Wellness Portals: Their Top Must-Have Features and Benefits for Employees

Do you know that an ASSOCHAM survey revealed that 85% of private sector employees are affected by chronic diseases? These diseases are majorly caused by their sedentary lifestyle and inactivity. Therefore, the responsibility of their wellness falls on the employers, and that’s where wellness portals come in.

Wellness portals for employees are an amazing way to track their health. These portals have brilliant features that track hydration, calorie intake, workout sessions, meals, and much more that make health tracking effortless.

These Employee wellness platforms also significantly reduce stress and help employees stay active through fun wellness challenges like walking 5000 steps daily, drinking 8 liters of water, and others. Some organizations choose to incentivize these wellness challenges to add a factor of engagement.

These portals are also a brilliant option for effective wellness campaign tracking. For example, a company launching a walking challenge or walkathon across its branches in different countries can use these portals to track employees' performance and progress.

So, if you are looking for such a portal, this article will walk you through the details about them. Tag along till the end!

What is an Employee Wellness Portal?

From an employee's perspective, an employee wellness portal is an online platform that tracks and enhances their physical and mental well-being. These portals or platforms aim to improve overall wellness through a variety of features.

Corporate wellness portals have evolved significantly over the past few years. These platforms flawlessly transformed with the increasing use of smartphones. Today, they track mental and emotional well-being, whereas earlier, they only measured physical wellness.

In an organization, these portals benefit HRs and administrators in creating wellness programs, tracking essential health metrics and engagement, and creating daily wellness challenges.

Key Features to Look for in a Wellness Portal

There are many wellness platforms or portals available today. Choosing the most suitable one for you depends upon its top features. Companies can analyze these features and choose the one that fits best.

1. Easy Device Integrations

Compatibility with every kind of device, like tablets, computers, and mobiles is one of the major features of a good portal. This fast-paced life where everyone is on the go demands everything be accessible everywhere.

For instance, these portals track daily steps or distance walked. This feature requires the portal to be accessible on our phones. Offering the platform on phones or apps can result in enhanced engagement. Today, it is necessary to make wellness platforms easily accessible as the world is always on the go.

2. Health Education and Coaching

Wellness portals also provide health education and coaching. These coaching sessions could include videos, seminars, PDFs, PPTs, books, and audio files. Thus, it enhances employees' knowledge and enables them to make informed decisions about their health.

As these resources are available on mobile devices, employees can access them around the clock. They cover a wide range of health-related topics like nutrition, physical fitness, as well as mental health.

Educating employees about their health helps build a community of health-conscious people. It boosts engagement and nurtures the organization's healthy work environment.

3. Wellness Assessments

Wellness assessments are tools that diagnose or test the health of employees. Every efficient wellness portal comes with such diagnostic tools to evaluate various aspects of employees' overall well-being.

These wellness assessments can be in the form of questionnaires, biometric screenings, and other ways that measure physical as well as mental and emotional well-being.

4. Engaging Wellness Challenges

Wellness portals include fun wellness challenges to get people to work out. It means either the challenges are recognizable or can be incentivized to increase participation.

Employers must understand that getting people to work out is not easy. A 2019 study showed that out of all the people with gym memberships, only 49.9% went to the gym twice a week. Therefore, it is crucial to make the challenges fun and engaging.

A practical way to make challenges engaging is to keep them short. People don't have a lot of time, so a 5-minute workout session is much better than an hour-long gym session.

5. A Reward System

This feature incentivizes employees to complete a specific task. The incentive can be redeemable points or any other form of tangible value. For instance, Amazon gift cards, Zomato gift cards, and more.

This system is based on positive reinforcements. It empowers and encourages employees to participate more. A reward at the end of a challenge also increases the chances of employees completing it.

6. A Leaderboard and Social Feed

A leaderboard in a corporate wellness portal recognizes employees for completing challenges. Recognition and scores have been proven to boost morale and motivation. They can further promote employee participation in the challenges.

Social feed can also help increase participation and engagement. It enables the participants to share their scores, milestones, and health updates with others. This can inspire others to participate too.

7. Customizable Communications and Announcements

A wellness portal can be an excellent platform for health updates and campaign announcements. To be able to brand and customize messages and announcements gives admins the benefit of communicating effectively.

Admins can announce campaign results, the walker of the month, and many other things to communicate with and motivate the employees.

8. Efficient Reporting and Analytics

A wellness program is useless if you cannot measure its performance. Therefore, wellness portals come with built-in analytics and reporting features. These help HRs and admins accurately track employee performance and generate reports.

