If your organization has a wellness committee, employee research group (ERG), or wellness ERG in place, you might be wondering how to set them up for success to have a real impact on improving wellbeing for employees.
Organizations with a high-performing wellness committee in place can help shift the company culture to one that actively promotes healthy living and encourages a positive, inclusive remote workplace.
In this article, we’ll be looking at the roles and responsibilities of a remote wellness committee, the common problems we see committees struggling with, and our top tips to help structure and motivate your committee to maximize results.
The role of wellness committees and ERGs
Both wellness committees and ERGs help to create a supportive, inclusive, and engaged workplace environment, which is incredibly important for remote organizations.
Larger organizations might have a wellness committee, plus several different ERGs that are active at any given time, to ensure the diverse needs of all employees are met. So alongside wellness-focused ERGs, you might also have ERGs that support employees with resources for neurodivergence, LGBTQ+, or women’s leadership, as examples..
Wellness committees do pretty much what they say on the box. Their mission is to promote and support the overall physical and mental wellbeing of employees – which can be especially challenging for remote workplaces.
Committee initiatives might include things like helping to create and manage annual wellness plans, assisting in implementing wellness apps like Bright Breaks, and promoting monthly challenges that help reduce stress and improve employee fitness, life balance, connectivity, and morale.
ERGs are typically led by volunteer employees. Their key role is to encourage a culture of diversity and inclusion in the workplace by promoting awareness, advising executives on developing more inclusive policies, and offering support and personal growth opportunities to employees who need it.
Common challenges for remote wellness committees
Running an effective wellness committee can be challenging enough — but when employees are based all around the world, and can only connect with their workplace online, this presents a few extra problems.
In Gartner’s 2021 Benchmarking Survey, 87% of employees said they have access to workplace wellbeing offerings, but only 23% of employees use them. So engagement is clearly a core problem that needs to be addressed.
Some of the most common problems we see wellness committees running into are:
- A lack of time to effectively promote wellness initiatives
- Not making it a priority to set aside time to work on committee tasks
- Not being able to create content fast enough, or consistently enough, to drive engagement (e.g. writing weekly wellness-related posts)
- Not having an effective two-way communication channel with the rest of the org about wellness
- Not setting clear, actionable goals
- No way to track or measure goals
- No real pride or investment in the success of the committee as a whole
- Not enough budget to drive wellness initiatives that can make a difference
While this looks like an overwhelming laundry-list of challenges, improving a wellness committee really comes down to the basics of time, goals, and budget.
8 tips to improve your remote wellness committee
There are a few ways you can help get your wellness committee back on track and improve the outcomes of their initiatives.
Review your committee structure
Even if you have a well-structured committee in place, it can be helpful to review the structure to see if it’s affecting your wellness program in any way.
Ideally, the committee should be made up of people at all levels in your organization, who represent your entire workforce. This will make sure that all the diverse cultural, demographic, and personal needs of your employees are being met within your wellness program.
In terms of skills and personality, it’s important that the people on your committee are:
- Champions for wellness in all its forms
- Committed to helping all employees improve their health and work/life balance
- Dedicated to promoting the wellness program
- Trustworthy
- Reliable
- Respected by their colleagues
- Great at communicating with employees
- Able to attend regular committee meetings
A good structure will also make sure that each committee member understands clearly what their tasks and responsibilities are, so that nothing slips through the cracks between meetings.
It’s important to include a dedicated communications person in your committee structure, as they can help drive and motivate the rest of the committee to stay on track with promoting initiatives within their respective teams and areas of influence.
Meet regularly
In remote organizations, it can be difficult to catch up for meetings with the entire committee. Setting consistent meeting times can ensure that everyone remembers to show up. Your meetings should be engaging, interactive, and make good use of your time together.
For members that can’t make it due to time zones or other issues, ensure there’s some sort of asynchronous communication in place to ensure they can quickly get up to speed with what they missed. Meeting recording and note-taking platforms like Grain are very handy to help people catch up on what happened in meetings, as well as shared documents.
Create productive meeting agendas
Meetings are a great first step, but it’s all too easy for them to turn into casual catch-ups instead of productive committee sessions.
Make sure someone is in charge of setting productive meeting agendas that work towards achieving the overall goals of both the committee, and the organization as a whole.
A productive meeting should aim to discuss wellness initiatives, gather feedback, and plan upcoming activities.
Initial meetings should discuss the overall strategy of the wellness committee and confirm plans on how to use different wellness programs and tactics to achieve goals.
