In our webinar on October 17, 2019, we heard from Katie Dunn, Senior Account Manager, and Eduardo Gil de Montes, Client Marketing Manager about best practicies when building a culturally-intentional well-being program through strategy, goals, and a cohesive well-being brand. Check out the video below, or read the transcript of the webinar below the video.
Building a successful program strategy
First things first we take a look at your culture, your mission and the why behind having a well-being program in the first place.
• What brought you to well-being?
• Why is it important to you?
Then we take that why to determine your goals and your program design and use those goals to determine up metrics for success.
Last but not least, the overall approach to the program design is the whole human approach. We are multi-faceted humans, and it’s not just about a health metric that determines a successful well-being program or improved well-being in the individual.
Poll: Do you think your current well-being brand resonates with your employees in your corporate culture?
It looks like a majority of you said that we have some recognition of the brand but no real tie the culture. I’m glad to see that is a top response, only because I want to dig in a bit deeper into how we can build the brand more into your culture. I’m also glad to see that there is some recognition. That means you’ve already laid some groundwork, so let’s just see how we can build on that.
Understanding your Culture through an Assessment
When we start our relationship with clients, we administer an assessment to use as a jumping-off point for a conversation to learn about what is important to their culture. Is it safety? Is it contribution is sustainability? And how do these themes show up in their environment?
Then as part of that conversation, we learn about the senior leaders in the organization. How involved are they all in well-being and why? Who specifically within their leadership team in involved? Then outside of well-being, how do leaders engage with employees?
Understanding the Employee Perspective
Part of our initial assessment is sending out a survey to your eligible employee base. Through this, we can learn about demographics of your population, motivations and preferred incentives, and communication preferences.
Best Practice Recommendations
We use all of that data from the cultural assessment, employee assessment, and the conversations with our clients to drive our best practice recommendations to design a program that’s relevant to your culture and your population – ultimately to create something that employees want to actually engage in.
Metrics of Success
We focus on your overall program goals to determine success metrics. Those metrics are evaluated throughout the year to see how we’re doing and adapting our strategy to make improvements. Some of our standard numbers that we evaluate:
- Activation – what are we doing to get people involved
- Engagement – what are we doing to keep people participating
- Outcomes – how are people improving health numbers
Those are definitely things that check the boxes.
But what is true success look like? How does your program ‘feel’ to your employees? Are they bought in? Are they excited and making positive life changes?
Ultimately we want to design a program that people are excited about, that is culturally relevant, and that they want to share with their colleagues and families. Some of the metrics that we look at to evaluate success in these areas is our satisfaction scores any direct feedback or testimonials from employees. We are also introducing a new metric of success, the level of flourishing an employee has. We measure this through the Flourishing Index.
Well-being Champions
Another example of how this can be represented at your organization is through people who are leading by example. We call these people Well-being Champions. They are employees, rather than people in official positions of leadership. These are employees who have a passion for well-being, and most importantly, they have a personal story themselves. They become representatives of your well-being brand, and they are your boots-on-the-ground at each location. They are approachable to peers, successful in evangelizing the program because they’re engaged, and they know the specific details to offer guidance and support to others. Also, if given the opportunity, they can have visibility into your success metrics and can help in driving campaigns like promoting your health screenings and onsite events.
One of the benefits I can offer my clients as an account manager, is to help in guiding a strategy around a Well-being Champions Network. I can offer recruitment tactics, and weave them into the overall program strategy.
An Example of Success
A culture-first well-being program strategy is a never-ending and ever evolving process. This client it has a really engaged population. They’ve done a great job building up incredible resources such as a medical center, an onsite gym, and even built safety into their well-being culture. In evaluating the program, together we felt like we wanted to take it further and align back to their goals. They wanted to know how to build a program that was supportive and provided resources and tools to their employees to help them flourish.
Leadership took the initiative to go back and gain some feedback from employees. They uncovered that employees viewed the program as “too hard” and confusing. It didn’t actually feel supportive, which was going against with the ultimate goal of the program.
From that feedback, I worked with the client to use that data and evolve the program. Our goal was to improve and create a program that was meaningful, culturally relevant, and supportive. This is a great example of how leadership can build a culture of well-being by continuing to listen, care, refine and align. Discover more client successes.
Building a Well-being Brand
When we think about putting our brains together we think about it in three phases:
- Research – gaining some understanding of the organization from an external viewpoint
- Discovery – using the research to have a deep conversation with the client
- Design – gathering all the information to develop a visual identity
1 – Research
We start with some initial client research. We we take a look at documentation provided by the client as well as external resources. Through our client intake survey, we gaina high level overview of the company, demographics and goals. The survey also gives us clues into well-being areas that they want to focus on. We also take a look at that company website which is the public face of the organization. This gives us an idea of what’s important from an organizational standpoint and tends to offer a primary example of the corporate identity out in the wild. We find important messaging, the tone and voice of the company externally, and mission statements and core values to help us understand what’s important. Social media can also gives us an idea of what’s important to the employees, and how they interact in the world as representatives of the company.
2 – Discovery
The discovery phase is where we take all that initial research, and we start a brand conversation. We involve a number of individuals across the organization: Human Resources and Benefits, marketing individuals, leadership, and employees from different departments. Some clients take the conversation back to their employees as a whole for their input into the program brand.
