forward to your comments.

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