Corporate Wellness BlogCorporate wellness and employee wellness blog

Starting a Corporate Wellness Program need not be costly, but will require the commitment of some financial resources. If possible, include the Corporate Wellness Program in your corporation’s annual business plan and budget as you do for other efforts important to your corporation’s success.

How much to budget for the Corporate Wellness Program?

There is no one-size-fits-all formula for starting a Corporate Wellness Program that results in improved employee health. Organizations differ in how much money they need and how much they can make available for the Corporate Wellness Program. Consider the following common expenses in developing an adequate Corporate Wellness Program budget:

• Corporate Wellness Program staffing costs (either internal salaries or consultant fees)
• Corporate Wellness Program data collection costs (including health risk assessment costs, if relevant)
• Corporate Wellness Program incentives and rewards for healthy behaviors (such as discounts on premiums for non-smokers)
• Costs of Corporate Wellness Program Procedures to be implemented (such as costs of covering tobacco quit medications or costs of subsidizing healthy foods in the cafeteria or vending machines)
• Corporate Wellness Program administrative and communications expenses

In times of tight finances, be prepared to justify your requested Corporate Wellness Program budget. Arm yourself with data on potential short- and long-term outcomes of the proposed Corporate Wellness Program Procedures. Itemize the Corporate Wellness Program expenses of past initiatives and share projected expenses for initiatives planned for the upcoming year.

Sustaining Corporate Wellness Program Funding

A dedicated Corporate Wellness Program line item in your corporation’s budget makes it more likely to be regarded as a need, rather than as a “nice-to-have” amenity that could be cut when funds run low.

One of the best Procedures for ensuring continued financial support for the Corporate Wellness Program is frequent communication to leadership, including:

• How many employees have you reached through the Corporate Wellness Program? Has morale increased? Have health risks decreased, e.g., fewer employees using tobacco, more employees active?
• How well are you managing the Corporate Wellness Program resources you’ve been given? Where and how has your budget been spent? Keep track of the staff time required for each initiative and be able to present the numbers at any time.
• Anecdotal Corporate Wellness Program success stories from employees. Don’t underestimate the power of a good story to put a human face on your success.

Supplemental sources of Corporate Wellness Program Funding

If needed, have the individuals responsible for starting a Corporate Wellness Program look for ways to supplement available internal funds. Are there grants or other funding available that can help support your Corporate Wellness Program ? What community Corporate Wellness Program resources could you use to meet some of your needs?

Walking Health Promotion Programs are some of the most popular Corporate 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 walk 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 Corporate Wellness Program, 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 Corporate Wellness Program 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 at the worksite and make sure people know about walking wellness by using your office communication channels – newsletters, announcements, corporation meetings. Keep it fun by building weight-loss teams, setting up races or organizing healthy picnics and athletic activities around the walking wellness route.

Here 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 at the worksite.
Reinforce the walking wellness program message by regularly mentioning it during staff member meetings
Set up a health-related benefit that walking wellness participants can use for health-related expenses.

Finding an individual to guide your corporation in starting a Corporate Wellness Program

Without a qualified Corporate Wellness Program coordinator to guide and manage your corporation’s creation of a culture of health, efforts can be scattered and momentum can stall. While it’s essential that the creation of a culture of health be someone’s priority, not all corporations need a full-time coordinator. There are a number of ways to secure the time of a qualified coordinator.

Be careful not to confuse Corporate Wellness Program skills with fitness skills. You are not looking for a personal trainer or a nutritionist to run your Corporate Wellness Program. The following are good indications that an individual may be qualified to be a Corporate Wellness Program coordinator:

• knowledge of community health, population health and worksite Corporate Wellness Programs
• competent working with and understanding aggregate data, preferably Corporate Wellness Program data
• competent managing projects, including developing timelines and facilitating meetings
• competent in strategic planning, including defining goals and related objectives
• ability to understand, and use the findings of, journal articles on effective Corporate Wellness Program Procedures.

What will a Corporate Wellness Program coordinator do?

