The worksite environment is a powerful, but often overlooked, element in managing employee health. Here we will identify some of the best-practices in starting a Company Health and Wellness Program that supports your organization’s employee health strategy and allows employees to take charge of their own health. For example, a Company Health and Wellness Program that includes a smoke-free worksite policy improves the likelihood that employees will try to quit smoking and will quit smoking successfully. Similarly, a Company Health and Wellness Program that includes discounting healthy foods in your cafeteria and vending machines helps raise employees’ consumption of healthy foods which supports your investment in disease management programs for employees with diabetes, heart disease or hypertension. The following will guide you through the ten key steps in starting a Company Health and Wellness Program and worksite environment that encourages employee health.
In an era of increasing health care costs and fierce competition, businesses have a vested interest in the health of their employees. Research studies have found that, on average, employees with healthy behaviors (such as not smoking or being active for 30 minutes a day) incur lower health care expenses, are absent from work less often, and are more productive when at work (higher presenteeism) than employees with unhealthy behaviors.
Corporate Health Promotion Program: Capturing Upper Management Support
Company Health and Wellness Program support from the highest level of upper management is essential to your success in starting a culture of wellness within your worksite. Look for Company Health and Wellness Program support from a leader who is respected by and can influence other leaders. (It’s not necessary that he or she be the fittest executive within your organization just that they directly support the Corporate Health Promotion Program.) You will be relying on this culture-of-health champion to advocate for changes that you recommend and to ensure the organization allocates adequate Company Health and Wellness Program resources (staff, time, and money) to maintain and improve the worksite policies, physical environment, and social norms.
Capture Company Health and Wellness Program Staff and Budget
The creation and maintenance of a Company Health and Wellness Program within your organization needs to be someone’s priority. However, unless your organization is quite large, you likely don’t need to hire a full-time staff person for the Corporate Health Promotion Program. There are a number of ways to find an individual with the needed skills to guide and support your organization’s Corporate Health Promotion Program.
Creating facilities and Company Health and Wellness Program policies, such as those allowing employees to be physically active during the workday, does not need to be expensive, but it does require adequate and sustained financing. If possible, include the creation of a worksite environment that supports the Company Health and Wellness Program as a permanent component of the operating budget; that helps to ensure it’s an ongoing priority for your organization.
Employee Involvement in the Company Health and Wellness Program
Developing a representative group of staff members to advise your organization’s Company Health and Wellness Program ensures that improvements in worksite facilities, policies and practices address the true needs and obstacles of all groups of staff members. In addition, these employees can support as the front-line Company Health and Wellness Program supporters of policies and practices with their peers.
Create a Company Health and Wellness Program Vision and “Brand”
A Company Health and Wellness Program vision and a brand are powerful first steps in turning a Company Health and Wellness Program from an idea to a reality. What would you like your worksite environment to look like five years from now? A succinct Company Health and Wellness Program vision statement summarizes for all (employees and leaders alike) the reasons for starting a Corporate Health Promotion Program. It also reminds everyone of the link between employee health and your organization’s ability to achieve its overall mission.
Branding your organization’s Company Health and Wellness Program conveys to employees that the organization’s commitment and support of healthy behaviors is important and is here to stay. Choose a Company Health and Wellness Program name and logo that resonate with employees. Then use that brand on all Company Health and Wellness Program communications with employees about the policies, facilities and programs your organization offers to promote healthy behaviors.
Evaluate Your Existing Company Health and Wellness Program Situation
Exactly how your organization establishes a Company Health and Wellness Program that encourages healthy eating, physical activity, and reduces tobacco use will depend on the unique characteristics of your organization and employee population.
Evaluate how the current worksite facilities, policies, and unwritten norms support — or discourage — healthy behaviors.
Gather information on the health and health-related behaviors of your employee population. The most common method is by using a validated health risk assessment. If you don’t have data specific to your employees, you can estimate the prevalence of different health risks and behaviors within your employee population using state or national data. Note: Information on staff members’ health interests alone is not sufficient; but can be a useful supplement to health risk data and might help you set priorities.
Establish Company Health and Wellness Program Goals and Priorities
Use what you’ve discovered about employee health and about your current worksite environment to determine your organization’s Company Health and Wellness Program priorities. From those Company Health and Wellness Program priorities, define clear and measurable Company Health and Wellness Program objectives for improving employee health and your organization’s culture. Well written objectives will provide the basis for planning and for measuring your progress.
Choose Company Health and Wellness Program Procedures
Focus your organization’s Company Health and Wellness Program resources (time, energy and money) on procedures that are most likely to produce results: an increase in healthy eating, an increase in physical activity, and a reduction in tobacco use. There’s no need to guess at what might work. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reviewed thousands of studies and has identified the Company Health and Wellness Program approaches most likely to result in significant, lasting, and widespread improvements in health behaviors. Those Company Health and Wellness Program procedures are included in the physical activity, tobacco, and healthy eating sections of this website.
The formula for Company Health and Wellness Program success is to make the healthier choices the easier choices.
Implement Company Health and Wellness Program Procedures
Once you’ve chosen your Company Health and Wellness Program Procedures, it can be useful to arrange the work on a timeline. The “right” amount of time for implementing each Company Health and Wellness Program strategy depends on the staff time, budget, and business demands of your organization. Work plans maintain your efforts moving and help to ensure that plans to establish a Company Health and Wellness Program stay on track even if there are changes in staffing or other challenges.
Communicate and Educate About the Company Health and Wellness Program
Ensure employees are aware of the Company Health and Wellness Program opportunities you’ve provided. Planning your Company Health and Wellness Program communications allows you to communicate regularly with employees without overwhelming them at any one time.
Monitor and Report Your Company Health and Wellness Program Results
At the same time that you plan your Company Health and Wellness Program Procedures, think about how you’ll measure success. It’s much easier to gather information – or to establish systems for collecting information — before you implement a Company Health and Wellness Program strategy rather than as an afterthought. Keep in mind that you’re likely to see improvements in employee morale and/or behaviors before you see decreases in rates of absenteeism or health care claims.
Report both your Company Health and Wellness Program successes in building a healthy worksite environment (such as complete implementation of a policy that provides employees time for walking during the workday), and Company Health and Wellness Program successes in getting staff members to take charge of their health (an increase in the number of employees who contacted the stop-smoking program, or an increase in the number of fruit-cups purchased from the cafeteria following a promotion and price-cut).
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