Corporate Wellness Blog

According to the American Journal of Health Promotion, “Health promotion is the science and art of helping people change their lifestyle to move toward a state of optimal health. Optimal health is defined as a balance of physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and intellectual health. Lifestyle change can be facilitated through a combination of efforts to enhance awareness, change behavior, and set up environments that support great health practices. Of the three, supportive environments will probably have the greatest influence in producing lasting change.”

Employee Health Promotion Program: Action Steps

The process of assembling a Employee Health Promotion Program involves:

• Identifying the current health status of your employees
• Determining the appropriate programs and interventions to offer
• Promoting and launching the programs
• Building in motivational rewards and incentives
• Measuring the impact
• Revising programs based on assessment outcomes

It may even include planning policies and procedures that support employee participation in wellness activities at your worksite (such as flextime).

Steps to Starting a Workplace Health Promotion Program

• Conduct an organization assessment
• Obtain senior staff reinforcement
• Establish a Company Health Promotion Program Committee
• Obtain employee input
• Organize goals/objectives
• Design and implement program activities
• Identify incentives
• Review outcomes

One of the ways the government plans to improve the nation’s health is through comprehensive Company Health Promotion Programs. According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, these programs may help staff members live healthier lifestyles by creating supportive work environments and offering awareness, education and behavior change programs. In fact, one of the goals and objectives of Healthy People 2010, a set of health objectives for the nation to achieve by the year 2010, is to stimulate the proportion of staff members that take part in a comprehensive Company Health Promotion Program at their workplace to 75 percent.

5 Ways to Assess and Improve Your staff members’ Health

Emotional health is a state of wellness that comes from understanding and acknowledging our emotions and finding appropriate ways to express them. As staff members, we often bring emotional problems from our childhood or current family life into the worksite because we haven’t dealt with them effectively outside of work. This can seriously damage worksite relationships and lead to poor achievement and negative feelings all around.

Many tools and techniques exist for helping us improve our emotional health. Some of the most common are given below, with real-life case histories illustrating their use. If an unpleasant mood or feeling persists over a length of time, do not hesitate to seek out a qualified professional. Corporate Wellness Programs usually have professional reinforcement already in place as part of their services.

1. Wellness Coaching / Wellness Counseling:
One of the hallmarks of emotional health is the willingness to ask for help when we need it. Confidential professional help, the coaching and counseling provided by employee assistance or wellness programs, can offer an external source of strength and insight for “working out” emotionally-based problems rather than “working them in” to your work.

2. Self-help Groups:
Self-help groups are designed to aid people in emotional situations in which they feel alone. The purpose of these groups is twofold: to allow people to safely feel and express their emotions, and to help break their isolation at work and/or in society at large and reintegrate them into society with the reinforcement of a peer group.

The classic self-help group is Alcoholics Anonymous, but thanks to technology, it’s possible to make connections with others that have common health challenges, no matter how unique the situation. People are taking advantage of tele-conference groups and social websites, such as sparkpeople.com and revolutionhealth.com. Worksite Health Promotion Programs frequently have such groups available through online or phone support. Progressive corporate wellness provider Exan Wellness, for example, offers teleconference cell groups and moderated wellness forums for interacting with others in a supportive, confidential and anonymous environment. People with shared challenges get together and discuss the emotional challenges they are facing at work or in other areas of their lives and work through shift together.

3. Journaling: Journaling is frequently recommended by counsellors as a way to help identify and process emotions. People record their emotions in writing as they experience them, in whatever form they wish. By helping the writer gain greater emotional clarity, journaling can help in making more emotionally informed decisions. In much the same way, letter writing enables people to identify and process the emotions they feel in relation to others. The letter need not be sent or its contents shared: it simply supplies a place for the expression of feelings.

An 18-year-old “army brat,” Brent has always done well at school, academically and athletically. But in his last year of high school, something seems to have happened to him. He has lost all interest in school, becoming moody and withdrawn.

