You’ve most likely landed here because you have wellness dollars to spend for your organization. This means that your organization has a budget allocated directly from its insurance benefits provider, and can use it to create an opportunity for as many employees as possible to improve their well-being.
You’re likely aware of some of the guidelines around how to spend the wellness dollars set out by your benefits provider. If you haven’t looked over them yet, be sure to! You don’t want to be disappointed if your spend isn’t approved.
In this article, we’re going to look at some popular ways to spend wellness dollars, and how you can maximize the results of your spend to make sure that it’s a win for the whole company.
Understanding wellness dollars
You may already know what wellness dollars are, and are just looking for some inspiration to help you plan this year’s spend. Or, you might have been delegated this task and don’t really know where to start.
Wherever you’re at, here’s a general rundown of how wellness dollars work.
Each year, money is allocated to your organization by your insurance benefits provider for the specific purpose of improving and maintaining your employees’ well-being.
You and/or your HR teammates will make proposals to the benefits provider, and get approval to spend these wellness dollars on specific wellness-related activities or programs. Your benefits provider will want to see that you’re spending your wellness dollars on something that is going to be accessible to all employees in order to enhance their well-being before they approve your spend.
If you don’t use your wellness dollars within the annual contract period, you’ll lose them (depending on your specific insurance contract) — so it’s handy to have a plan in place and be ready to spend these dollars when they become available.
Wellness dollars aim to reduce the amount of employee health claims, as well as being an attractive benefit for new hires and boosting overall productivity and engagement. They mutually benefit your employer and employees, which is why it’s important to spend them in a way that can maximize results for everyone.
How wellness dollars can benefit remote employees
If you’re leading a remote or hybrid organization, you’ll need to get a little more creative with your wellness dollar spend.
As your health and wellness activities will need to benefit all your employees regardless of their location, in-person and scheduled activities won’t work unless you’re planning on a company-wide onsite or offsite. Even then, your wellness spend’s impact will be limited to that timeframe. You’ll need to think of things that can be done asynchronously at times when it best suits each employee.
It might also be impractical (and expensive!) for your organization to send everyone on your team physical well-being items or company swag such as workout gear, yoga mats, or wearable devices.
When you’re planning your wellness spend, it’s helpful to think of activities and programs that have extra benefits for remote employees, such as virtual platforms that include group classes or team challenges.
For example, Bright Breaks offers virtual wellness challenges. This feature not only promotes well-being, but is designed to boost employee engagement while fostering healthy competition, connection, and camaraderie between dispersed team members.
What are the restrictions on spending wellness dollars?
There are clear guidelines and restrictions around how you can (and can’t) spend your wellness dollars. Here’s a basic example of what the guidelines and restrictions could look like provided by your benefits provider:
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- All expenses need to be offered and made generally available to benefit all plan participants, not limited to subsets of your workforce or specific employees.
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- Once a wellness expense is approved, you can make the purchase using your wellness dollars.
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- You’ll need to submit receipts, invoices, and all other necessary documentation required by your insurance provider, typically within the same month of purchase.
These are some examples of ineligible activities that you potentially can’t use wellness dollars for:
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- Sponsorships — e.g. golf tournaments, 5k races, and sports teams
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- Purchases of furniture
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- Gifts for individual employees (this is unrelated to incentive gifts)
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- Sporting equipment
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- Medical claims or premium reductions
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- Trainings that are only available to specific employees
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- Retail memberships — e.g. Amazon Prime or Costco
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- Social gatherings
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- Covid-19 expenses
This is just a brief walkthrough of the guidelines to help you understand the overall process of using your wellness dollars. Check with your organization’s insurance provider to get the low-down if you’re unsure whether a specific expense will be approved or not.
Popular ways to spend wellness dollars
When you’re considering which types of programs you can use your wellness dollars for, keep in mind that they should be solutions which will work towards achieving overall wellness goals for your company.
Here are a few ideas to get the ball rolling.
Bright Breaks
This gets a big check mark from insurance benefits providers, employees, and HR leaders! The Bright Breaks platform has hundreds of live and recorded 7-minute breaks that fit perfectly into your employees’ schedules, and unlike other wellness platforms, there’s something for everybody.
Whether your team wants to unwind with deep stretching, break a sweat with a HIIT workout, or learn something new about wellness, it’s all just a 7-minute session away.