Data-driven portals are likely to function better. Real-time data collected through employee wellness dashboards helps formulate better wellness plans for the future.

9. Virtual Fitness Classes

Virtual fitness classes are quite beneficial for people in a 9-to-5 job. These people want fitness coaching to be available to them anywhere and anytime. Employers can make these available to boost participation and engagement.

With their work schedules, corporate employees don't have the energy or time to go to a gym or a yoga class. Therefore, fitness classes available on the portal can bridge this gap for them. They can actively improve employees' physical and mental health. This is a major benefit of employee wellness programs

10. Nutrition and Diet Plans

Wellness portals also provide personalized and general diet plans for people. This is a major feature and benefit of these portals, as diet consultations and wellness coaching cost hundreds of dollars.

75% of healthcare spending goes to treating chronic diseases that are caused by diet-related issues. Therefore, taking care of employees’ diets can help create a culture of wellness at work.

11. Complete Data Security

Data security is a crucial feature of these portals. These platforms collect different kinds of data on physical, mental, and emotional health, and this data must be protected from leaking.

Employers need to earn employees' confidence about the privacy of their data to get them to sign up on these portals.

12. Mental Health Resources

Mental health resources refer to videos, PDFs, and consultations for mental issues. These portals often come with recorded mindfulness practice sessions and guides to manage anxiety, depression, and panic attacks.

These resources help corporate employees immensely as they are under daily stress and pressure.

These features discussed above will help you know what you might need in a wellness portal for your organization. That said, let’s go through the steps to choosing the right provider for these portals.

How to Choose the Right Employee Wellness Portal Provider?

Choosing the correct wellness portal provider is essential for the smooth functioning of the organization. It is also necessary to check if the providers' programs can be integrated with your policies without significant changes.

Therefore, when choosing a wellness portal for your organization, consider the following factors:

Check What Your Company Needs

• Check if the types of initiatives provided align with your employees' needs.
• Understand the current situation of your organization and assess what you need.
• Consider the age difference, fitness levels, and employee demographics.
• Check if your budget aligns appropriately to keep the program running in the long run.

Validate Their Features

• Thoroughly check if every feature they provide is helpful to your organization.
• Run a test of their portal or app before accepting it.
• Understand their support system if this is your first time using employee wellness portals.

Customization Options

• Every program they offer will not serve your purpose. Check their customization options.
• Confirm your branding requirements with them.
• Check if the challenges and reward systems provided can be customized.

Privacy and Security

• Ensure that you set your requirements for your employees', employees', and clients' data privacy.
• Ask them about the system they incorporate to secure their database.
• Ask them if they stick to the regulations of HIPAA for sensitive information.

These steps are some basic checks to run before choosing a wellness portal. They can equip you to judge a portal based on your organization’s needs.

How Vantage Fit Can Help

Our application, Vantage Fit, is a one-in-all employee wellness platform. It is readily available on every device with smooth user interface. The app has built-in fitness challenges that help employees stay fit, build healthier habits, and earn redeemable points.

Vantage Fit provides a flawless portal and a customizable employee wellness dashboard for seamless metrics collection. Book a demo today!

A Recap

Employee wellness portals like Vantage Fit are changing the corporate world as we know it today. The above-mentioned wellness portal features can help you familiarize yourself with one if you are looking for one for your organization.

If you are an employer, this line is for you—an employee lost is a significant cost incurred. Therefore, keep your employees engaged with proper wellness portals that keep them healthy. Book a demo with us today and see the difference for yourself!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Are wellness portals considered standalone solutions for employee well-being?

No, wellness portals alone cannot help achieve total employee well-being. They work as a small part of a broader wellness program or strategy, including employee health benefits, good work culture, health insurance, and others.

2. Do wellness portals use principles of behavior change science to promote a healthier lifestyle?

Yes, wellness portals often incorporate principles of behavior change science to promote healthier lifestyles. These platforms use evidence-based strategies to encourage sustainable behavior change by focusing on motivation, habits, and reinforcement.

3. How to promote the employee wellness Portal?

To promote the employee wellness portal, proper integration of technology, engagement strategies, a reward system, and other techniques can help greatly.

4. How to maintain and update the wellness portal?

To maintain and update, the platform should receive regularly scheduled updates to update content, refine features, and incorporate the present needs of the employees. This can help build a robust wellness portal.

5. What are the ethical considerations surrounding the collection and use of employee health data in wellness portals?

The ethical code requires unbreakable confidentiality between the employee and the organization regarding his or her personal health data. Employees' privacy should be protected at every step.

References

1. WebMD Health Services
2. Fierce Healthcare