A Documented H&W Strategy is Essential for Success

May 6, 2020
Annette Maggi
Business Skills

By RDBA Executive Director Annette Maggi, MS, RDN, LD, FAND

As a retail dietitian, have you documented your health and well-being strategy? Regardless of level of role within the company – corporate, regional or store -- every retail RDN should have a defined health and wellness strategy.

There are four reasons you need a documented health and wellness strategy:

• Ensures leadership commitment and key stakeholder buy in. Every retail company has business goals and priority projects. Developing and maintaining a health and well-being strategy ensures the work of retail RDs at your company aligns with these corporate goals, and roles up to business priorities. It also ensures you have agreement from leaders and stakeholders, giving you the go-ahead to set things into action and execute against the strategy.
• Puts you in control. Retail RDNs are pulled in many directions and get suggestions from many departments on nutrition programs and services that should be offered. A documented health and well-being strategy allows you to evaluate new requests against your approved plan and ensures you can stay focused on priority projects.
• Maintains program focus with reporting structure changes. It’s not uncommon for store directors to change or corporate RDNs to suddenly report to a new function. Having a living, breathing strategy in place will impress new leaders but can also prevent a big shift in healthy living programs.
• Showcases your leadership skills. Developing and executing a health and wellness strategy shows your strengths – ability to analyze current markets, assess competitors, and develop plans that align with corporate goals and objectives.

Over the next few weeks, RDBA e-Weekly will include articles on how to develop a health and wellness strategy to position you to be highly successful in selling health at retail.