Have you worked in a corporate environment in the past? Perhaps your client base largely works in this type of setting? No matter how familiar you are with the office environment, corporate wellness is an area worth considering as a health professional!

Corporate wellness consists of health and wellness based services that are offered to employees at a company. Often times, companies will bring in a contracted health and wellness practitioner to design and run these offerings for their staff as they may not have an in-house wellness team.

There are many benefits of expanding into corporate wellness, such as:

• It opens up a whole new portal of income for your business that can help you scale. You could even specialize in corporate wellness as a niche if it’s something you’re passionate about.
• Companies who prioritize their employee's health are generally happy to invest in workplace wellness solutions, and typically have the budget to do so.
• You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You can take what you already offer and repurpose it.
• If your interest is piqued, let’s take a look at how you can easily repackage your existing content to meet corporate wellness needs.

Understanding Corporate Needs

Before diving into designing your corporate wellness content, you should do a bit of research to get to know the company. There are a few important steps to take in order to best understand corporate needs:

1. Get clear on which type of company and/or employee you want to work with.
   Not all companies or employees will have the same needs. You may want to consider offering wellness education to specific industries (ex. finance or tech), specific employee types within a company (ex. support staff or managerial level), or just general wellness education that can apply to everyone.
2. Get to know the company.
   Once you know who you want to work with, do some research to find companies that fit those requirements and get to know them. You’ll want to understand who your audience is - Are they analytical or creative? What is the age demographic? Is the corporate culture casual or more formal?
3. Build a relationship with the in-house Human Resources or Wellness Team.
   Depending on the company and their size, they may or may not have a team like this in place. If they do, it’s important to get to know them and keep them in the loop. They generally oversee or control what you can and can’t offer, say, or do as an external contractor. If you exclude them or go over their heads, it can make things harder for you later on.
4. Understand what existing health offerings the company already has in place.
   Does the company provide health benefits to its employees and if so, what does it include? Is the company already using a Health Risk Assessment (HRA)? Get to know how these work, some of the gold-standard assessments that employers use (such as the University of Michigan HRA - check out an example here), and how to tie employee’s HRA results into your program or offering.
5. You’ll also want to understand if and how the company is offering a yearly biometric screening. Will they want you to integrate that screening into your offering? Will you bring in and oversee the screening or perhaps do that yourself if you’re qualified? How will you incorporate the screening results into the HRA and your offering (since they all fit together)?

Re-Packaging Your Content For Corporate Wellness

The beauty of corporate wellness is that you don’t need to start from scratch. Take a look at your existing content and see how it could be re-purposed in an office environment. Whether that be group programs, materials for one-on-one clients, or workshops you’ve run in the past, assess which of this content might best align with the needs of employees in a corporate environment.

1. Topics That Resonate.
   Topics that are relevant and resonate with your regular client pool may not apply the same way in a corporate environment. Consider which health issues are most relevant in an office environment by looking at the issues that contribute most to sick days, employee turnover, and lowered productivity or morale (check out the CDC Workplace Health Resource Center as a great reference point, or gain insight from the in-house Human Resources/Wellness team if available). Next, take a look at what materials you already have that could improve these issues. For example, perhaps you have existing content on balancing blood sugar. This could tie into productivity as it will support employees having sustained energy levels all day.Some employers prefer evidence-based, proven programs that have shown to provide a measurable ROI and are typically focused on their top conditions (the conditions that make up 5-10% of their health care costs, for example, diabetes, obesity, back problems, mental health challenges, stress, etc.). Be familiar with some of these programs (again, refer to the CDC Workplace Health Resource Center for some examples) and don’t be afraid to leverage their topics and structures when putting together your own corporate wellness offerings.
2. How To Offer Your Content.
   Once you have your topic in place, consider the format you'd like to use and how you will deliver your content. There are a few different options common in the corporate wellness space:

• Workshops/Lunch 'n' Learns
  • These are a great way to start building a relationship with a company. It’s typically a one-time offer but can often lead to additional workshops, longer-term consulting, or other services.
  • Remember that these sessions don’t necessarily need to be done in person. You can conduct them virtually over Zoom as a webinar presentation or an interactive workshop.

With all of these options, it’s important to consider how you will increase engagement. The company is the one hiring you, but the employees are who you’ll actually be serving. This can potentially make for lowered engagement as the employees haven’t invested in your services themselves. Being prepared with tools to keep them motivated is essential. Consider strategies such as:

• Incentives for participation.
• Tap into peer-to-peer accountability.
• Get them involved in the content by polling them on topics they’d like to learn about.

Diving into corporate wellness can open up a new portal in your business, without having to start from scratch! It does, however, come with different considerations than working with your existing client pool. As we’ve discussed, you should start by getting informed and understanding corporate needs. From there, work on repurposing your existing materials to align with topics and formats that are relevant to an office environment.

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