How to Build a Successful Wellness Program

These days corporations across the globe are encouraging their employees to participate in Wellness Programs to help improve their employees work flow & quality of life.   It has been proven that healthy employees equal a healthy business!   Here are some ways better health of your employees or team can help your business:

FACTS ABOUT HEALTY EMPLOYEES:

• Healthier Employees are 25% more likely to have higher job performance.
• Exercising 30 minutes per day leads to higher work productivity.
• Healthier employees take fewer sick days.
• Overweight employees cost employers $73.1 billion per year in workers comp claims.
• Healthy employees are more engaged and more alert on the job.
• Healthy employees reduce company health care costs – 61% of employers say employees Health Habits are a top challenge for controlling health care costs.

TRACK THE FOLLOWING:

While building your program you’ll want to consider things like:

• Eating & Drinking Habits
• Smoking Habits
• Exercise
• Break time & Stress reduction
• Sleep

The first step to building a solid wellness program is to create trackable benchmarks, metrics and goals for a healthy work place.   You’ll want to consider how many employees you have that will be participating – a good goal is to get 70% employee participation. Having the majority participate will encourage the other 30% to get on board with your healthy initiative.

You will want to create a checklist of daily activities that your employees can use to track their performance & progress and earn health points for rewards.   These points should be redeemed for awesome branded products that promote your company & a healthy lifestyle!!

Here are some ideas you may include to add to your employee checklist & points program but feel free to get creative. It’s important to keep this simple, trackable and fun for you & your team!

IDEAS TO TRACK WITH YOUR TEAM:

• Did you drink 32oz. of water today?
• Did you eat a healthy breakfast?
• Did you have one green food for lunch?
• Did you walk around the building 5 times? (depending on size of your office).
• Did you take 15 minutes to stretch today or 4 – 15 minutes breaks?
• Did you take a multi vitamin today?
• Did you refrain from smoking at work today?   For nonsmokers…they get a point every day!

Here’s some things employers can do to kick off their wellness campaign or encourage healthy work place activities:

ASK YOUR TEAM TO PARTICIPATE:

• Ask your employees to join you for a 5k walk/run
• Provide branded water bottles
• Throw a monthly healthy potluck lunch
• Get rid of sugary work place snacks & provide water and healthier alternatives
• Bring a chef in to teach healthy cooking recipes
• Offer standing desks
• Create a healthy office cook book
• Hold a health fair
• Offer employee gym memberships
• Turn sit down meetings into walking meetings
• Host an office Field Day
• Offer recess or nap time
• Encourage break times
• Reward your healthy advocates

Now, once you’ve built your program you’ll want to put one person in charge of making sure employees are filling out their health cards and turning them in each day or week. As the employees collect points for their hard work considering offering these awesome products as rewards & to promote your program: