Employee Wellbeing Strategy for SMEs | Vivup

Employee wellbeing is key to achieving business growth, regardless of the size of your business. According to Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report, 85% of employees admit to feeling disengaged at work. Staff who harbour these feelings are less likely to stay on board, so issues with retention and replacing top talent could follow.

It’s important to establish an employee wellbeing strategy—a comprehensive plan designed to promote and support the mental, physical and financial health of employees—to make sure that you’re properly addressing your peoples’ needs. This strategy should not only have clearly defined goals, but should also be entwined with a wider employee benefit offering to ensure the complete mental, physical and financial wellness of your people.

Why SMEs Need an Employee Wellbeing Strategy

Understanding the SME Employee

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) often have a more personal work culture than larger organisations, offering unique advantages that influence their approach to employee management and benefits.

For example, the resource constraints of limited budgets can heavily affect their ability to offer extensive benefits. However, the smaller size of SMEs also means that they can adapt more quickly—making flexible working conditions more possible. Additionally, employees are often able to see a more clear and direct impact of their work on their business's success when they are in a smaller organisation.

Because of the unique challenges and needs of SME organisations, it’s especially important that companies tailor their wellbeing strategies. 

SME organisations should take advantage of their small size and close employee-management relationships to personalise targeted wellbeing strategies. Additionally, SME organisations should consider creating better work-life balance by supporting more flexible and adaptable strategies. In order to overcome the budget challenges and constraints that can come with being a smaller organisation, companies should consider more creative, non-monetary benefits that can boost morale without the high costs. 

Considering the Risks 

While an effective employee health and wellbeing strategy has the power to reduce employee stress, an ineffective (or non-existent) wellbeing strategy comes with a host of risks for your business. These risks include:

• Absenteeism: Stress, anxiety and burnout among your workforce can contribute to spikes in absenteeism, which costs your business money
• Retention and recruitment: An ineffective wellbeing strategy can lead to costly issues with retaining and recruiting talent
• Poor employee physical health: It’s not just mental health that affects the performance of your workforce. Many employees now find themselves in hybrid or fully-remote roles, and—while some may thrive in this new landscape—others will feel lonely, isolated and disconnected from their teams, which inevitably impacts engagement and overall performance 

Employee Wellbeing as a Competitive Advantage:

While it might be hard for smaller businesses to compete financially with larger corporations, prioritising employee wellbeing packages can help small businesses to stand out when competing with larger companies for top talent, as it helps to show prospective employees the more personalised and supportive working culture that can come with being at a smaller company.

A strong focus on wellbeing can also help to contribute to further business growth and stability by creating more motivated, healthier employees.

Key Elements of a Successful Wellbeing Strategy for Small Businesses

Mental Health Support

Even with limited budgets, SMEs can offer mental health support and access to counselling to their employees through EAP services, creating a supportive work culture or implementing flexible working options.

Physical Wellness Initiatives

Companies can integrate low-cost physical wellness initiatives into their daily business practices, such as gym benefits, regular physical activity breaks, or remote wellness workshops.

Work-life Balance

Try promoting a healthy work-life balance for employees to help highlight the perks of working in a small business, and work to incorporate flexible work schedules or remote work options into your organisation’s wellbeing strategy.

Building Employee Benefit Packages for Small Businesses

Affordable Benefits Plans for SMEs:

Small companies can enhance their benefits packages by partnering with local businesses for discounts, such as gyms or wellness services. Additionally, they should consider implementing flexible work hours or remote options, which carry minimal costs but significantly boost employee satisfaction. Additionally, using a benefits platform allows both employers and employees to customise their benefits according to needs and budget allowance.

Tailoring Benefits to SME Employees:

Small businesses should work to tailor their benefits packages. They can do this by conducting anonymous surveys that explore key areas such as mental health and work-life balance, allowing employees to express their specific wellbeing needs, as well as to promote open conversations between employees and their managers. By doing this, SME businesses establish an ongoing feedback mechanism to reassess and adjust their SME employee benefits regularly, making sure they evolve with changing employee needs.