Brent describes to his guidance counselor all the times he had to move when he was growing up. Each move wrenched him from his friends and forced him to play the role of the “new kid on the block.” The counselor suggests that Brent write letters to the friends he has missed over the years telling them how he felt. Finally, he has a chance to say a proper goodbye.

4. Assess Your Emotional Wellness: Corporations that seek to boost employees’ interpersonal skills, or emotional intelligence in the workplace are more thriving, according to ground-breaking journalist Daniel Goleman. And emotional intelligence is the buzzword in workplaces these days. Some Employee Wellness Programs have information about emotional intelligence, or emotional health assessments. Seek out more information about emotional intelligence for better corporate wellness.

5. Friendships/Support Systems: Friendships allow people to feel supported in their emotional journeys. At the same time, they give people an opportunity to cultivate their empathetic skills. These skills are also important for workplace health. When we are empathic with fellow workers, we help them resolve harmful or unhealthy emotions. New friendships are made through hobbies, classes, clubs, or even through web-based groups. Many people are finding emotional satisfaction by making friends through Facebook and other social websites.

At times workplace stress that is not dealt with in a healthy manner can be brought home. A 36-year-old mother of three, Sarah, wants to be a great wife, a great mother, and a success at her job. One day, drained after a long day at work, she shouted at her rambunctious children and threatened to hit her youngest son. Her behavior horrified her. To make matters worse, she believes she is a failure at her job as well as at motherhood. She watches with jealousy as younger co-workers advance much more rapidly up the corporate ladder despite having less experience than she has.

On the advice of a counselor, she decides to take time out for herself and take a course for amateur painters. It doesn’t take long before she strikes up a friendship with a single mom in the class. She once led a life very similar to Sarah’s before managing to achieve a better balance between work and family. Her new friend becomes a much-needed sounding board for Sarah and offers her perspectives on her life that she hadn’t considered before.

25% Jump in Employer Interest in Employee Health and Wellness

Job Site wellness for their staff members, companies are discovering, is wonderful for the health of their companies as well. Company Health Promotion Programs help to cut the costs associated with poor employee health, which include absenteeism, loss of productiveness and poor work quality.

A current Hewitt Associates survey of over 500 United States businesses indicated a valuable paradigm shift in how businesses view health benefits for their workers. Of those surveyed this year, 88 percent are committed to instituting long-term healthcare assistance programs (over the next 3-5 years) for their workers, with the objective of boosting the health and work rate of their workforce. This represents a 25 percent rise in interest in Workplace Health Promotion Programs over 2007.

A strong offering of Employee Health Promotion Programs to meet the demand has resulted. Health assistance providers have broadened their programs with tools that address general lifestyle factors, physical, social and psychological health factors. Programs look to predict chronic disease in their staff members and give them the tools and the information to prevent it. Companies also demand a way to measure the effectiveness of their healthcare spending.

“Self-care is our motive,” says Vic Lebouthillier, president of progressive health & wellness provider Exan Wellness.”We really believe giving employees tools to help them manage their own health, and promoting the advantages, while giving people resources to reach out for help is the key to thriving lifestyle shift. Corporations are also telling us they need a cost-effective way to deliver Corporate Wellness Programs. The type of program we have developed over years delivers the highest healthcare return on investment.”

Combining worksite wellness promotions, web-based assessments and health trackers, web-based health information, phone conferences and self-help groups, and access to a wide variety of health professionals, is behind the success of the Exan program. “Having web-based statistics about workers’ health also makes it easier to track the bottom line – return on investment” says Vic Lebouthillier.

“Corporations are moving beyond their traditional role as a provider of medical care benefits to cultivate holistic programs that pinpoint the specific health needs of their employee populations, drive employee behavior change and eliminate barriers to healthcare,” says Jim Winkler, leader of Hewitt’s health management consulting practice.