Once the initial groundwork is established in the committee and members are clear in their roles, meeting topics should be more specific in order to effectively execute different wellness initiatives outlined in the plan such as challenges or events.
After a cadence is established, meetings will often have a single topic to focus on in order to achieve a goal. This is encouraged so that the committee’s efforts are not spread too thin. If there is a wide variety of topics or, the committee needs to hear from every member, this can cause unnecessary pressure.
Empower individual committee members to lead single initiatives such as a wellness challenge, and ask them to lead a meeting to help make decisions with the group about it to help move it forward.
Before the end of each meeting, determine what the topic will be for the next meeting and any deliverables or action items that need to happen in the meantime.
Be realistic!
Wellness committees often overestimate what they can achieve alongside their existing workload – leading to overly optimistic plans being made.
During meetings, it’s important that everyone involved is realistic and transparent about the tasks they set for themselves, and about the time, resources, and budget the committee has to work with.
Guide the committee to consider the big picture, and then set up small, actionable steps from there. Prioritizing the wish-list of initiatives helps guide everyone on what to work on next based on the desired timeline.
Keep in mind the lead time needed for platforms and vendors to deliver virtual speakers or wellness sessions (such as private wellness sessions from Bright Breaks!), and prioritize organizing them accordingly. When setting up a wellness challenge within a platform, consider this lead time, as well as any communication needing to go out to employees prior to the challenge
Ensure direct input from someone with access to budget
Speaking of budget, your wellness committee should have someone in the mix who either has sign-off abilities to use budget, or has a direct line to someone who does.
This is a practical necessity to help the wellness committee’s initiatives come to life, as well as necessary to keep the momentum going when the wellness committee sees success. Having wellness initiatives be delayed or blocked due to lack of correct influence in the committee can be deflating.
This factor is often overlooked when committees are set up, leading to wonderful wellness plans that struggle to see the light of day.
Keep diversity in mind
Diversity and inclusion need to be at the forefront of every wellness committee. These days, it’s not enough to just run a step challenge, or encourage healthy eating.
You’ll need to consider who is ideal to sit on your committee – try to attract those to participate in the committee who represent the diversity of your employees and their unique wellness needs.
Wellness programs must cater to the different needs of your employee population as a whole. Consider programs that factor in physical wellbeing, flexible work policies, mental health awareness, cultural differences, age differences, dietary differences, and other elements that make your employees feel seen and heard.
If you’re stuck – you can ask your other ERGs for advice!
Actively measure progress
All of your committee initiatives should be measured and reported on in a way that ties into overall business goals
It is very motivating for the committee to see the progress of wellness programs based on success metrics. When planning each initiative, determine with the committee how success will be measured. Will it be the attendance of a virtual speaker? Or participants in a challenge? Pick some metrics to track and share with the team.
This will help set goals in the future, and also provide learning on what employees respond to best.
Promote, promote, promote
All of your carefully planned wellness activities will go to waste without promotions. And this can be one of the most difficult things for wellness committees to manage. Newsletters, internal comms, emails, and Slack channels can all take up a lot of time for your busy committee members.
You’ll need to set a realistic schedule for content creation and publishing that’s manageable for your committee to keep up with, but consistent enough to drive engagement.
Sign up for weekly wellness resources provided for FREE by Bright Breaks, so your wellness committee will never run out of wellness content to keep dedicated wellness channels thriving.
Use AI and apps to make promoting wellness to remote teams easy
These days, there are plenty of helpful software shortcuts that enable wellness committees to create and promote more of their initiatives, in less time.
- AI tools like ChatGPT can help committee members to brainstorm ideas, or quickly spin up initial drafts of content and copy for promotions like Slack scripts and emails.
- Online swag providers make it simple for committees to design and send company merch as incentives or rewards for employees who participate in wellness challenges.
- Wellness apps like Bright Breaks offer a simple solution that your committee can implement to help motivate and connect employees in a fun and engaging way. With 7-minute instructor-led classes, your employees can take quick breaks throughout the day to reduce stress, stretch, refocus, and more.
Not a Bright Breaks customer yet? There are free resources for you here to promote employee wellbeing, with different themes every week.
In summary
Remote wellness committees are set up with the best of intentions, to make a real difference for employees. But the reality is that the volunteer committee members are always pressed for time, so wellbeing tasks tend to take a back seat to their other responsibilities.
At Bright Breaks, we make life easier for wellness committees, with a simple, highly effective wellness program that works (without feeling like work!). You can learn more about Bright Breaks here.
