Wellness Plan Template

What can a wellness plan template do for you?

We’re so glad you asked.

A thorough wellness plan template could help you:

• Provide formal, sharable documentation that details your wellness plan
• Pitch your wellness plan to company leadership
• Clarify the details of your wellness plan
• Create a brand-new wellness plan
• Stay on track as you create a wellness plan

And where is this fabulous wellness plan template, you ask? It’s below for your reading and planning pleasure. We hope the template helps you launch an initiative that engages employees in great wellness activities. And above all else… create a healthier workforce.

What is a Wellness Plan?

According to the health policy experts at HealthCare.gov, a wellness plan or wellness program is…

“A program intended to improve and promote health and fitness that’s usually offered through the work place, although insurance plans can offer them directly to their enrollees. The program allows your employer or plan to offer you premium discounts, cash rewards, gym memberships, and other incentives to participate. Some examples of wellness programs include programs to help you stop smoking, insulin? is low or not working well. সহজ বাংলা: রক্তে চিনি বেশি থাকার রোগ।" data-rx-term="diabetes" data-rx-definition="Diabetes is a condition where blood sugar stays too high because insulin is low or not working well. সহজ বাংলা: রক্তে চিনি বেশি থাকার রোগ।">diabetes? management programs, weight loss? programs, and preventative health screenings.”

Wellness plans outline specific steps necessary to get employees from one level of health to a higher level of health.

Wellness Plan Benefits

A wellness plan gives employees the tools, guidelines, and resources they need to boost their health and well-being.

Wellness plans offer a variety of evidence-based benefits. Here’s a sampling:

• Wellness plans and programs can have a positive impact on employee health.
• Wellness initiatives can boost engagement.
• Workplace wellness strategies give employees what they want and expect from employers.
• Wellness programs help employees manage stress and change.
• Wellness plans may mitigate depression symptoms.

Wellness plans also offer big-picture benefits, namely clarity, and direction—the same key benefits of planning in general. Here’s a perfect summary of the benefits of planning from the masters of concision at CliffsNotes.

(Just swap out “managers” for “employees” as you read the summary.)

“The military saying, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,” is very true. Without a plan, managers are set up to encounter errors, waste, and delays. A plan, on the other hand, helps a manager organize resources and activities efficiently and effectively to achieve goals.”

A wellness plan turns an abstract concept, like “boosting wellness” into a practical set of rules and action items, making it more achievable.

The Wellness Plan Template

Before we dive into the nuts and bolts, let’s first review what the plan ultimately needs to accomplish.

• It needs to convince leadership that your wellness ideas should be adopted.
• It needs to be accessible, something you (and others in your company) can reasonably understand and follow. (This simple truth decides a plan’s ultimate success. There’s no wrong way to make a plan as long as the result is realistic and actionable in your universe.)
• It needs to help others visualize your ideas. It needs to include enough facts, figures, details, and specificity so that other people can grasp your ideas.

Introduction

Use the introduction to explain why employee wellness is important to your company, especially to make sure leadership (and anyone else who might need to be convinced) knows how important and valuable employee wellness is to the company.

Fill this in to get started on your introduction. Feel free to copy and paste exactly or tweak however you like.

[COMPANY NAME]’s mission is to [MISSION STATEMENT].

That mission simply wouldn’t be possible without healthy employees. We want our people to be the best they can be, and we designed this wellness plan to accomplish just that—to give our employees the tools, advice, and resources they need to pursue their health and wellness journeys.

Employee wellness offers obvious qualitative benefits, but you might be surprised to learn it may offer quantitative benefits as well. For example, wellness programs could save companies up to $565 per employee in healthcare costs a year.

Objectives

Here’s how to establish solid objectives for your health plan.

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has Sample Wellness Plan that demonstrates well-designed objectives. Review the sample plan, and check out the key takeaways below.

• • Consider why you even decided to create a wellness plan. (This will help you determine your core objective.)
  • Define your core objective. (The DHHS example is “Reduce the percentage of employees using tobacco.”)
  • Give yourself a time frame to achieve the objective. (“Reduce the percentage of employees using tobacco by May of 2012.”)
  • Give your objective a measurable component so you’ll be able to tell whether or not you’ve achieved it in a few years or months. (“Reduce the percentage of employees using tobacco from 25% to 22% by May of 2012.”)
  • Figure out how you plan to measure the measurable component. The two main options for most organizations will be:
    • User self-reporting. (Surveying employees to ask about their behaviors)
    • Device tracking. (Tracking employee behaviors via FitBit, etc.)
  • Figure out how to work toward that core objective by determining actions that would help you achieve it. The DHHS calls these actions interventions to address the objective. The sample plan proposes using the following interventions to accomplish the goal of reducing employee tobacco use:

#1 – Begin to offer smoking cessation support groups to tobacco users interested in quitting.