As an added bonus, using Bright Breaks means minimal legwork for your HR team. Our automatic scheduling and gift card prizes do all the heavy lifting to drive engagement for you.
Keep employees engaged with wellness challenges and quests that are inclusive and accessible! Leverage the live and on-demand content covering a wide range of well-being topics to inspire your organization to engage in their personal well-being.
Here’s a few different ideas on how to get the most out of Bright Breaks for your team
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- Invite them to complete a quest, to take breaks (live or on-demand sessions) from different categories
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- Run a challenge tasking participants to earn points by taking live and on-demand breaks of their choosing
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- Inspire competition through a team-based challenge, either randomly created to break down communication silos or between departments
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- Run a step challenge on Bright Breaks, asking participants to reach a step target to be entered into a draw
To optimize challenges and quests for as many people to participate as possible, we suggest embracing a departure from the common “most points or most steps win” format when offering incentives to participate.
We’ve learned through our experience working with a wide variety of organizations that setting a target such as “earn 5 points”, or “take 60,000 steps” during a two week challenge, and then entering those who meet this target into a draw, to be the most effective way to encourage as many people as possible to participate.
This low-pressure approach to participation sets a goal to reach that is reasonably obtainable by most people for a chance to win. It avoids the development of the “why bother?” attitude by potential participants if they already see folks in the lead or are not personally motivated to be hyper-engaged.
Online wellness platforms
With the rise of remote work, there are now plenty of employee wellness platforms and mobile apps that your teams can use asynchronously for their daily well-being fix.
These are all designed to be simple and engaging for users, and cover many wellness themes such as mindfulness, meditation, step challenges, fitness, and stress management.
You should ideally choose an online solution that covers the 7 types of rest. This will make sure that every break your team takes is rejuvenating and meaningful, and contributes to overall employee satisfaction in your organization..
At Bright Breaks, we embrace the 7 types of rest when curating and producing content and engagement tools to provide a well-being platform that is as diverse as the needs of your employees and organization members.
From squat challenges to educational nutrition breaks, we strive to cover as many bases as possible to appeal to people with different needs and abilities.
Wearables
Wearable devices such as Fitbits and Apple watches are hugely popular and can support your organization’s wellness initiatives.
These hi-tech devices can track sleep patterns, heart rate, daily steps, and more, to help employees take ownership of their individual fitness goals and monitor progress over time.
Wearables can also support your company’s wellness goals by integrating with step challenges, hydration challenges, and other team activities.
It goes without saying that this is an expensive option, especially if you have a large workforce! For remote teams, there is also the extra hassle of getting these devices safely to all of your global employees, and then crossing your fingers that they actually use them.
If you’re going the wearables route, or know that a large portion of your employees already have and embrace them, you can leverage this with Bright Breaks’ step challenge feature!
The Bright Breaks mobile app connects directly with Apple Health and Google Connect to track steps automatically, making for seamless tracking and live leaderboard updates. This works for wearables and mobile phones alike.
Gym memberships
A gym subscription can be a solid way to spend your wellness dollars. However, you’ll need to be confident that this is something all your employees want, and can use.
Something to keep in mind is that while a gym membership may be ideal for some, many remote employees might be miles away from the nearest gym, which means they likely won’t use their subscription. Even if they are close to a gym, spending time in a gym alongside others to exercise and trying to time their visits for when it’s less crowded may not be their thing.
If you have the data to support that the majority of your employees are interested in heading to the gym, looking into vendors such as Wellhub that facilitate a shared cost structure between employers and employees for gym memberships is a worthwhile exercise.
If your employees are 50/50 about using a gym membership, we suggest you look at an online platform that offers physical workouts for people who want them, and a range of other activities for people who don’t (like Bright Breaks!).
Wellness challenges
Alongside friendly rivalry, wellness challenges can also encourage your teams to make some healthy lifestyle changes.
There are plenty of virtual solutions out there to bring your remote teams together and promote well-being at the same time. Step-challenges, hydration challenges, and a range of other team and individual activities can all be found with a quick online search. MoveSpring, YUMUUV, and Wellable are popular choices of virtual corporate wellness challenges aside from Bright Breaks.
We’ve already outlined how the challenges at Bright Breaks can generate engagement and inspire enthusiasm toward well-being earlier in this article, but here is how we’re set apart from other wellness challenge providers:
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- Unlimited user pricing: The sky’s the limit! As many employees as possible can participate in challenges and quests while the pricing remains the same.