Then we go into a deeper brand discovery. We look at whether or not you have an existing well-being programming brand. Was it successful? If yes, then what elements of the existing brand are we keeping? Is there a name, logo, colors that we’re keeping? If it wasn’t successful, then elements can we use in the rebrand and revitalization of the program?
The next consideration is of course corporate brand guidelines. How closely does the program need to be aligned with the corporate brand? We take into account any limitations and requirements around the name, logo, colors, and images such as using regional and demographic appropriate environments and people in photography.
Then we look at a cultural discovery such as internal voice and messaging. It’s important to understand how the company speaks to their population, how employees and leaders speak to each other, and how does the internal voice of accompany differ from the external voice of the company.
We also look at most effective communication channels that our clients are already using. Maybe your employees are really tech-savvy, so using in-app and SMS messaging will be the most effective. Or if you have a non-tech sector of your population, considering print communications such as posters or home mailers will help distribute your message.
Then we look for any key cultural initiatives within the organization such as groups, clubs, mentorships, and trainings that help us really understand what’s important to your employees and what the organization is focusing on.
3 – Design: Concept, Revise, Finalize
When building the visual identity for your well-being brand, we break this into three phases:
- Concepting – providing concepts of the visual brand
- Revision – gaining feedback and delivering revisions
- Finalization – translating the final identity into all needed formats
In the concepting phase, we deliver two initial design concepts including a program name, logo and accompanying digital graphics on graphics for consideration. Through these two concepts give our clients a choice in design direction. This also gives our designers the opportunity to show corporate clients something a little bit more unique as an option for their program brand. There is almost always a very positive reaction to something a little bit more out-of-the-box.
Our clients can provide feedback based on what is resonating (and what isn’t) with their goals and culture. Then we move into the revision phase. A single concept is selected to forward with refined. The design is final once the client and we are happy with it.
With the final brand, we deploy it across our systems as well as into our communications toolkit, Brand on Demand.
Brand Examples
Here are a couple of different examples of brands that we have developed for some of our cultural-first clients.
RaceTrac
They are a good example of sticking close to their corporate brand guidelines for their well-being brand: colors, fonts, iconography and the program name, LifeTrac. We played off of company’s name in using a driving theme throughout to add a little fun. To showcase their amazing culture, we utilized high quality photos of real employees. They offer authentic, friendly faces. Real smiles and not contrived stock photos. They also highlight the diversity in their population. All of this, including seeing their peers faces on the platform, really has helped create a level of trust and excitement in their program.
Asics
This is a good example of incorporating corporate brand elements while allowing for some creative flexibility for a more stand-alone brand. Being Asics, they are recognizable as a fitness brand – very health and fitness oriented, but one of the things that we discovered in our conversations with them is that they really wanted to expand into mental health and mindfulness space. We incorporated elements of their corporate brand through utilizing the Asics logo and some of the geometric elements, but used some interesting textures and their secondary and tertiary colors for a more standalone brand. And, fun fact for Asics, their name is an acronym for the latin phrase Anima Sana In Corpore Sano. This means Sound Mind in a Sound Body. So, we pulled that into their program name – Asics: Sound Mind Sound Body.
Reaching your Diverse Population
When we think about how we communicate with your population, there are a couple things to consider: who your population is, where they work, and how they work. We need to take these all into consideration with how we want to communicate with them. You might have a group of your population that are shift workers and don’t sit at a computer all day. Quite possibly, email isn’t the best way to reach them. Maybe pushing communications through an app or text is the best way to reach them. Possibly a heavy portion of your program eligible population is spouses and the only way to reach them is through home mailers.
Knowing who your population is, where they are located, and how they like to communicate is really impactful and helpful in knowing how we can reach them throughout the year. This is something that account managers here at ADURO take into consideration when we build out your communication strategies for the year.
Poll: What tools do you currently use to communicate with your employees?
It looks like the majority of you guys are currently using email, posters and flyers, meeting announcements, and intranet is also really popular.
These different options are just tactics to consider, and it’s something that we build into our strategy with our clients as we begin to understand your employees how best to communicate with them.
Also, I mentioned earlier we utilized a survey at the start of the program to we get to know who your employees are and how they like to be communicated with. We like to use that data when we’re building at our communication strategy at the start of a relationship and throughout the year. Analyzing usage and effectiveness through click-through and open rates can allow for testing and building strategies.
Marketing Toolkit
As a way to extend the brand and your promotional power, we offer 24/7 cloud service that we call Brand on Demand. Brand on Demand is loaded with resources that pull in your branding and are ready to go when your program is launched. We have dozens of pre-built templates that are in there including flyers, posters, postcards, tipsheets, social media graphics, digital screen graphics and more. They all utilize your brand colors, logo, and the unique url for your program. What you see to the right is a is a very curated sleep campaign that we’ve put together. But the beauty of Brand on Demand is that you have the ability to use your own images and content in any one of our templates. So, what it comes down to it, the sky is really the limit to communications you can build with this tool.
Here’s another example of one of our newest campaigns, inspired from from working with our other culture-forward clients. We know that leadership involvement really increases trust and drives engagement across the platform. Personal stories from leaders really break down barriers and help drive engagement.
Custom Marketing
We also offer our custom marketing and design services. If you have a special project or an initiative coming up and don’t see what you’re needing in our everyday offerings, we have a team of designers and marketers available at an hourly rate to sit down and discuss what’s possible. For more information about this, contact your account manager or send a message to [email protected].