Nonetheless, in a separate survey of 30,000 workers, 74 percent said that, even though they felt their business had an obligation to help them be aware of how to use their health benefits program, only 12 percent felt the business had any right to tell them how to be healthy. Based on these results, employers need to drive home the fact that improved health is better for their workers as well as the business. It’s a win-win situation.

Employers and employees did learn common ground when it came to future health care. Both surveys indicate that 95 percent of employees be aware of that their taking care of their health today will effect future healthcare payments. A similar percentage also be aware of the important of early detection and prevention when it comes to saving on healthcare costs.

Cost is important for most corporations as well. Over 80 percent of those surveyed made cost mitigation a priority for 2008, but those reductions did not involve shifting responsibility for health care onto staff members. Although 64 percent of corporations have shifted expenditures to their staff members, only 17 percent aim  to do so in the next 3-5 years. Similarly with health reimbursement accounts, 20 percent now offer these, but only about 5 percent aim  to use them in 2008.

These survey results indicate companies are getting more proactive in assisting their workers to change behaviors and take ownership of their own health futures. This is obviously great for the well-being of workers, but also for the well-being of the companies they work for. Almost half the companies surveyed were convinced that changing health behaviors was key to increased work rate and reduce absentee rates. Over 60 percent intend  to institute programs that help workers modify and/or sustain a healthier lifestyle. Almost of these companies will also use data and measurements to be sure their health care strategies meet their health care objectives?

It is clear to most American citizens (especially those of us in business) that healthcare costs are skyrocketing out of control. No one doubts that either the market will solve the problem OR the government will impose one on us. Managed care has failed from either a cost containment or quality of care perspective. Organizations have reached the point where the cost of providing health insurance is almost as burdensome as government regulation. It’s time for some new thinking on healthcare and its impact on business and vice versa. “Corporate wellness” as an operational perspective rather than merely window dressing is one way to deal effectively with rising healthcare costs.

The Insurance Issue

The first step in solving the concern is to realize that an employee’s health is their own responsibility. Expecting companies to support unlimited health insurance coverage is simply unrealistic and unreasonable. It’s time for companies (on a broad scale) to reconsider their role in offering health insurance coverage. Instead of offering complete coverage for all workers through group plans, companies ought to begin to shift the burden of health coverage to those covered.

Here’s the approach. Provide catastrophic medical insurance as a group benefit to all workers with a large enough deductible (say $5000 per employee) to make the cost affordable for the organization. Then, allow workers to buy their own medical insurance policies (based on their own needs) and pay for them through payroll deduction with pre-tax earnings. There are numerous insurance employers that sell individual plans on this basis. Everybody wins. Staff Members can tailor their coverage to their own needs and circumstances using their own doctors. Businesses win by stopping the endless cycle of rising expenditures and ever-changing plans. And when people become responsible for the cost of their own insurance, they become more attentive to their own health. Besides, if an employee is interested in working for you ONLY because your organization offers great insurance benefits aren’t they telling you they’re going to cost you more money in the future?

Create a “Wellness Culture”

Our current “sickness culture” perpetuates the healthcare crisis and hastens the demise of market-based solutions. By sickness culture, I mean our focus on health problems rather than on having a healthy workplace and performance culture.

So, what would a “wellness culture” look like? First, rather than paid sick days, employees might be rewarded at year’s end with an attendance bonus. Staff Members would be reimbursed for thriving completion of smoking cessation and weight-loss programs. Corporations would invest in corporate memberships at local health clubs so every employee can take part. Staff Members would be available in-house wellness programs on a variety of issues ranging from ergonomics to stress management. Finally, organizations would commit to hiring and retaining healthy employees. Simply put, healthy employees cost less and are more constructive than unhealthy ones. Applicants ought to be screened for health habits and practices that limit their productivity and improve the likelihood of future expense. While this may seem harsh, it rewards those employees whose personal lifestyle and habits make sure the best Return on Investment by the organization committing to hire, train and pay them.

