Workplace wellness is a crucial aspect of employee well-being, and employers can improve it by offering employee wellness programs, providing convenient healthy alternatives, offering nutritious lunches, providing health education opportunities, making downtime a priority, emphasizing mental health, and encouraging physical activity throughout the day. These strategies can lead to lower healthcare costs, increased productivity, reduced turnover, and improved mental and physical health.
To boost employee participation in these programs, employers should increase their understanding of well-being, as the company’s health stats consistently beat national averages from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). By promoting healthy behaviors, such as regular physical activity, healthy food options, wellness programs, breaks, and flexible work arrangements, employers can help employees develop healthy habits that benefit both the individual and the company.
Encouraging healthy behavior at work involves allowing more physical activity, sharing health and wellness information, hosting team events, promoting virtual cooking classes and webinars teaching healthy eating strategies, and providing plenty of water access to promote hydration. Enhancing workplace personal health resources, such as medical services, information, training, financial support, facilities, and the five pillars of health – “Eat Wisely, Exercise Regularly, Be Happy, Stop Smoking, and Practise Personal Hygiene”, can also help.
Targeting all aspects of wellbeing, including physical, emotional, and social wellbeing, can be achieved through creating the role of a wellness coordinator, providing onsite or nearby access to fitness facilities, training to improve health, having a generous Paid Time Off (PTO) policy, and addressing stress levels. Worksite wellness programs offer incentives or benefits to employees for making healthy lifestyle choices, supporting employees by encouraging behavioral changes.
📹 Health and Wellbeing in the Workplace – Litmos Heroes
A healthy workforce is a happier, more productive workforce. Work can have a positive impact on our health and wellbeing.
📹 Wellness Programs Don’t Seem to Work as Advertised
The latest Kaiser Family Foundation survey on employer sponsored health insurance focused on the fact that growth in premiums …
I just read that NYT piece and was listening to this thinking “It sounds like he is just plagiarizing the NYT piece I just read.” I didn’t realize you had written that piece. lol As for this topic. It is absolutely no surprise that lifestyle modification portions of wellness programs show no success. Lifestyle modification in general shows little to no success, so tying financial penalties to it is just a form of unavoidable punishment. The reason lifestyle modification doesn’t work is that there are so many factors outside of personal control that impact it. Demanding people that have no free time get more exercise is doomed to failure. Demanding people living paycheck to paycheck to keep their family fed buy more vegetables isn’t going to suddenly improve their eating habits. Then there are factors in the built environment, things like a lack of walk-ability in our communities, air pollution, and crime are all outside of personal control but present significant barriers to being more active. Food deserts are real and pervasive. People don’t have access to suitable kitchens or the skills to use one. Etc. Will power has been show in studies to be a limited resource, people can’t just force themselves to live differently, even if they want to, much less just because their employer does.
A few years ago, I was a summer intern at a company that had a wellness program. They had a competition every few months, and whoever recorded the most hours of exercise in a two month period won a prize. The prize was a free six-month membership to Title Boxing Club. I am still totally confused as to how this program was supposed to encourage exercise. The only people interested in that prize would have been people who were already active, and people who weren’t active would not be interested in trying to win a six-month membership to a gym.
I think your point about “incentives” actually being penalties is very important. Many of these targets don’t have a lot of empirical evidence behind them (aside from smoking). Some are also difficult to achieve in the time allotted by the company. The concept of wellness programs (or disease management programs) is a great one, but instead of looking for what works for patients we have focused on what is best for the companies. The penalties are the fastest way to get the cost from the company to the employee.
But do wellness programs help with employee satisfaction and mental health? I would think part of a wellness program includes occupational therapy and a gym membership. The programs that punish employees definitely don’t do any good, but incentives to see a staff psychologist or use a gym might be at least emotionally beneficial.
