A very timely article appeared in CIO.com recently about the The 7 Pitfalls of Company Wellness Programs . We at DE believe it’s a must read for our clients and non-clients alike who are running an employee wellness program or thinking of starting one. Here is a key excerpt from the article on communications that is fully aligned with DE’s recommended strategy:

Email seems like a natural channel for program updates, but employee inboxes everywhere are already full, and getting workers to read wellness newsletters can be difficult, according to Jason Russell, director of the North America Total Rewards employee benefits program for SAP America.

Russell recommends keeping email communications brief, about a page or less. And they should be easy to read and interesting. For example, employees are more likely to get or stay engaged when newsletters highlight other employees or executives that participate in fitness programs. SAP America’s wellness emails sometimes include brief interviews with workers about how they stay fit, modeled after the bios featured regularly in Runner’s World magazine, Russell says.

Here is another one that we generally recommend to our clients as well:

The software programs that are sometimes required to participate in fitness challenges and wellness programs don’t always get along with IT firewalls, according to Indiana University Health’s Cooper. So she worked with the organization’s IT team in advance to “make sure the software programs could be loaded onto participants’ computers.”

Go read the whole article here when you can.