Wellness Initiative
Wellness issues important to you – brought to you by the insurance specialists at Morris Financial Group.
Wellness benefits refer to the education and activities that a workplace may do to promote healthy lifestyles to employees and their families. Examples of wellness programming include such things as health education classes, subsidized use of fitness facilities, internal policies that promote healthy behavior, and any other activity, policy or environmental change that affects the health of employees.
Our Agency can design a simple or complex wellness program. Many programs require a minimal investment of time and money. More substantial programs often use more resources, but the many benefits to supporting and encouraging employee health and wellness outweigh the costs.
A wellness program will impact your company’s bottom line by:
- helping control increasing healthcare costs
- increasing employee productivity
- increasing employee morale.
We can build and customize a wellness program specific to your employees needs and will deliver the tools you need to get your wellness program off the ground.
All of your programming should involve creation of a supportive social and physical environment where healthy decisions are the norm. Part of creating this environment is to clearly define the organization’s expectations regarding healthy behaviors, and implementation of policies that promote health and reduce risk of disease.
Changing the environment and changing policy is crucial to affecting change in most health habits. Policies create the opportunity for widespread behavioral change because they change the existing “rules,” which can have a powerful effect on employee behavior and habits. Environmental changes, both physical and cultural, provide options or opportunities to adopt healthier habits and can also result in widespread change.
Company policies and changes in the work environment will affect or influence individual behavior at work, which may also lead to changes outside of work. In many cases, policy and environmental changes make it easier to make the better health choice. An example would be serving bagels and fruit instead of pastries at company events. Some other simple examples are:
Formal written policies:- Guidelines for ordering food for company events
- No smoking on company property
- Company cost-sharing for health club memberships
- Outdoor bike racks
- Labeling or highlighting health food choices
- Posters promoting healthy messages
Think about addressing some of the easy changes first to get a taste of success and show that your wellness program is working. As your program develops you can always tackle some of the more difficult issues.Unlike trying to impact change at an individual level, environmental and policy changes have the ability to impact large groups of people and will likely provide the most “bang for the buck.”
Interventions that target individual behavior change take a great deal of resources and impact only one person at a time. Policy and higher level interventions targeting communities and organizations have a much greater potential impact. Although your wellness strategies should address as many levels as possible, it’s also important to focus on areas where the greatest potential benefit could occur.
Stages of Change and Program Considerations
A major factor to be aware of is that people vary greatly in their readiness to change behavior. In your survey of employees it may be helpful in developing programming to know what percent of employees are at the various stages. Most people go through five stages in changing behaviors:
- Pre-contemplation – At this stage they are not thinking about changing their behavior in the near future.
- Contemplation – They are beginning to seriously think about changing their behavior in the near future (next six months).
- Preparation – At this stage most people have tried to change their behavior at least once in the past year, and they are thinking about trying again within the next month.
- Action – Real steps are being actively taken to change their behavior. This is the stage where a slip is most likely to occur.
- Maintenance – This stage applies to people who have changed their behavior for over six months and are now maintaining that healthy behavior.
People can move from one stage to another in order, but they can also move back and forth between the various stages before they adopt a behavior for good. Again, a slip is not a failure, but an important part of the learning and behavior change process. Most people may attempt healthy behavior change several times before they succeed and the chance of success increases every time.
One way to develop your program activities is to take your worksite assessment checklist and evaluate the areas where no policy or program exists or areas where some policy or program exists, but can be improved. For each of these items, ask the following questions:
- How important is the item?
- How much will it cost to implement the item?
- How much time and effort would be needed to implement the item?
- How great is the potential “reach” or how many employees may be affected.
- How well does the item match employee’s interests? Use the survey results to help answer this question.
You should also “package” your activities whenever possible so that they build off of each other. By providing the right mix of programs, you can get a multiplier effect that is greater than the effect of adding up individual activities. “Packaging” related strategies will lead to greater participation and long term success. For instance, having a policy that encourages physical activity on break time, coupled with using pedometers as incentives and then providing maps or on-site trails to get staff out walking will lead to greater success.