How much do your services cost?
We use per-employee pricing, starting at $150/employee. If you opt to do a year-long program (with assessments and recommendations at months 0, 6, and 12), the cost starts at $350/employee. We bill half up front and half when the recommendations are delivered (for year-long programs, it’s 1/4 up front, and then 1/4 when each recommendation report is delivered).
Why should I invest in employee wellness assessments?
Getting an accurate picture of how your employees feel at work has tangible benefits. One of the biggest ways that focusing on employee wellbeing can help save money for your company is in reductions in voluntary turnover.
The average voluntary turnover rate in the US is 17.3% annually—those are people who are leaving your company when you don’t necessarily want them to. And replacing those employees is expensive. It can easily cost twice their salary, depending on how specialized the role is. Let’s break down the costs:
(Recruitment cost: $25,000 + onboarding and development costs in the first year: $30,000 + lost productivity while the role is unfilled: $30,000) x (17.3% turnover x 200 employees) = $2,941,000/year.
Nearly $3 million is wasted on replacing employees you didn’t want to lose. And most of the reasons good employees voluntary leave can be addressed through holistic wellness assessments:
- Lack of appreciation
- Being or feeling underpaid
- Inadequate management
- Limited career growth prospects
- Lack of training and development options
- Workplace relationships
- Work-life balance
- Job isn’t interesting or meaningful
- Job dissatisfaction
- Toxic organizational culture
- Lack of flexibility
- Fatigue/exhaustion
Understanding how satisfied your employees are on the job is the first step in reducing voluntary turnover. Companies will wellness initiatives see a reduction in turnover of 25%. And employees who have a good work-life balance are 33% less likely to leave their jobs. If you reduced your turnover rate 25% (from 17.3% to 13%), that would equal a cost savings of over $730,000 per year. And considering that even on the high end companies are spending around $2,000 per employee per year on wellness initiatives, that’s still a cost savings of over $330,000 (assuming you have 200 employees).
We already have a wellness program. Why should be do a wellness assessment?
Most corporate wellness programs are like the icing on the cake when it comes to overall employee wellbeing. If you’re nailing all the other dimensions of employee wellness, then formal programs can be an amazing way to enhance that wellness.
But corporate wellness programs are often underutilized and unappreciated because there are systemic issues that are negatively impacting employee wellbeing. Things like poor management, low engagement, insufficient compensation, and lack of respect are the underlying factors that reduce employee wellbeing and job satisfaction. If you don’t address those issues, all of the self-care stipends, meditation app subscriptions, and gym memberships in the world won’t have a meaningful impact on your team.
Assessments give you a clear picture of what factors within your company are negatively impacting your employees. Then you get a comprehensive plan for how to fix those issues.
We also focus only on the parts of individual wellness that are controllable from a company perspective. You’re not responsible for your employees’ health or social life outside of work, and many employees can find wellness programs that attempt to address those issues to be overbearing and an invasion of privacy. By focusing on the dimensions of wellness that are controllable within the company, employees feel valued and can have the mental energy and motivation to address any wellness issues they have outside of work on their own.
Can’t I just do an internal wellness assessment without hiring an outside company?
You absolutely can. But it’s not necessarily going to get the results you want and your ROI is likely to be much lower.
First, you’ll have to have someone on your staff create the questionnaire. The initial questionnaire we developed took weeks of research, testing, and iteration (not to mention years of relevant experience and training before that), which is refined for every single client. Do you have someone on your staff who can take the next month to focus solely on creating a questionnaire? And will that questionnaire be thorough enough to actually be useful?
Second, you have to contend with employee perceptions of an internal assessment. Most employees don’t think that internal wellness and “happiness” surveys are taken seriously. They’ve filled them out in the past and have not seen changes, so they don’t think they’re very effective. There’s also the perception that the information they provide might somehow be linked back to them, resulting in negative consequences or retaliation. By using an outside company it shows that 1) you’re investing in the process and are more apt to take it seriously, and 2) they can be more candid because we make every effort to keep their data private and anonymous. This results in more accurate feedback.
Third, an internal assessment will give you a picture of how your employees currently feel, but it doesn’t tell you how to fix any issues that come up. We have a wealth of resources available that can help pinpoint exactly what your next steps should be, whether that’s executive coaching for your leadership team, creating different policies around certain aspects of your work (like better recognition or more flexible hours), or adding a formal wellness program. You won’t be left with a bunch of problems you have no idea how to fix.
How do you safeguard employee information and responses?
Data privacy and security are top priorities for The Workplace Wellness Guru. We use industry-standard tools for collecting responses from your employees. Email addresses are not attached to the answers your employees provide, so even if we wanted to know who said what, we don’t have access to that information.
When it comes to comments, we do our best to anonymize the comments that come in so that we can provide valuable feedback without it singling out any particular employee as the one who left that feedback. This way employees can be honest in their answers without fearing reprisals.
And since we break down the results by department, we have minimum department sizes (generally 4 employees) to help preserve anonymity. (If you have departments with fewer than 4 employees, we’ll combine departments in logical ways to report the data so that anonymity is preserved.) When employees are sure that their name will not be linked with their responses, they’re more likely to be candid and honest in what they say, benefitting everyone involved.
What kinds of companies do you work with?
We focus on remote (and some hybrid) companies, particularly those with 20–300 employees. If you don’t fit into that description, get in touch and we can discuss a solution that might work for you!