Be open to “alternative and complementary” approaches

Studies published in primary health care journals reveal that people who use “alternative and complementary” health modalities (including chiropractic, acupuncture, yoga and massage) are generally healthier, better educated, take fewer medications and miss fewer days from work than the average American. Since these people look for ways to stay healthy without prescription drugs and surgery, they end up being a net benefit in terms of attendance and productiveness. Old prejudices in this area should be discarded in order for employers to improve productiveness and boost profitability

Conclusion

Healthcare costs are rising at a staggering pace. Managed care is an abysmal failure. Corporations are buckling under the pressure of offering health coverage to their workers. American competitiveness in the market is sagging. These times call for extraordinary solutions. It’s time for American organizations to consider some out-of-the-box solutions to the health care crisis. Company wellness is an approach that is timely, achievable and reasonable given the alternatives. All options should be considered while we still have a chance.

Research spanning more than a decade has consistently demonstrated Employee Wellness Programs to be monetarily effective and that every dollar invested on a corporate wellness program can return $2.30 and $10.10 by lowering absenteeism, sick day usage and by lowering insurance costs. Additionally it is noted that there are marked improvements in employee effectiveness and work rate in corporations that implement a Employee Wellness Program.

Healthy corporations enjoy greater employee morale and an improved ability to attract and retain key people. Additionally, staff members are more alert and productive. For instance, Coca Cola reports that they save an estimated $500 a year per employee once they implemented a fitness program in which 60 percent of their staff members participate. Coors Brewing Organization stated that staff members who participated in their Corporate Health Promotion Programs reduced their absentee rate by 18%.

staff members enjoy their share of advantages from Corporate Health Promotion Programs too. A healthy lifestyle impacts every part of a person’s life, including their work environment. Corporate Health Promotion Programs result in fewer injuries, less human error and a work environment that is more harmonious and relaxed. Additionally, staff members who work at a employer that implements a Corporate Health Promotion Program know that their employer is concerned about their health & wellness. Employees frequently report a reduction in their stress levels due to Corporate Health Promotion Programs.

As staff members feel better, more relaxed, more valued and more human to their corporation; they enjoy a growth in productiveness. This increase in productiveness, while constructive to the corporation, is also essential to the employee as it increases their own sense of self worth and confidence levels. Workers who feel thriving and who feel that they accomplish goals and objectives are overall happier and in a better frame of mind.

The benefits of Company Health Promotion Programs, both tangible and intangible, are evident. It is a wise move for a employer to start a Company Health Promotion Program, particularly when they incorporate some form of mental health aspect into it. This also has social benefits as domestic violence and child abuse is determined to be diminished in areas where wellness programs are implemented. These days, a employer can almost not afford to have some sort of wellness program to offer to their employees.

Some of the top wellness programs currently in use today include:

Health Risk Assessments or HRAs

Health Risk Assessment is a top corporate wellness program currently in use globally. Companies that start it determine the safety and health problems of employees by the assessment of appropriateness of the facilities and equipment against the needs of the employees.

It can, for example, guide the corporation into determining how the air quality within an office room impacts the users and then help the assessment team to come up with the measures crucial to correct the issue. An HRA can also evaluate the level of exposure employees have to certain hazardous or dangerous materials and practices.

Immunizations

This isn’t always practiced in every country since there are regions where government sponsored immunization shots are available. Nevertheless, it has also become an significant component of the top Employee Health Promotion Programs in countless corporations in North America.

Immunization shots, such as those used to combat flu, for example, are available to employees for free.

EAP

EAPs consist of a wide variety of services. It can range from offering educational resources to workers regarding health concerns to sponsoring health services and health care. In a myriad of corporations, medical and insurance have also become a staple part of their benefits system.

In-house nutrition drives

This is another wellness program that corporations use, especially those that offer in-house commissary or cafeteria services. Instead of serving richer, high-calorie fare, cafeterias offer options for a healthier diet, usually in the form of low-calorie foods and sugar substitutes.

