Company Wellness Programs

Walking Health Promotion Programs are among of the most popular Company Health & Wellness Initiatives. They set the bar for entry fairly low – most anyone can walk around the block or their building – and walking wellness also offers staff members with a good way to break up the afternoon doldrums and interact in a casual, more social environment with other staff members. Just leaving your desk for a few minutes every day for a little sunshine can be a big stress reliever – and stress is the second leading cause of absenteeism, according to Employee Health Promotion statistics.

As a first step to starting your Company Health & Wellness Initiative, we recommend that you have a designer draw up an attractive map of your corporate campus or vicinity. Plan out and test a few short walks of varying distances, and using a pedometer and watch, figure out how long each walk is in time and distance. Have a little fun with your walking Company Health & Wellness Initiative by equating each walk with a common office activity of the same duration, like a writing a one-page status report or filling out a common form. Post the map in the office and make sure people know about walking wellness by using your office communication channels – newsletters, announcements, company meetings. Keep it fun by building weight-loss teams, setting up races or organizing healthy picnics and athletic activities around the walking wellness route.

Following are some other walking wellness tips from Tom Weede, author of The Entrepreneur Diet: The On-the-Go Plan for Fitness, Weight Loss, and Healthy Living:

Make sure to link the walking wellness program to work objectives. Employees need to be reassured that these walks are part of their responsibility to be healthy and productive. They’re not personal errands that need to be compensated for by longer days at the office.
Keep healthy snacks in the office.
Reinforce the walking wellness program message by regularly mentioning it during worker meetings
Set up a health-related benefit that walking wellness participants can use for health-related expenses.

Company Health & Wellness: A Long-Term Committment

“Corporate Health and Wellness” – what does that phrase mean to you? To many of us, it evokes an array of ambivalent thoughts — the gym membership we barely used, the nagging ankle injury from last year’s company picnic, the backaches, the bratwurst we had for lunch, the love handles and of course, the fad diets that failed us or that we failed. Usually, Company Health & Wellness is a guilt trigger that causes us to feel remorse about our bodies and the health management we know we should be doing for them.

Unfortunately we live in a society where our survival is dependent on sitting at a desk, not hunting game, picking berries and sprinting away from wolves. We also live in such luxury, nutritionally, that we can gain weight steadily without being wealthy. Cardiovascular disease, obesity and bad nutrition cause most of the Company Health & Wellness issues that weigh down worker attendance and erode a corporation’s productivity.

It’s ironic that the poorest societies in the world – the ones furthest from the conveniences of modern life – often boast the fittest, most physically hardy members. And as for the animal kingdom — don’t look there for Company Health & Wellness commiseration. In the wild, it is extremely rare to find an animal that suffers from our kind of wellness issues.

Prescription Medication dependency degrades Company Health & Wellness

It doesn’t help that Americans are descending into a deadly love affair with drugs — and drug testing won’t help you with these drugs.

For example, Greg Critser’s book Generation RX details how Americans spend about $180 billion dollars on Prescription Medications each year, with the estimated 2011 tally at a whopping $414 billion. The average number of Prescription Medications per American in 2004 stood at twelve.

Twelve! That means that your average worker is taking 14, 18, or even more than 20 medications in an attempt to improve their Health and Wellness.

Is this effective, though? Critser is not convinced that the prescription medications help American Company Health & Wellness. In fact, he points out a bevy of negative Company Health & Wellness consequences for America’s legal prescription addition, which include prescription interactions, liver damage, and the legions of people who now depend on prescription medications to deal with ordinary trials and stresses.

An employer has the potential to improve Company Health & Wellness

It’s not all bad news, though. Occupational health screenings and well-designed corporate Health Promotion Programs can help you fight the downward Company Health & Wellness spiral for you and your workers. In fact, good Company Health & Wellness efforts – like a strong walking wellness initiative – can literally save lives and reduce the symptoms that cause staff members to turn to prescription medications in the first place.

Company Health & Wellness: An Attainable Goal

Was Company Health & Wellness on your corporation’s new year’s resolutions list? Here we are a little over midway into the third month of 2008, the time when resolutions start to falter if they haven’t lost momentum completely. Has your Worksite’s wellness resolution fallen by the wayside? If so, there are still ways to get back on track.

One Company Health & Wellness tip comes to us from the YMCA of Greater Des Moines, reported from the Jersey Shore. Rod Shirk, the YMCA’s chief financial officer, participated in the organization’s first executive Company Health & Wellness Initiative, which registered his cholesterol as higher than normal. That prompted him to get a physical, which showed high levels of a prostate-specific antigen that often indicates prostate cancer. The outcome? His doctors caught a life-threatening illness just in time.

All thanks to a single health management program.

So of course, Shirk is a huge proponent of Company Health & Wellness Initiatives. He says, “For us here at the YMCA, if we are telling people to be healthy, we had better set a good example for our staff members.”

Company Health & Wellness Decreases Health Care Costs

Though cases like Shirk’s dramatic cancer save are the most desirable effect of Company Health & Wellness Initiatives, it isn’t the initial draw for Worksites. They do it to lower medical care costs, and there’s no doubt that Company Health & Wellness Initiatives do just that. Health Promotion Statistics show that Company Health & Wellness Initiatives return anywhere from $2.30 to $10.10 per dollar spent on wellness. “Health care costs should go down as people think about changing their diets and getting more active,” Shirk says.

The Company Health & Wellness savings aren’t just in the Medical Insurance department. Human resource departments report that Company Health & Wellness Initiatives also reduce absenteeism and increase productivity.

Still, corporations have been loath to invest that elusive Company Health & Wellness dollar despite the well-documented returns. A Principal Financial Group and Harris Interactive survey found that only 10% of small- to medium-size businesses have made on-site health screenings – like the one that saved Shirk’s life – available to their staff members.