Workplace Health & Wellness Fairs: Ideas and Tips from Wellergize™
We've put together this simple site to give you some ideas and tips to create a successful health and wellness fair in your organization.
Why have a wellness fair?
There are many benefits to holding a wellness fair. It can be promotional or exploratory - part of your existing wellness program or part of the process of determining what components will be best received in your environment. By holding wellness-related activities within work hours, it shows management has a commitment to the health of personnel.
Your health and wellness fair coan be strictly for your organization, or if you have a smaller number of staff, create a cluster of organizations to share costs. Hold it in a location accessible by all parties. Include some team building or networking exercises to help employees get to know each other in a more relaxed environment.
Before you start: some general information about wellness fairs
The most successful wellness fairs have a good mix of information and activities. From bringing in specialized speakers, to making the most of local and national not-for-profit health agencies, to making trade-offs with local health-related businesses, you can put together a wellness fair on almost any budget. The Internet offers a wide range of freebies in the form of posters, tip sheets, and information packages, so investing a little legwork can pay off big in terms of results.
Depending on the current fitness level of your employees, the activities portion of the fair could be less physical.
Setting your wellness fair objectives
What is it that you are looking for out of your wellness fair? Is your fair an annual event? Is it a quarterly series with different themes per session? Have you decided that this is all your company can afford for your wellness program? Is it simply one part of an on-going comprehensive program targeted to changing employee attitude and behaviour toward health and your organization?
How healthy are your overall wellness program returns? We've all seen the remarkable ROI stats posted by large corporations, and would like to tap into that. Where specifically would you like to see the benefits? Are you hoping to cut costs in the area of absenteeism or turnover? (If so, you either need one spectacular wellness fair or it needs to be part of a regular, monitored, program.) Is it an issue of reducing accidents on site? Are the bulk of your employees sedentary for vast periods of time? Do you have a high number of a particular population segment, like mothers or people caring for elderly parents?
Possible Goals for the Fair
Most likely your event goals will be a sub-set of the following outcomes:
Being clear about the goals helps you get a realistic idea of what you need to put in place and setting expectations for your results. One wellness fair does not make a "wellness program", but it can be a good way to kick one off or touch base with employees about changes in their needs and expectations.