The Corporate Wellness Program coordinator is responsible for guiding a process that establishes workplace facilities, policies and practices that promote health. The individual may do some of all of the following for your Corporate Wellness Program:

• act as a liaison between leadership and the Corporate Wellness Program employee advisory workgroup
• interpret health-related data on your Corporate Wellness Program
• establishe and manage work plans and budgets for implementation of selected Corporate Wellness Program Procedures
• facilitate Corporate Wellness Program Committee meetings
• guide your corporation in establishing measurable objectives for the Corporate Wellness Program
• recommend effective Corporate Wellness Program Procedures, using the evidence in the health behavior literature and national and/or recommended best practices
• document and report short-term and long-term progress on Corporate Wellness Program Procedures and objectives.

Where can we find a qualified Corporate Wellness Program coordinator?

Explore the following when looking for a Corporate Wellness Program coordinator:

• Existing staff: Are there individuals on staff who have the background, or are interested in gaining the skills, to support as a Corporate Wellness Program coordinator? Is it possible to dedicate a portion of someone’s time (e.g., .5 FTE) to the position of coordinating your corporation’s Corporate Wellness Program Procedures? If possible, budget enough to cover not only salary but also continued learning, journal subscriptions and membership fees for this Corporate Wellness Program position.
• New staff – Can you hire an individual to be your corporation’s Corporate Wellness Program coordinator? Would it need to be a full-time position, or would part-time be sufficient?
• Corporate Wellness Program Consultation – Various corporations (e.g., health plans, benefit consultants and public health departments) provide Corporate Wellness Program consultation on building a culture of health within a workplace.

An outside Corporate Wellness Program consultant can advise an internal Corporate Wellness Program coordinator and your Corporate Wellness Program Committee on establishing priorities and determining Procedures. Or, you can contract with a Corporate Wellness Program consultant to be your coordinator. If you choose the latter approach, you’ll want to contract with the individual for sufficient hours to carry out all of the responsibilities associated with coordinating an effective strategy.

Health Promotion Statistics tell a clear story – corporate Health Promotion Programs are effective , and they save companies money.

You should take note of these interesting Health Promotion Statistics:

Some 25 percent of American companies were running corporate Health Promotion Programs in 1996.
Health Promotion Statistics depict a savings of $2.30 to $10.10 for every $1 spent on health promotion programs.
Coca-Cola’s physical fitness program recouped $500 per year per staff member, despite the fact that only 60% of their staff was enrolled.
A Ipsos-Reid Corporate Wellness statisics paper in 2004 found the three major preventable causes of staff absenteeism to be mental health (anxiety and/or depression), stress and a bad relationship with a supervisor.
Health Promotion Statistics from Prudential Insurance reveal a benefit expense of $312 per individual enrolled in their wellness system, but $574 per non-enrolled staff member.
At the Coors Brewing Co., Health Promotion Statistics illuminate a savings of $5.50 per $1 spent on physical fitness, with a positive side-effect of participant absenteeism dropping by 18%.

Strong and visible leadership support for the Corporate Wellness Program promotes health and is essential to securing needed Corporate Wellness Program resources (staff, time, and money) and implementing recommended changes.

1. Identify a Corporate Wellness Program champion

In a small corporation, there may be a single leader who is the clear choice to champion the Corporate Wellness Program. In a larger corporation, look for an executive with the authority to sway others in the uppermost levels of the organization regarding the Corporate Wellness Program. The Corporate Wellness Program champion need not be the fittest member of leadership. Rather, look for a Corporate Wellness Program leader with the disposition to be a visible and vocal supporter of workplace policies that encourage healthy behaviors. Organizations with multiple sites can consider whether it would be useful to have an executive Corporate Wellness Program champion at each site.

