As an employer, you know why supporting and maintaining employee health is important. You know the organizational problems it can solve (like lowering healthcare costs, absenteeism and low morale) and the benefits it can provide (like attracting and retaining high-quality talent, increasing productivity and ultimately, a financial ROI).
Supporting employee health can be challenging with so many options available. One effective yet often overlooked solution is hosting a wellness fair—an interactive event promoting overall workplace wellness. In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about wellness fairs, including:
A wellness fair is a program provided by an employer to help promote and educate employees on health and wellness. Although wellness fairs are typically planned and hosted by an employer, an employer can also pay for employees to attend a wellness fair, conference or convention. In this article, we’ll be focusing on employers hosting their own wellness fair.
Compiling educational health content into a resource library for employees to access at any time is a great way to provide support, but it doesn’t always guarantee engagement. Because wellness fairs take the form of a social event with face to face conversations, they are distinctly engaging in nature. Employees are more likely to be engaged at a live event, and stay motivated afterward.
In short, a health fair focuses more on physical health and traditional healthcare, while a wellness fair touches on various pillars of wellness; including mental, environmental, social and financial, in addition to physical.
A wellness fair is meant to educate employees on the practices, resources and tools that exist to improve and maintain their overall well-being, or specific areas of wellness. Wellness fairs can be a more inclusive approach to promoting areas of wellness that commonly affect an employees’ performance in the workplace.
Planning a wellness fair is an extensive process that requires a lot of time, patience and research. The goal of a wellness fair is often to increase workplace wellness and create awareness about certain health conditions. The most important first step of planning a wellness fair is understanding the unique interests and needs of your employees. Ensuring that the activities, products and information presented are all well-aligned with employees interests will contribute greatly to the success of your event.
Typically, a well-designed and executed wellness fair takes about an average of six weeks to plan. Ultimately, the time needed to effectively plan your event is dependent on the size, scope and desired outcome.
The target audience for a wellness fair depends on its focus. For example, if the fair centers on nutrition, it’s essential to use surveys and biometric screening data to identify employees who would benefit most from related activities or seminars. You may also want to consider inviting employees’ dependents, especially if the fair covers broader wellness topics like mental health or family fitness. Tailoring the fair to specific health needs and interests will help ensure the event’s success and engagement.
It’s always a great idea to make sure you have a firm understanding of the specific needs and interests of people in your organization. The best way to collect information about what your employees need is by looking at an overview of your organization’s biometric screening results. This will tell you exactly what health conditions employees currently have or are at risk of developing.
Let us take that off your hands! Our platform offers pre-made, customizable survey templates for dozens of topics, from DEI to Employee Satisfaction. It even automates administering pulse surveys and analyzing data into aggregated reports.
The success of your wellness fair depends on how well you’re able to strategically plan, market and execute it. That being said, here are a few things you can do to help ensure fruitful results for both your wellness fair and your employees’ well-being:
First, require all employees to get a biometric screening within at least the last 6 months and submit their completed form by a certain date, before you begin planning.
Next, compile all screening results into a report that shows:
Finally, use the data from employee biometric screening results to create a survey (or find a template) that asks employees relevant questions about:
From here, you can devise some wellness fair themes to focus on. Some creative names for wellness fairs may be:
Use enticing descriptions and visuals to clearly communicate and highlight the details you know they’ll be excited about! Knowing what to expect and seeing aspects they can look forward to will help ensure everyone goes into the fair with an open mind and is more likely to be engaged.
The duration of your wellness/health fair is dependent upon the goal of the event, the amount of people attending, amount of vendors, activities and speakers or presentations. The average recommended duration of a wellness fair is 3-4 hours, but depending on the scope and desired outcome, it could be an all day or multi-day event.
Any type of virtual event is difficult to get people to attend. The second challenge after getting people to attend, is getting them excited and engaged. Here are a few tips and best practices when it comes to successfully hosting a virtual health/wellness fair:
One advantage of going virtual with your health or wellness fair is that you can collect great data from things like email open rates, chat logs, and webinar registration/attendee data.
Virtual CPR training
Information on heart disease and warning signs of heart attack, stroke, or cardiac arrest
You can also invite local health and wellness professionals like; massage therapists, yoga instructors, wellness coaches, personal trainers, counselors or connect with licensed therapists to:
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