Can you do an episode on how we can conduct our own research on foods, supplements, and drugs in order to get unbiased and accurate empirical evidence? For example, if I wanted to find out for myself (without your excellent articles) whether green coffee extract was effective, how would I do that? The results of Google searches are flooded with so many vested interests that it’s impossible to know what is valid; Wikipedia is decent, but I can’t get comfortable relying on a source that, at the end of the day, can be edited by anyone; and most articles on PubMed or EBSCO are exorbitantly expensive (despite being publicly funded). Long story short, even for evidence-based consumers, it is often difficult or impossible to discover the truth without an institutional affiliation.
This struck a nerve. While thankfully I live in a country that has universal healthcare, the company I work for does do annual health checks and reports. Normally I pass them with flying colours, but the last one I got a red flag for BMI. Ever since then, I’ve been receiving emails pressuring me lose weight from various people in the organisation. The fact is, I’m extremely active and consider myself quite healthy. I do resistance training for about 75 minutes in the morning 5 days per week and go for a jog on the other 2 days, and on top of that I commute by bicycle. My food is very healthy, all cooked and prepared at home and all macronutrients are painstakingly accounted for. My body fat at this moment is no more than 15%, yet because I have a lot of muscle mass my BMI is high. This is a problem for me when it comes to these generalised testing. Thankfully for me, there are no financial incentives or penalties associated with BMI targets, otherwise I would be making a lot of noise about it!
I participate in a wellness program where we are encouraged to track steps walked over a period of several weeks. I honestly wish it was something that was year-round and included benefits/rewards. Currently, there is little verification of data tracked, but if they started to offer rewards, I would suspect checks and balances to be needed, or it would quickly be scammed.
This vid is informative! I’ve been trying to look for YouTube article like yours that explains everything in this article!Your article for sure reminds me of the website from Dr. Ethan. Ethan’s articles are totally useful and he really helped me on my wellness. I recommend you watch his YouTube out and give the health enthusiast a like! ➡️ #DoctorEthanNHS
I think a better program than gyms is to encourage strolling throughout the day. Our appointment scheduling system tries to give agents breaks in between calls and other scheduled work, we can encourage employees to stroll and fraternize during this time, both by making it enjoyable and by incorporating it into periodic reviews. I think that there are policies a company can adopt to encourage wellness overall, but they are going to be deeper considerations than just hiring some firm to spend an incentive budget and not step on anyone’s toes.
I find it shocking and disturbing every time you jump cut back and forth the length of the desk. I know you are doing this in order to retain peoples attention, but, I would prefer you to use a different tactic. I can’t speak as to what would be the right tactic for you. I just find this way so jarring that I don’t watch many of your articles, but I would love to watch more.
I have never heard of a wellness program before. However, it does make sense that offering people benefits in a financial form would seem to be a well thought out incentive. On the other hand it may not benefit all people, especially those who do not have health issues such as those who do not smoke, and who eat healthy and exercise often. I definitely do not think it is fair to use something such as body mass index as an indicator for who does or doesn’t qualify for the wellness program. Weight is something that does have a genetic factor and so those who are overall healthy, but have a higher BMI, may be excluded from the program for reasons that are somewhat out of their control. Wellness programs may seem like a good idea, especially in the means of saving money, but they need to be looked into more in depth in order to avoid excluding some employees.
I’m from a country where employer provided health insurance isn’t the norm, and the idea that my workplace would be invasive like this about my non work related personal health seems absolutely wild to me. It’s one step off from them monitoring my sex life and giving me bonuses/penalties accordingly.
You know in Britain we do penalize people who make unhealthy choices through the form of high taxation on alcohol and tobacco. This tax helps pump up the socialized healthcare pot to help combat the outcome. Alright you’re in the US you use a individualistic system but the principle is the same, which to be honest I find quite fair in principle. Particularly if you’re offer resources which help people quite smoking (which is genuinely hard) or cut down their drinking.
The BMI is a terrible measurement of health. I had a talk with my doctor and she said my optimal BMI would be around 29. For most people this is near obesity. And I’m not a body builder or athlete. I’m 194cm tall with 60cm shoulder width and 44cm hip width (shoulders and hips just the bones). After all I need to loose weight (the reason I talked to my doctor), but a “normal” BMI would be more unhealthy than my current condition.