2. Find existing Corporate Wellness Program allies

There may already be a number of individuals within your corporation who recognize the value of a Corporate Wellness Program. Think about who those individuals are in your corporation; consider areas such as occupational safety, union representatives, risk management, medical officers, and human resources when looking for a Corporate Wellness Program ally. Obtain their stated support for the Corporate Wellness Program. Corporate Wellness Program support could include contributions of staff time or expertise, financial resources, agreement to endorse/support policy and environmental changes, or agreement to participate in, and voice their support for, changes in the workplace that will help to build a culture of health.

3. Build a business case for the Corporate Wellness Program

There is a reason that more and more companies are finding a way to promote employee health via a Corporate Wellness Program and policies: A Corporate Wellness Program makes good business sense. workers with healthy behaviors, on average, are more productive when at work (higher presenteeism)1 and incur lower health care costs than employees with less healthy behaviors.2,3 As a result it would be foolish not to have a Corporate Wellness Program.

4. When developing a Corporate Wellness Program use what you know about leadership styles and the decision-making process within your corporation

Every corporation is different. Build leadership support for the Corporate Wellness Program in the way that makes the most sense for your corporation. Think about the following as you plan how to approach leadership for Corporate Wellness Program support:

• What are the current priorities and pressures facing executives? How could a Corporate Wellness Program and a healthier workforce support those priorities?
• How do the leaders prefer to receive data: written documents? verbal presentations?
• What kinds of Corporate Wellness Program information are likely to sway decisions? Do they want data and Corporate Wellness Program statistics specific to your corporation, or are state or national data sufficient? Are the leaders more influenced by internal factors or by what competitors are doing?
• Who would the leaders see as a reliable messenger for this Corporate Wellness Program information? Does someone from the risk management area carry more clout than someone from the human resources area?
• How do decisions get made in your corporation? Informal committee meetings? Formal or informal meetings between executives? Plan accordingly and you improve the odds that the Corporate Wellness Program will become a reality.

5. Maintain Corporate Wellness Program support once you have it

Once you have appropriate Corporate Wellness Program support, ensure that you maintain it by regularly updating the leaders on employee health and progress toward starting a culture that promotes health. Ask upper management how often they want to receive Corporate Wellness Program progress reports.

Source Information:
1 Bunn, JOEM, 2006, 48:10.
2 Foldes, Bland, An et al. Modifiable Health Risks and Short-Term Health Care Costs. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota internal research, submitted for publication.
3 Anderson, 2000, American Journal of Health Promotion, 15:1.

Corporate Wellness benefits still aren’t self-evident to some executives, even though the research, real-world evidence and cost-benefit analyses are demonstrative. With careful planning, almost every corporation can reap Corporate Wellness benefits.

Part of the problem is that some executives erroneously believe that the Corporate Wellness benefits are mostly on the staff member side. The truth is that Corporate Wellness benefits both the employer and staff member – and according to Employee Health Promotion statistics , the employer stands to gain $2.30 to $10.10 in cost savings per dollar spent. Employee physical fitness saves companies money.

At the same time, health care and insurance costs continue to skyrocket. Corporate Wellness benefits are one of the only ways to cut those costs while helping staff members at the same time. As Karen Roberts, senior vice president with Aon Consulting, said about Corporate Wellness benefits in her address at the 2006 WorldAtWork Total Rewards Conference & Exhibition, “If you can’t afford to invest in wellness this year, you’re never going to afford it.”

Corporate Wellness benefits include helping to prevent cancer, obesity, heart disease and hypertension. It’s rare that companies can cut costs and assist struggling staff members, support families and even arguably save lives. Isn’t that a good thing?

The workplace environment is a powerful, but often overlooked, element in managing employee health. Here we will identify some of the best-practices in starting a Corporate Wellness Program that supports your organization’s employee health strategy and allows employees to take charge of their own health. For example, a Corporate Wellness Program that includes a tobacco-free workplace policy improves the likelihood that employees will try to quit smoking and will quit using tobacco successfully. Similarly, a Corporate 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 Corporate Wellness Program and workplace environment that promotes employee health.