In-house employee wellness newsletter and campaign drives

One of the top wellness programs that corporations can enable is a self-powered tool using a newsletter to encourage wellness, coupled with a visible campaign. The campaign may be done periodically and focus on a specific topic, such as smoking risks, cancer, stress, carpal tunnel syndrome, safety in the workplace, etc.

The employee wellness newsletter in itself can be an effective means to deliver information to staff members or participants of a company but it is far from perfect. Some staff members, for example, may not read the newsletter entirely or even pay attention to it. If the concerns outlined in the newsletter are promoted through an active and highly visible campaign, it will be easier to maximize positive results.

Exercise and physical activity drives

Another top wellness program for organizations is one that involves physical activities. Businesses frequently sponsor exercise-related events such as marathons and business sports programs to encourage staff members to remain fit or lose excess weight. In mid- to large-sized organizations, organizations may even pay for fitness center memberships or in-house exercise facilities.

Incentives and Rewards

Some of the top wellness programs implemented by organizations involve Incentives/Rewards. This involves business-sponsored programs that reward employees for achieving specific wellness-related goals/objectives. Participation in health campaigns and signing up for wellness programs are two of the most commonly rewarded schemes. Rewards can range from special recognitions to over time acquired points (for bigger rewards) to specific gifts. In a few cases, cash may also be used.

However, incentive systems have had mixed reactions and levels of success. But it continues to be one of the top choices among employers who are willing to modify it in order to fit their unique needs.

Peer Pressure

In a myriad of corporations, corporations take advantage of peer pressure in order to advocate employees to participate in wellness programs. This is currently one of the favorite Workplace Health Promotion Programs currently in use today and growing in popularity. Peer pressure is often leveraged to help reward competitions referring to workplace wellness and to persuade employees to be active in company-sponsored wellness fairs.

Wellness is a great concept. It brings happiness into health and encourages a truly holistic approach to life. Wikipedia defines wellness as a healthy balance of the mind-body and spirit that results in an overall feeling of well-being. It sounds like exactly what every one is looking for. But when you begin to talk about corporate wellness, or workplace wellness, all life goes out of the concept. Total solutions, disease management and health evaluation do not inspire visions of enjoying life and living it to the full. They begin from the assumption that sickness is here to stay and needs to be discovered, managed and controlled but can never be healed.

The wellness industry is growing phenomenally fast. Wellness guru, Paul Zane Pilzer, has labeled it the next trillion dollar industry. But wellness has two different faces. On the one hand there are the small employers – people working from home or in small centers selling all kinds of wellness products and services at a speed of growth that is escalating rapidly. On the other hand corporate wellness is also exploding but in a very different direction.

The baby boomers who are driving the popular wellness revolution have been described as the first generation to refuse to accept the inevitability of death. They are actively looking for ways to prevent aging, stay healthy into old age and enjoy themselves more than ever before after retirement. This is a radical departure from current notions of old age, which are often dominated by pictures of sickness, frailty and suffering.

The employers have been largely forced to take on wellness. This is partly through legislative pressure, with numerous countries introducing laws to make employers liable for stress-related sickness in their staff members. It is also financially motivated, as research has repeatedly demonstrated the enormous expenditures of absenteeism (and increasingly of presenteeism as well).

Whereas the baby boomers are actively looking for new solutions and new lifestyles the companies are struggling to organize largely traditional and mainstream health systems, such as doctors, nurses, insurance and screening systems. The issue is that the traditional health system does not have solutions for the issues that people are handling.

Nobody ever went to see a doctor to get happy, because a doctor doesn’t have any clue how to make people happy. And many stress-related health concerns are described as chronic diseases, which means that they last for a very long time – or maybe for the rest of your life – because there is no medical cure. Counseling is a common offering in corporations for emotional concerns, but whilst it may support a useful pressure valve it is not a powerful treatment for stress, unhappiness or depression.