#2 – Include information on the benefits of quitting smoking in the wellness newsletter

#3 – Provide “quit kits” on Kick Butts Day to employees who use tobacco or have a family member who uses tobacco

#4 – Provide coverage for tobacco cessation medications in the insurance plan

#5 – Set a date to implement and implement a tobacco-free campus policy

Plan Features

Use this section to outline and describe the specific items you want to offer as part of your plan. The plan features should be the actions and interventions you feel will best support your core objectives.

Here are some popular wellness plan features you might consider incorporating into your strategy. Most of these ideas came from our posts on wellness program ideas and on increasing employee well-being. Check out the posts for even more ideas.

Food and Nutrition Ideas

• Start hosting a healthy potluck every month
• Provide water bottles that list ounces/cups to help employees meet hydration goals
• Provide healthy snacks and get rid of office junk food
• Host healthy cooking challenges and classes
• Organize produce exchanges, farm market excursions, or produce box deliveries

Fitness Ideas

• Bring fitness instructors on site
• Build an in-office fitness center or offer discounted gym memberships
• Team up for races
• Start a running group
• Offer fitness flex time, where people can come in late or leave early to make time to go to the gym

Mental Health and Learning Ideas

• Subsidize courses at local colleges
• Give employees an hourly time budget to take online courses during work hours
• Host meditation sessions
• Promote mental health awareness and make sure everyone knows what services the health plan will cover
• Host a gratitude challenge

Interventional Ideas

• Develop a weight-loss program
• Offer smoking cessation resources and programs
• Have professionals come in for a day of drop-in preventative screenings. (They might do vision scans, blood-pressure readings, dental checks, hearing checks, and other basics.)

Fun and Bonding Ideas

• Organize volunteer days
• Host team breakfasts, lunches, or happy hours
• Do more team building
• Host annual summits
• Organize group participation in a local sports league
• Have team-building fitness challenges

Environmental Wellness Ideas

• Offer laptops and work outside “passes”
• Plan group hikes
• Reorganize office space to allow more sunlight
• Bring in live plants
• Add air filters around the office
• Bring in light therapy lamps and light bulbs
• Offer to recycle and composting bins
• Play soothing music over the intercom/speaker system

Employee Eligibility

Use this section to detail exactly who may access the wellness plan resources and features you’re offering.

Use this text to get started on your eligibility verbiage.

Full-time employees who have been with [COMPANY NAME] for one year or more may access all wellness offerings. New employees, contractors, freelancers, and other non-traditional employees may contact [contact name] to discuss eligibility for all or part of the wellness program.

Program Costs

Use this section to outline all costs—including costs to the company and costs to employees—of participation in the wellness plan.

Here’s an example:

Wellness program feature: Subsidized gym membership

• Cost to the employer: $15 a month
• Cost to employee: $10 a month

Max cost to the employer

• $15 [cost to employer] x 12 [months in a year] x 145 [all employees] = $26,100
• Summary: Total cost to employer per year of program duration will not exceed $26,100

Timeline

Use this section to note key benchmarks of the wellness plan in a format that makes sense to you. Create a timeline for each objective’s key actions/interventions.

Here’s an example:

Intervention development – 3 months

• Wellness feature: Subsidized gym memberships
• Development Summary: Researching, visiting, and negotiating with local gyms

Target completion: June 1

Intervention roll-out – 1 month

• Wellness feature: Subsidized gym memberships
• Roll-out summary: Promoting the feature, managing employee sign-ups, and distributing passes

Target completion: July 1

Ongoing maintenance and success tracking – 1 year, possibly longer if we continue after a 1-year pilot

• Wellness feature: Subsidized gym memberships
• Maintenance summary: Tracking success, continuing negotiations for best-possible details

Target completion: July 1 – next year

Ongoing Maintenance

Use this section to outline what ongoing maintenance would be required for both your overall plan and your plan features.

Here’s an example:

Overall plan maintenance:

• Evaluating success
  • Quarterly surveys
  • Quarterly report and analysis of overall plan participation and success data
• Ongoing communication to increase participation
• Tweaking and improving the plan based on feedback and data

Note: You will also need to do feature-specific maintenance. Simply follow the steps for overall maintenance while focusing on one specific feature.