In an era of rising health care costs and fervent competition, companies have a vested interest in the health of their employees. Research has found that, on average, employees with healthy behaviors (such as not using tobacco 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 Wellness Program: Gaining Leadership Support

Corporate Wellness Program support from the uppermost level of leadership is essential to your success in starting a culture of health within your workplace. Look for Corporate Wellness Program support from a leader who is respected by and can sway other leaders. (It’s not necessary that he or she be the fittest executive within your organization just that they directly support the Corporate Wellness 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 Corporate Wellness Program resources (staff, time, and money) to maintain and improve the workplace policies, physical environment, and social norms.

Obtain Corporate Wellness Program Staff and Financing

The creation and maintenance of a Corporate Wellness Program within your corporation needs to be someone’s priority. However, unless your corporation is quite large, you likely don’t need to hire a full-time staff person for the Corporate Wellness Program. There are a number of ways to find an individual with the needed skills to guide and support your corporation’s Corporate Wellness Program.

Starting facilities and Corporate Wellness Program policies, such as those allowing employees to be physically active during the workday, does not need to be costly, but it does require adequate and sustained funding. If possible, include the creation of a workplace environment that supports the Corporate Wellness Program as a permanent component of the operating budget; that helps to ensure it’s an ongoing priority for your corporation.

Staff Member Involvement in the Corporate Wellness Program

Developing a representative group of workers to advise your corporation’s Corporate Wellness Program ensures that improvements in workplace facilities, policies and practices address the true needs and barriers of all groups of workers. In addition, these employees can support as the front-line Corporate Wellness Program supporters of policies and practices with their peers.

Create a Corporate Wellness Program “Brand” and Vision

A Corporate Wellness Program vision and a brand are powerful first steps in bringing a Corporate Wellness Program from an idea to a reality. What would you like your workplace environment to look like five years from now? A succinct Corporate Wellness Program vision statement summarizes for all (employees and leaders alike) the reasons for starting a Corporate Wellness Program. It also reminds everyone of the link between employee health and your corporation’s ability to achieve its overall mission.

Branding your corporation’s Corporate Wellness Program sends a message to employees that the corporation’s commitment and support of healthy behaviors is important and is here to stay. Choose a Corporate Wellness Program name and logo that resonate with employees. Then use that brand on all Corporate Wellness Program communications with employees about the policies, facilities and programs your corporation offers to promote healthy behaviors.

Assess Your Existing Corporate Wellness Program Situation

Exactly how your corporation establishes a Corporate Wellness Program that promotes healthy eating, physical activity, and reduces tobacco use will depend on the unique characteristics of your corporation and employee population.

Assess how the current workplace 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 workers’ health interests alone is not sufficient; but can be a useful supplement to health risk data and might help you set priorities.

Determine Corporate Wellness Program Priorities and Goals

Use what you’ve discovered about employee health and about your current workplace environment to determine your corporation’s Corporate Wellness Program priorities. From those Corporate Wellness Program priorities, define clear and measurable Corporate Wellness Program objectives for improving employee health and your corporation’s culture. Well written objectives will provide the basis for planning and for measuring your progress.

Choose Corporate Wellness Program Procedures

Focus your corporation’s Corporate Wellness Program resources (time, energy and money) on tactics 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 Corporate Wellness Program approaches most likely to result in significant, lasting, and widespread improvements in health behaviors. Those Corporate Wellness Program tactics are included in the physical activity, tobacco, and healthy eating sections of this website.

The formula for Corporate Wellness Program success is to make the healthier choices the easier choices.

Implement Corporate Wellness Program Procedures

Once you’ve chosen your Corporate Wellness Program Procedures, it can be useful to arrange the work on a timeline. The “right” amount of time for implementing each Corporate Wellness Program strategy depends on the staff time, budget, and business demands of your corporation. Work plans maintain your efforts moving and help to ensure that plans to start a Corporate Wellness Program stay on track even if there are changes in staffing or other challenges.

Communicate and Educate About the Corporate Wellness Program

Ensure employees are aware of the Corporate Wellness Program opportunities you’ve provided. Planning your Corporate Wellness Program communications allows you to communicate regularly with employees without overwhelming them at any one time.

