Dr. Avi Ratnanesan discusses how employers are rebuilding workplace wellness after the pandemic. Key challenges: measuring ROI on wellness programs, getting employees to use EAP services, and aligning wellness with hiring and retention goals on tight budgets. His team built the People Matter tool to help companies pick the right mix of digital and provider solutions.
Chapters
Hi there, it's Dr. Avi here and coming to you from the Workplace Wellness Festival here in Sydney in the International Convention Center. It's been really exciting festival these last couple of days. Fantastic wellness solutions and providers working together with HR leaders to figure out really what's the best way to deliver wellness programs to actually improve health, how your employees actually can work from home in the current environment. It's been a hell of a last two years. I mean some of the stories from the organizations that are presented here, Flight center, some of the major brands that you'd hear about in corporate Australia, what they've actually had to endure in having to make people redundant over the last two years, hire them back, provide the right flexible arrangements have all been a major, major challenge. And some of the big topics that we're hearing here include, you know, how do you measure the effectiveness of these programs, how do you tailor them and increase utilization of your eap? And what are the other types of programs that are suitable to initiate? How do we measure the roi? How do we configure the right mix of wellness programs and integrate that into our existing HR initiatives around retention, talent attraction and increase that employee value proposition? Many of these issues have come up and have been raised. Many are still trying to figure these out. That's one of the reasons why my team and I at NHS have really pulled together the PME tool of People Matter. To me it's really to help organizations figure out the right mix of solutions to ensure attraction and retention are optimized in an environment where we increasingly constrained with resources. We don't have the budgets, we don't have the money that we used to have a couple of years ago before the pandemic. How do we make this a lot more effective and how do we introduce the right digital solutions into these various environments in our workplace and provide the right providers to come in to solve some of these challenges. So it's really, really interesting as to where things are at now. It's very exciting to see that increased investment in this space by so many forward thinking organizations and I think it's only going to get better and better as the industry matures. If you have any questions, I'd love to chat. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or Facebook or any other point of connection with energies and love to help you have a conversation around around this whole area of people well being HR and investment and how we do the right things the right way at the right time. Bye for now.
