Health and Wellness in the Workplace: Start-Up Guidelines
Improving health and wellness in the workplace is the only solution to the problem of rising health care costs that makes sense. Where do you start?
How do you Assess Health and Wellness in the Workplace?
To accurately assess the health and wellness levels of your employee population, you will need to survey the group. There are many health risk assessment tools available for this type of task. A health risk assessment tool will measure the health and wellness in the workplace and the extent of the cost that illnesses represent in your health care budget.
In order to choose a health risk assessment tool that will benefit your corporate health care needs, a priority list of goals to meet for health and wellness in the workplace should be developed, first. This will help you narrow down what sort of health risk assessment tool you need.
Given the importance of this task you may want to consider a free consultation from an independent wellness consultant, like those at Wellness Proposals, who can help you determine what the corporate objectives should be.
Once you have identified your objectives for health and wellness in the workplace, and have established a proposed timeframe within which to meet them, you will be able to choose the most appropriate Health Risk Assessment tool for your specific corporate health care needs.
How can you Address Health and Wellness in the Workplace on a Limited Budget?
There are low-cost actions you can take to reduce claims and generate interest in attaining health and wellness in the workplace.
- Establish a wellness incentive program committee and make sure it represents a fair cross-section of employees from all ranks.
- Accept input and feedback from the wellness incentive committee as long as it is within a reasonable budget outline; it will generate interest and improve employer-employee morale.
- Use self-reporting health risk assessment tools and let employees take a half hour of work time to complete the form.
- Start to generate awareness by downloading and posting free educational materials from Wellness Proposals to generate knowledge.
- Have quizzes and quick-fix exercise breaks.
- Play upbeat music and accept employee requests for songs to relieve stress.
How do you Engage Unhealthy Employees to improve their Health and Wellness in the Workplace?
Most people, who participate in corporate wellness programs that increase the level of health and wellness in the workplace, are already fit and healthy. Partner them with someone who needs help and offer incentives for getting new people to join. Statistics show that employee motivation correlates positively with money, time off and reduced portion of the co-pay.
How can you Promote Health and Wellness in the Workplace?
Once you have employees involved in their own health and wellness in the workplace, keeping them involved is just as important as generating new interest. Someone should be designated to be responsible for tracking participation and evaluating the effectiveness of the wellness incentive program. If the current budget does not have room in it for a wellness vendor, try delegating someone from within who already has an aptitude for keeping fit and healthy and a disposition that would lend itself to motivating others.
Starting health and wellness in the workplace largely depends on engaging the interest of your employees, incorporating their own suggestions and giving them every opportunity to provide feedback.
Writer Bio: John Bates is a leading wellness industry consultant and prolific writer about all aspects of health and wellness programs. His work can be found on numerous wellness websites including his own: Wellness Proposals, Infinite Wellness Solution's and Infinite Health Coach.