Monitor and Report Your Corporate Wellness Program Results

At the same time that you plan your Corporate Wellness Program Procedures, think about how you’ll measure success. It’s much easier to gather information – or to start systems for collecting information — before you implement a Corporate 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 absenteeism or health care claims.

Report both your Corporate Wellness Program successes in building a healthy workplace environment (such as complete implementation of a policy that provides employees time for walking during the workday), and Corporate Wellness Program successes in getting workers 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).

Employee Health Screening means better heath risk assessment baselines and better security

“Employee Health Screening” is a hot phrase these days, but it can help your staff members with health management, too. When the pundits talk about Employee Health Screening, they’re usually referring to retinal scanners, fingerprint readers, and other high-tech security measures. However, if you trace the phrase “Employee Health Screening” back to its roots, it refers to the measurement of unique human physical and behavioral characteristics.

Both security and Employee Health Promotion are of critical importance to the modern business. As a result, Employee Health Screening should be one of the tools in the arsenal of a forward-thinking organization.

Onsite health screenings aren’t just a “feel-good” measure for your staff members. Assessments of staff member health help your workers to prioritize their well-being, which results in happier, more productive staff members. Health risk assessments also build your database of staff member biometric data. Employee Health Screening, when handled worksite by our experienced professionals, is hassle-free and smoothly organized. The biometric data we collect then can be stored digitally for years or even decades, helping you and your staff members build better health risk assessment baselines that you can use to analyze staff members physical fitness and the efficacy of your organization’s Health and Productivity Programs. Collected biometric data can even allow an staff member’s doctor to assess that individual’s health over many years, helping him or her spot trends and diagnose disease.

Our Employee Health Screening extends to a wide variety of health risk tests, including measurements of blood pressure, blood type, body fat, substance abuse, and susceptibility to cardiovascular disease. You or your corporate security department may find it useful to coordinate our Employee Health Screening and health screenings with your own biometric security procedures. Collecting biometric data for security purposes – like fingerprints, facial recognition imprints, or hand geometry – can be dovetailed with our health tests to minimize workflow disruption.

Corporate 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 corporation 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, Corporate 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 poor dietary habits cause most of the Corporate Wellness issues that weigh down staff member attendance and erode a organization’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 Corporate 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 Corporate Wellness

It doesn’t help that U.S citizens 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 U.S citizens 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 staff member 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 drugs help American Corporate Wellness. In fact, he points out a bevy of negative Corporate Wellness consequences for America’s legal prescription drug addition, which include prescription drug interactions, liver damage, and the legions of people who now depend on prescription drugs to deal with ordinary trials and stresses.

An employer has the potential to improve Corporate Wellness

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

Health Risk Assessment: Helping Quantify Employee Health help you quantify staff member health

An Health Risk Assessment (HRA) is an important tool to help you isolate the value of strong corporate Health Promotion Programs.

Health Risk Assessment: What is it?

Does the term “Health Risk Assessment” have you puzzled? If so, then you are not alone. Unfortunately there is no standard definition or format for a Health Risk Assessment. A health risk assessment is both a procedure and a document, too, depending on the context — you must answer questions and ideally undergo some simple Employee Health Screening to develop a document that describes what’s good and bad about your current state of health.

To add confusion to the situation, there’s a field called health risk management. Talk to an OSHA inspector about health risk assessment and they will likely assume you’re referring to an analysis of contaminants and industrial chemicals in a factory or manufacturing facility.

Health Risk Assessment: The Typical Health Risk Assessment

A comprehensive health risk assessment is aimed at producing a concrete baseline of a individual’s health, and includes most of these features:

a blood pressure check,
testing for cancer,
blood glucose test, and
a analysis of the staff member’s health status.

Health Risk Assessments would analyze the staff member’s:

lifestyle indicators,
medical conditions,
prescriptions,
functional concerns and abilities,
quality of life,
self-efficacy,
physical fitness level.