Creating a Wellness Champion Network is a great way to bring awareness and build engagement around your wellness offerings. You can boost your wellbeing culture by supporting and encouraging your most involved employees.

Holly Greer, global wellness program manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), shares tips and best practices for leveraging your Wellness Champion Network to help promote Wellbeats and other wellness offerings.

HPE is a long-standing Wellbeats client with approximately 60,000 global employees in 58 different countries. The wellness ambassador network Holly has built at HPE includes about 380 individuals around the world.

Why Build a Wellness Champion Network?

Wellness Champion Networks are helpful in overcoming communication barriers. As more and more business happens virtually, email communication is critical—but as the volume of emails increases, it’s difficult to make your email communication stand out. That’s where your wellness champions come in. These individuals can engage in personal, face-to-face communication to support your wellness offerings.

Wellness Champion Networks can also help you engage your “hard-to-reach” employees. Employees who work with their hands on site may not be checking emails. Employees who are overworked and overwhelmed may not be responsive. Those employees who don’t think they need a wellness program—because they’re very healthy or very unhealthy—make up yet another segment of hard-to-reach employees. Getting your wellness champions in front of these individuals can serve as an impactful means of connection.

Ultimately, your Wellness Champion Network reinforces your company culture. These individuals understand and share the culture and beliefs, and they have a personal connection to wellbeing or a passion for wellness. They serve as your boots on the ground and give a voice to your wellbeing culture.

How to Engage Your Wellness Champions

Use the following four steps to identify your wellness champions, increase their involvement, and ultimately get your message across.

1. Discover their “why.”

Recruit employees with a passion for wellness using a simple, easy-to-find application. You want to attract people who have a passion for health and wellness and then shine a spotlight on it. Having an application process that pulls out their why is key. Keep the Wellness Champion application short and sweet.

2. Keep your champions in the loop.

You want your Wellness Champions to feel like they’re part of something special—because they are! Keep the group connected by meeting regularly; quarterly meetings work great. Create a communication hub to unite your Wellness Champions, and make sure there’s a constant flow of communication. Share reporting while maintaining sensitivity about what information you’re sharing. You want them to feel special.

3. Recognize and celebrate your champions.

It’s challenging to recognize a group and help them feel appreciated when you might not have the budget to pay them more or even send them a T-shirt, so look for creative ways to recognize your Wellness Champions. Use peer-to-peer recognition by encouraging individuals to showcase one another’s accomplishments and send notes or e-cards through company-wide communication. Feature wellness champions in newsletters or send notes to supervisors acknowledging their employees’ involvement.

4. Give your champions a voice.

Include your Wellness Champion Network in decision-making and give them a platform to share their passions. If they feel that they have a voice, they’ll be more invested in initiatives and outreach. Allow voting on programs or campaign themes, give them a voice, or invite them to leadership meetings to showcase what they are doing to enhance wellbeing across teams.

If you’re considering starting a champion network or if you need new ideas to keep your existing network engaged, consider implementing Holly’s tips to unite your team around your wellbeing culture.

Support Your Wellness Champions with Wellbeats

In addition to Holly’s proven strategies to engage Wellness Champions, Wellbeats offers tools to help set you up for success when it comes to managing your Wellness Champion Network.

• Client Resources Hub: Along with Monthly Marketing Toolkits, Wellbeats has a Wellness Champion Toolkit to help you engage and support your wellness champions.

• Wellbeats Swag Store: In the Wellbeats swag store, administrators and members can purchase Wellbeats branded swag. These make great prizes for raffle drawings and recognition if it fits in your budget.

• Aggregate Data: This information showcases how your population is using Wellbeats and demonstrates content interests and impact of initiatives. View the most popular classes, class categories, and programs; monthly enrollments of new users; and report groups to see engagement by different locations and departments.

About Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) is the global edge-to-cloud company that helps organizations accelerate outcomes by unlocking value from all of their data, everywhere. Built on decades of reimagining the future and innovating to advance the way people live and work, HPE delivers unique, open, and intelligent technology solutions as a service. With offerings spanning Cloud Services, Compute, High Performance Computing & AI, Intelligent Edge, Software, and Storage, HPE provides a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, helping customers develop new business models, engage in new ways, and increase operational performance. For more information, visit www.hpe.com.

About Wellbeats, a LifeSpeak company

Wellbeats, a LifeSpeak company is a leading provider of on-demand virtual fitness, nutrition, and mindfulness classes for use in workplaces of all sizes, health plans, on college or university campuses, multi-family housing, the U.S. military, and fitness and health clubs. Based in St. Louis Park, MN, Wellbeats makes fitness accessible, affordable, and approachable for everyone. More than 1,000 classes and 35+ programs are available to help members stay on track and meet their goals. To learn more, visit www.wellbeats.com or check out a sampling of the company’s fitness classes during a Facebook Live class, and follow Wellbeats on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.