Imagine walking into a company where the staff members are happy, healthy, full of inspiration, fit, love working, have meaningful family lives, active social lives, and enjoyable relationships at work and in their neighborhood. That kind of company would be a pleasure to work in and bound to be efficacious because people would be working to their optimum capacity.

So can we create a system of true wellness that will serve the development of the businesses and their workers and will pay for itself because of the advantages that both sides will gain?

First of all we have to face the fact that we can’t place all the responsibility into the hands of the current health system. Rates of Absenteeism, stress, depression, the very roots of the wellness revolution, have not been solved by the current system. If they had been we wouldn’t have this revolution, we would all be much more well. So we need to look elsewhere for solutions.

We also can’t rely on makeshift feel-great wellness offerings, such as the onsite massage team which visits the office once a month or the wellness day that raises awareness for a bit of while but leaves most people unaffected. They are simple to organize but have little or no real significance on employee wellness.

Employer needs are different than individual needs and many of the new small wellness businesses that are springing up simply don’t have the capacity to serve the corporate market. Nevertheless it is in the best interest of both businesses and staff members to learn and develop systems of wellness and health that really work – that benefit people to be happy, handle stress, love working, and to have sufficient energy to go home at the end of the day and enjoy their family and social life. So far the corporate world has hijacked the concept of wellness and turned it into a modern version of occupational health. It is time to raise the vision and find out how to make truly healthy, happy workplaces where people thrive.

High rates of employee turnover and the expenditures of sick days are increasingly taking bites into employer profits. The high cost of recruitment programs only adds to the challenges that these issues in total cost the average employer. Many employers are finding the solution to these challenges by improving job satisfaction, team building, and the implementation of programs that yield a reduction in these expenditures.

It has become increasingly clear to most managers that a well designed wellness program / physical activity program with a strong nutritional and fitness lifestyle emphasis will directly meet this need. Senior Management’s objectives and goals for a constructive wellness program must be viewed through the perspective of increased employee work rate, decreased absenteeism due to health related causes, improved employee morale, decreased utilisation of employer subsidised health benefits, enhanced group cohesion and effectiveness and a decline in turnover due to lack of job satisfaction. It is obvious that an improvement in any of these areas will have a beneficial impact on the financial status of any organisation.

The benefits from an staff members point of view can be seen in improved health, increased energy levels, decreased body fat, a more youthful fit body, an increased ability to handle work related stress, greater feelings of confidence and morale and more social groups at work contributing to greater feelings of satisfaction with their work and workplace.

To be most beneficial a wellness program needs to achieve both management’s and employee’s objectives, and this can be accomplished through a program that will offer the individual employee with an awareness of their current physical condition and attitudes to fitness and wellbeing, and the benefits of attaining a fitter, healthier lifestyle, and a plan that will allow them to achieve the significant changes to their physical condition that can be applied in the context of their life and work.

The Bottom Line – Company Health Promotion Programs

Diminished Absenteeism – Dupont reduced absenteeism by 47.5 percent over six years for the participants of their employer fitness program, (Health Behaviour, March 1992).

Diminished Medical Care Costs – Steel case showed a decrease in medical care claim expenditures of 55 percent for corporate physical activity program participants over non-participants over a six year period – an average of $478.61 for participants vs. non-participants who averaged $868.88, (The Am. Journal of Health Promotion, Sept/Oct, 1991).

Reduced Turnover – Turnover among physical activity program participants at the Canadian Life Assurance Company was 32.4% lower over a seven year period compared with non-participants (Canadian Journal of Public Health, Jan/Feb, 1988).

Positive Return on Investment – Blue Cross Blue Shield of Indiana reported that its business physical activity program had a 250% return on investment; $2.51 for every $1 invested over a five year period (American Journal of Health Promotion, March, April, 1991).

