Health is our most sustainable trend to date — and businesses are reaping the benefits. By placing a greater emphasis on employee wellbeing, wellness is turned into a strategic lever for improving performance and productivity, and so also stimulates long-term organisational health.

However, wellness initiatives don't just happen on their own, they take some planning and require strategic insight. Mannee De Wet, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Planet Fitness argues that organisations should rethink their approach to workplace wellness.

In part two of this Q&A, De Wet explains how companies can better integrate movement into the workday of their employees  and what metrics are actually valuable to track, showing how data can be used to build more effective and results-driven wellness strategies.

 

You highlight the link between physical activity and cognitive performance. How can companies integrate movement into the work day without disrupting productivity?

My feeling is, sometimes companies preach to the converted when they run challenges or incentives or let employees enter for fun runs. The bigger challenge is, how do you tackle your sedatory employees, those that are not active — that have no interest in being active?

So, for me, the focus on a company should be small steps. Create a challenge or an incentive that every single person feels they can achieve easily. It could be something as simple as a step challenge of how many floors you climb, and all people actually have to do during that time is just take the steps rather than take an escalator or elevator.

It's something that everyone can participate in and, in doing so over time, start changing that mindset. That person that always took the elevator that is not walking? If they start taking two or three flights of steps, eventually their mindset will start changing to maybe taking a one or two kilometer walk in the morning and we'll migrate them into the gym. And for me, that's really where the focus needs to be.

The mindset for me is first. Before you will change the body, you need to get people to think differently about health and fitness.

 

Many organisations invest in wellness programmes but struggle to see measurable ROI. What metrics should business leaders actually be tracking to link wellness to performance?

Yeah, always a difficult one. You know, the benefit these days is that everyone has got wearables or access to wearables: it's now very easy to track steps, it's very easy to track calories, it's very easy to track flights — so choose a challenge.

Get people engaged through wearing their wearables. They can share it through platforms like, I mean, Garmin, Apple, you can put it on Strava. There's so many different formats now where people can actually share what they are actually currently doing and through that create leaderboards that you can communicate through the company.

You can celebrate successes rather than, you know, push something down people's throats where it's more of a negative than a positive.

And that's the other thing. If you want to change behavior, you need to incentivise people. And it doesn't mean giving people time off. It could give people an opportunity to be active in their day-to-day work environment. They mustn't feel that they're sacrificing their own personal time in order to achieve that. Otherwise you're just creating another barrier for people to actually participate.

 

What role does data play in the fitness industry today, both in tracking member engagement and in proving value to corporate partners?

It plays a vital role. And the nice thing is, like I mentioned before, data is readily available. Everything that we are using today in our day-to-day lives are actually tracking all our metrics activity: what we're doing, where we're going, how we're stepping, how many calories we are burning. 

The big question is, how do you consolidate that data in a framework that people don't feel is invasive, where they're comfortable in sharing that type of information? And then, understanding which of your employees are sitting in a high risk segment and finding interventions and challenges that appeal to those segments in order to get them more engaged, and ideally just to get them to start thinking differently about their health and then having a very slow migration and movement in order to get them to that point where they actually start looking at health clubs and fitness in general as part and parcel of their day-to-day routine.

 

Did you enjoy this Q&A? Let us know in the comments section below.

Want to stay up-to-date with the latest news? Subscribe to our newsletter.

Missed Part One of this Q&A? Read From the Gym Floor to the Corporate Boardroom: A Q&A With Mannee De Wet — Part One.

*Image courtesy of Facebook and Canva