3 Benefits to Providing Wellness Training to Retail Employees

April 18, 2018
Business Skills

By Beth Dokolasa, MA, RD, Guest Writer

As a retail dietitian, you focus a lot of time and attention on developing nutrition and wellness programs for your customers and community members, but what if I told you there is a large (and captive!) audience that you may be overlooking? Providing ongoing wellness training to your co-workers has the potential to provide far reaching benefits — from boosting the success of your customer wellness programs, to helping achieve your company’s business objectives. 

Here are 3 positive outcomes to providing ongoing training to your fellow retail employees: 

1. Develop rapport with your co-workers. Ever feel like a lone wolf at your store because you have a significantly different set of job duties? Creating regular opportunities to interact with your co-workers will help them gain a better understanding of your role at the store which will help them see you as an approachable and helpful resource.
2. Gain promotion for your programs and services. Once your co-workers have a clear understanding of your role at the store, and you’ve gotten them super excited about nutrition and wellness, they will feel inspired to share their newfound knowledge about nutrition and your programs with the customers they interact with. 
3. Prove yourself as an asset to your store and company. Ongoing training supports a range of business objectives including:
   • Store sales. Providing your co-workers with ongoing nutrition training has the potential to support store sales as a result of them feeling more comfortable talking about your programs and store products.
   • Employee Retention. A primary reason employees leave a job is due to the lack of ongoing training and support. A dietitian employee training program has the potential to support employee retention by providing nutrition information that is useful for their job and helpful to their overall wellbeing.
   • Productivity. Any good nutrition and wellness habits you can instill in your co-workers has the potential of reducing sick days and achieving an overall healthier and more resilient staff.

No matter which way you look at it, supporting employee wellness and education is a major win for you, your co-workers, and your store. Stay tuned for my next article in which I will provide some ideas for how to develop an effective employee training program!

About Beth: Beth Dokolasa is a Registered Dietitian and Instructional Developer for Natural Grocers. She creates e-learning for a variety of audiences on topics from nutrition to customer care. For Beth, the most important part of her role is providing training content in a way that empowers and engages learners.  During her time at Natural Grocers, she also helped develop and lead the Nutritional Health Coach training program and helped manage the Nutrition Education Department. Beth earned her bachelor’s at the University of Illinois - Urbana and her master’s at the University of Denver. She currently lives in Evergreen, Colorado.