Companies across the country are trying to get employee participation. They want employees to buy a lot of things. For many reasons, employee involvement is very important. It starts with the company’s mission. Each employee has to look at the mission of the company and decide if it is in line with what they see themselves doing. Sure, you can argue that a person is going to do a job that pays them money. There’s more, but at some level everyone has to decide if they want to do a job or not.
How important is employee buy-in? When an employee accepts her mission, he becomes a force to further her mission. When an employee doesn’t buy, he is working against you and your mission.
My clients are from many different industries, so they have many different missions and philosophies. Each company has its own mission. When communicating a mission, it is important that it be clear to everyone. Otherwise, there may be a mix of people who work for the company and people who work against it.
Health becomes part of the mission when a company is trying to be successful in all areas. Just as you want employees to focus on and achieve goals in their respective areas, health becomes part of this when you implement a wellness program or corporate health strategy program.
Salespeople must accept the process, training, and goals of the company they work for. They also need to purchase a product or service to achieve these sales goals. Managers must embrace the company’s mission to properly train and guide their teams to reflect it.
When companies see health as a value and as part of their vision, they are setting themselves up for success. As we’ve seen over the years, companies with healthy employees can see benefits in insurance costs, productivity, and many other areas that improve with a healthy and energetic workforce.
This can only take place with the acceptance of the employees. If employees don’t want to be healthy, they won’t. More specifically, if employees don’t see the importance of participating in healthy initiatives, they won’t participate. They will only do what is comfortable for them. The key is to promote initiatives from the top and make sure the message is clear.
If employees are not supported or initiatives are not properly communicated, buy-in will suffer. It’s not that people don’t want to buy, it’s actually more that employees can’t buy. Health is like any other area of business. If it’s part of your company’s vision and it’s clearly communicated, they can accept it. If there is a lack of consistency, they will have a hard time buying even if they want to.
That is where the key to this message comes in. Shopping is important. We know this and it seems that we can put it into practice in many areas. We have even gone so far as to say that in the business world, for something to happen in a company, we need buy-in.
Not surprisingly, the key to employee health and making it really work is making sure you get employee buy-in. The surprise to me is when companies say they have tried wellness, but have not been successful. It seems simple, but maybe that’s because I’m used to making sure every piece is in place before moving forward, and certainly before stopping any programming. When a company fails to buy, there must be something they can do. There must be a way for them to keep moving forward despite the lack of acceptance.
In fact, there is a way for companies to keep moving forward. The key is to stay focused on employee acceptance. More importantly, they need to figure out why the lack of acceptance if there is already a concern. This key can help a business keep things moving if they have run into some issues.
Just as preventing diseases is a much more cost-effective way of dealing with them than treating them. Establishing employee buy-in is much easier and more profitable for companies that start with a clear focus on it than it is for a company that simply waits for it to happen and tries to fix problems that occur along the way.
It all boils down to this: Your employee health program should focus on employee acceptance. There must be a specific plan and that plan must be aimed at getting people involved and believe in the process. The process is important, but the results are even more important.
When you think about the results of employee health programming, it’s even clearer that people will accept. Everybody wants to be healthy. Everybody wants to feel good. A company that comes from a perspective of: “We want to help you achieve your goals.” You will be successful and so will your employees.