Implementing and Monitoring Employee Wellbeing Initiatives in SMEs

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating an Employee Health and Wellbeing Strategy:

Now that we’ve identified the need for a wellbeing strategy, let’s take a look at the steps you should take to develop a proactive approach and plan for implementing your own:  

• Lead by example and address the specific risks to your own organisation  
• Focus on the key challenges to your business. For instance, if the main goal is to reduce absenteeism, you should be focusing on implementing plans that safeguard mental health and boost engagement  
• Align and integrate your wellbeing strategy with your overall business strategy
• Encourage a positive culture for wellbeing where employees feel comfortable sharing their mental health concerns
• Consider financial education as part of your wellbeing strategy and offer practical support through financial wellbeing benefits
• Protect your employee retention levels with preventative care options
• Enlist wellbeing champions who can liaise with and advocate for your wider workforce

When creating your wellbeing strategy, it’s important to engage with your people at every stage to understand their specific wellbeing needs and ensure that the strategy is fit for purpose. Once you have your plan in place, it will act as a benchmark for future planning and raise standards for employee wellbeing within your organisation.

Launching Your Employee Wellbeing Strategy

So, you’ve got your plan of action—now it’s time to launch your strategy. To do this, you will need to: 

• Consider how your strategy and the support you’re providing will be branded. This should be uplifting and consistent, but should also specify if the wellbeing solution is being facilitated by an external provider. This may help to reassure your people that they can use the service confidentially and that no information will be relayed to management  
• Build a Wellness Calendar with key awareness days and work with your wellbeing champions to arrange ways to recognise and celebrate these days. For example, you might create opportunities for your people to practice mindfulness, meditation and yoga during Stress Awareness Month, or encourage open conversations and experience sharing in recognition of World Suicide Prevention Day
• Enlist line managers as role models and arm them with the relevant training and information to signpost employers for further assistance. You should also ensure that your line managers are playing an active role in keeping your people engaged with their wellbeing provision through regular communication and information sharing 
• Collect regular feedback from your teams to determine how accessible, impactful and successful your wellbeing strategy is. You can do this via employee engagement or pulse surveys, or with a simple suggestion box in a communal area

Adjusting the Strategy Over Time

Benefits plans for small business should regularly be revisited and assessed to gauge whether changes need to be made, as wellbeing strategies may need to respond to changes in employee needs or specific business circumstances. SMEs can assess the need to change their wellbeing strategy by regularly reviewing employee feedback and engagement metrics alongside industry trends to ensure alignment with employee needs. 

When making any changes to benefits, it’s important that these changes are clearly communicated to employees. To communicate these changes, outline the benefits and reasons behind the updates through a company-wide meeting or detailed email, highlighting how employee input directly influences the decision for these changes.

Choosing a Trustworthy Benefits Provider

While it’s clear that SME leaders should be actively investing in the wellbeing of their workforces, this might be a fairly daunting task to undertake. That’s why it’s important to seek advice, guidance and implementation from an expert wellbeing benefit provider who can offer holistic support for the mental, physical and financial wellness of your people.

A trustworthy provider should: 

• Consider and cover all aspects of employee wellbeing, not just mental wellbeing  
• Support you to set up and maintain your wellbeing provision  
• Provide branded collateral to spread awareness and encourage engagement  
• Provide regular insights and reports around uptake, engagement and tangible results

If you’re an SME leader in need of wellbeing support for your workforce, the Vivup platform can help you. From day-to-day challenges at home to mounting pressures in the workplace, our EAP offers differing levels of support to employees, including a 24/7/365 telephone helpline, face to face counselling and additional support.

Book a demo today to learn more.

Sources  

Dismal Employee Engagement Is a Sign of Global Mismanagement (gallup.com)   

The 2022 State of Workforce Mental Health (corporatewellnessmagazine.com) 

Four-fifths of SME employers do not have a health and wellbeing strategy – Employee Benefits 

How much is absenteeism costing your business? | ACUTEC  

Average Employee Replacement Cost is £12,000 for SMEs | Accounts and Legal  

Mental health impact of remote working | Nuffield Health