Posts from — November 2008

Wellness might be the fatal flaw in your Workplace Wellness Program. Is Wellness part of your strategy? Does worksite wellness stop when your staff members leave the office?

Wellness Continuity

If staff members don’t have the tools to pursue health and wellness on a Personal level, then it becomes easy for them to “fall off the wagon” and slide back into a unealthy lifestyles. If you have a walking program, for example, it should encourage staff members to build walking routes near their homes, perhaps with the cooperation of the neighborhood association or coworkers who live in the neighborhood.

Workplace Wellness Programs: Always on Your Mind

Your Corporate Health and Wellness Initiative coordinator should have “vacation wellbeing” as part of their job description. In other words, you don’t want a Corporate Health and Wellness Initiative to stop at the boundaries of the worksite campus. Instead, integrate Personal health and wellness with your Workplace Wellness Programs.

This can benefit your Workplace Wellness Programs in a couple of ways:

it lowers the chance that the employee will come back to the office feeling unfit, overwhelmed and unable to resume their Workplace Wellness Programs; and
it shows that their organization is just as invested in their Personal health and wellness as they are

Like a marathon, Personal health and wellness is a long-term commitment and it’s difficult for anyone to do in isolation. Simply put, it’s easier to maintain your health when you know others are depending on you and watching your Personal performance. It’s easier to maintain to an physical activity program when you have a jogging partner who wakes you up when you oversleep, or spots you when you’re lifting weights.

Similarly, it’s easier to maintain to your Corporate Health and Wellness Initiative when you know your organization is supporting you and wishing you the best.

Don’t Dictate Personal Health

Just as Wellness surveys serve a vital function in building a Workplace Wellness Program, it’s critical that you involve staff members in designing an off-site wellness strategy. No one enjoys being told what to do, but everyone enjoys having assistance in tacking tough problems. Make it clear that staff members are in charge of their own health and wellness. Your role as their health management partner is to support, advise, counsel, offer resources and information.

Of course, don’t forget that part of Personal health and wellness responsibility is to offer good health risk assessment baselines so staff members can proceed safely on the road to better physical fitness.

Workplace Wellness Programs: An Attainable Goal

Was Wellness on your corporation’s new year’s resolutions list? Here we are a little over midway into the third month of 2008, the time when resolutions start to falter if they haven’t lost momentum completely. Has your Worksite’s wellness resolution fallen by the wayside? If so, there are still ways to get back on track.

One Wellness tip comes to us from the YMCA of Greater Des Moines, reported from the Jersey Shore. Rod Shirk, the YMCA’s chief financial officer, participated in the organization’s first executive Workplace Wellness Program, which registered his cholesterol as higher than normal. That prompted him to get a physical, which showed high levels of a PSA (prostate-specific antigen) that often indicates prostate cancer. The outcome? His doctors caught a life-threatening illness just in time.

Thanks Workplace Wellness Program.

So of course, Shirk is a huge proponent of Workplace Wellness Programs. He says, “For us here at the YMCA, if we are telling people to be healthy, we had better set a good example for our staff members.”

Wellness Decreases Health Care Costs

Though cases like Shirk’s dramatic cancer save are the most desirable effect of Workplace Wellness Programs, it isn’t the initial draw for companies. They do it to reduce health care costs, and there’s no doubt that Workplace Wellness Programs do just that. Corporate Health and Wellness Initiative Statistics show that Workplace Wellness Programs return anywhere from $2.30 to $10.10 per dollar spent on wellness. “Health care costs should go down as people think about changing their diets and getting more active,” Shirk says.

The Corporate Health and Wellness Initiative savings aren’t just in the Health Insurance department. Human resource departments report that Workplace Wellness Programs also reduce absenteeism and increase productivity.

Still, businesses have been loath to invest that elusive Wellness dollar despite the well-documented returns. A Principal Financial Group and Harris Interactive survey found that only 10% of small- to medium-size companies have made worksite Health Screenings – like the one that saved Shirk’s life – available to their staff members.