Bad health is bad for business.
According to a recent study, employees’ medical expenditures already eat up 50 percent or more of company profits.
Add to that the cost of absenteeism and loss of productivity due to illness. The clear takeaway is this: companies can no longer afford to ignore their employees’ health.
Your company intranet can play a big role in promoting health and wellness among your staff. In this post, I’m going to share my thoughts on how you can easily and quickly create a wellness portal page on your intranet.
Suggested Applications for Your Intranet Wellness Portal
It all depends, of course, on whether you already have a company wellness program in place. If you do, then you use the applications that are most relevant to promoting, recording, and archiving the various elements of your wellness program.
Whether or not you have a company wellness program, these intranet applications would probably be useful:
Calendar
Create an intranet calendar for sports and exercise events, such as the family fun marathon organized by your staff association. Ask around. Perhaps there’s a small group of employees who run or bike or go to the gym together. Add those activities in the wellness calendar, too. Don’t forget to add wellness events going on near or around your office, such as free seminars
Blog
Publish an internal health blog and use it to share wellness information, announcements, and event reminders.
Links
Make a Link list of websites with helpful and trustworthy information on diet, exercise, stress reduction, and related topics. Ask staff for their favourite sites.
Discussion Forum
Build a discussion forum where staff can exchange tips and experiences on different wellness and health topics. Good categories for discussion include:
- favourite healthy recipes
- restaurant reviews
- exercise tips
- weight loss bragging board
Media Album
Encourage staff to share photos of what they’re doing to get and stay healthy. These could be photos of their morning green smoothie, their favourite gym equipment (with them actually using it), before and after weight loss photos, and more.
Give Wellness Some Homepage Love
Promote wellness by adding at least one Widget on your intranet home page. A blog Widget makes sense, so staff can see the latest wellness news and information. If you have a discussion forum, I would also add a forum Widget on the home page, because that would further stimulate discussion.
Does your intranet have a wellness portal? What elements does it currently have? If you don’t have a wellness portal yet, what would you put in it?