The Partnership for Prevention was formed to promote Fortune 1000 corporations to consider making workforce health a CEO concern and adopt strategies to encourage prevention and wellness. After several years of double-digit rate increases for medical insurance, corporations are realizing that one of the best ways to slow the cost increases is to have employees take more responsibility for both costs and health choices. A majority of corporations surveyed feel that the best way for reducing costs is financial incentives/rewards to promote employees to adopt healthier lifestyles.

Nearly 100 percent of organizations surveyed say that health expenditures will be a essential or valuable concern over the next five years, according to a survey by United Benefit Advisors. More organizations are adopting higher deductible health insurance plans with HRA’s or HSA’S, wellness programs, and expanded disease management programs in order to control ever-increasing health care expenditures.

Failure to deal with these concerns might be disastrous for a company. Wayne Sensor, Chief Executive Officer of Alegent Health recently stated, “I think that we have built a medical machinery we can’t afford. I think we are choking the economic engine of America.” In his October 2005 newsletter, Dr. Andrew Weil stated, “I think rising health- care costs are becoming the primary economic issue in our nation”. Obesity costs California companies billions of dollars each year. Projected costs for 2005 may reach 28 billion dollars for direct and indirect medical costs, worker’s compensation, and lost productiveness. California has experienced one of the fastest growing rates of obesity of any state.

According to California Health and Human Services Secretary Kim Belshe, “The obesity epidemic is more than a public health crisis, it is an economic crisis.” What is frightening is that most people do not even realize that they are obese, which is defined as only 20 percent above normal weight. There is a great need for additional education on weight and resulting diseases, and the worksite is an ideal venue. Wellness education and programs can result in a important return on investment and, if structured properly, can produce results in a very short period of time.

Although many businesses have attempted some form of wellness program in the past, results from those efforts have been disappointing. In many cases, the healthier staff members participated for rewards and incentives, such as health club memberships, but those who required it most did not take advantage of the program in a meaningful way. Businesses are looking at ways to encourage more staff members to buy into the wellness movement.

A recent webinar hosted by Human Resource Executive Magazine and presented by Carlson Marketing Group titled, “Healthier workers; Healthier Bottom Line: Engaging workers is the Missing Link in Managing Health Care Costs,” drove this point home. This session offered actionable advice on how businesses are achieving higher impact with their wellness investments by focusing on employee engagement. It also highlighted how you can create an Economic Engagement Model to forecast the potential influence for your organization.

Employers can simply no longer ignore the issue of their employee’s unhealthy lifestyles and must take action to engage them in a meaningful wellness program to lower health costs, absenteeism and lost work rate. employees also advance as they derive better health and greater satisfaction in both their personal and professional lives. The alternative is being caught in a non-competitive position and severely impacting the bottom-line of the company.

A listing of potential wellness topics and ideas not previously mentioned follows. Take some time to “think tank and brainstorm” new ideas with your own internal employee Company Health Promotion Program Committee.

Nutrition Category
• Low-fat campaign/food groups
• Team salad bars
• Vending machine changes
• Diet analysis by a dietician
• Produce on parade
• Eating disorder support group
• Restaurant education

Physical Activity/Exercise Category
• “Elevoiders” – stair climbing
• Poker walk
• Mall walking program
• Facilities – showers, bike lockers, exercise space, etc.
• Team treks
• Walk-a-block trails
• Recreational tournaments
• How-to-find equipment talks
• Running maps
• Biking maps
• Deskercises (mini stretches for desk jockeys)
• Fit-over-forty club
• Tennis shoe Tuesday
• Walk 100 miles in 100 days
• Walking “buddies”
• NW Trek!

Miscellaneous Category
• House calls
• Meet your benefits providers
• Dental health
• Fire safety
• Ergonomic assessments
• Self-help learning
• CPR/first aid course
• Hearing test
• Hand washing campaign
• Cancer screenings
• Back class
• Passports to health
• Vision screenings

Stress Management Category
• Comedy hour
• Stress Pest
• Humor newsletter
• Money management sessions
• Time management classes
• Relaxation class
• Better sleep campaign
• Relaxation room