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- Interactive well-being content included: A wide variety of live sessions and pre-recorded content is provided for employees to engage with to complete challenges and quests. No directing participants to other wellness vendors or self-reporting of wellness activities required!
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- Social connection opportunities: Over 300 live breaks (well-being sessions) take place on Bright Breaks every week with vetted educators. Participants are encouraged to join these breaks with their colleagues! You also have the option to award more points for participants who do so.
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- A variety of themes: Whether you’re focusing on mental health, nutrition, fitness, steps, or overall well-being, Bright Breaks has challenges to help you promote the wellness outcomes you’re influencing your employees to achieve – all directly within the platform!
We also provide promotional support with scripts and images as well as the ability to run company-wide, department-specific, and team-based challenges and quests.
Cooking and nutrition classes
If you have a lot of foodies in your remote workplace, you’ll be pleased to know that education around nutrition and healthy eating is typically covered by wellness dollars.
Your dollars can be used to arrange things like nutrition seminars by experts, or virtual cooking classes where your team members can learn to make delicious and healthy food in their own homes.
Check with your organization’s insurance benefits provider to see what other types of programs and activities your wellness dollars can help make a reality.
At Bright Breaks, we have a category of live and on-demand content dedicated to nutrition in our Eat Well category. Led by registered Dietitians, employees can learn information and tips around adopting new and maintaining healthy eating habits.
Examples of Eat Well breaks on Bright Breaks:
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- Nutrition Tips for a Healthy Gut
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- The Importance of Vitamin D
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- Save Money by Reducing Food Waste
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- High Fiber Snacks for Your Workday
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- Debunking Common Nutrition Myths
And many many more!
How to maximize your wellness dollars
For remote and hybrid organizations, strategic spending of wellness dollars can help to boost and maintain team well-being and morale, increase focus and productivity, and reduce staff churn. This all adds up to a healthy ROI for your organization.
Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your wellness dollars allocation.
Plan the spend in your annual wellness program
Wellness dollars will play a key part in your annual well-being program. If you don’t have a program plan set up yet, or you have one that could use an overhaul, you can read more about this here.
Because your insurance benefits provider has already allocated the wellness dollars amount, the need for C-Suite buy-in to spend these funds is considerably less challenging than if you were asking for an additional budget for employee well-being. It’s just a matter of getting your ideas approved in terms of what you intend to purchase for your remote and/or hybrid employees each year.
Set clear goals and measure
Having clear end-goals in mind, and the right metrics to track them, will help you determine if what you chose to spend wellness dollars on is a success.
Visibility into engagement metrics are highly important when selecting the right initiatives for your team. Here are a few metrics you (hopefully) can track when measuring success:
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- Engagement such as accounts created and/or attendance
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- Reviews and ratings left by employees of the wellness initiatives as a whole or specific components of it
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- Visibility into who is taking advantage of the initiatives and how often, ideally broken down by department, location and more.
At Bright Breaks, we provide all of the above and more in easy-to-analyze and transparent metrics to help you determine the success of the program. Overall, 90 day and month-by-month break attendance metrics are readily available and updated in real time.
Promote your chosen wellness activities effectively
As with all your other well-being resources, employees need to be fully aware of what’s on offer or they won’t engage with it.
Once your wellness dollar spend has been approved and actioned, make sure you get the word out effectively. For maximum engagement, your promotions should always answer your employees’ main question of “what’s in it for me?”. (Hint: This is where incentives like prizes and gift cards can come in handy!)
Put a plan in place that empowers your managers or your wellness committee to promote these new wellness solutions throughout the year. This will help your remote employees get the full benefit from your wellness dollars.
At Bright Breaks, we not only provide promotional materials for launch and challenges, but also fresh scripts every month based on monthly wellness themes promoting different break content. No need to sit down and write communications from scratch!
Wrapping up
Strategic spending of your annual wellness dollars can benefit both your employees and your organization — but remember that every employee is on their own wellness journey.
Your dev team might like some intense fitness workouts after focusing on strings of code all day, Jenna from accounts really wants to take up yoga again, and your customer support team has said they could definitely use some meditation skills right now. Wherever they’re at, your wellness dollars should try and help them reach their goals.
Bright Breaks gives you a fun, diverse, and effective way to maximize your wellness dollars. Our user-friendly platform is designed to have a positive impact on your remote employees’ well-being, productivity, and social connections — while minimizing work for your HR department.
