Employee Health and Wellness

Good Employee Wellness Starts with Employee Wellness

Employee Wellness might be the fatal flaw in your Employee Wellness Program. Is Employee Wellness part of your strategy? Does worksite wellness stop when your employees leave the office?

Give Your Employees Health and Wellness Continuity

If employees don’t have the tools to pursue health and wellness on a individual level, then it becomes easy for them to “fall off the wagon” and slide back into a unealthy lifestyles. If you have a walking program, for example, it should encourage employees to build walking routes near their homes, perhaps with the cooperation of the neighborhood association or coworkers who live in the neighborhood.

Employee Wellness Means Never Being “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”

Your Corporate Employee Wellness Program coordinators should have “vacation wellbeing” as part of their job scope. In other words, you don’t want corporate health promotion to stop at the boundaries of the worksite campus. Instead, integrate individual health and wellness with your Employee Wellness Programs.

This benefits your Employee Wellness Programs in two ways:

it lowers the chance that the employee will come back to the office feeling unfit, overwhelmed and unable to resume their Employee Wellness Programs; and
it shows that their employer is just as invested in their individual health and wellness as they are

Like a marathon, individual health and wellness is a long-term commitment and it’s difficult for anyone to do in isolation. Simply put, it’s easier to maintain your health when you know others are depending on you and watching your individual performance. It’s easier to stick to an fitness program when you have a jogging partner who wakes you up when you oversleep, or spots you when you’re lifting weights.

Similarly, it’s easier to stick to your Employee Wellness Program when you know your employer is supporting you and wishing you the best.

Don’t Dictate Individual Health

Just as Employee Wellness surveys serve a vital function in building a Employee Wellness Program, it’s critical that you involve employees in designing an off-site wellness strategy. No one enjoys being told what to do, but everyone enjoys having assistance in tacking tough problems. Make it clear that employees are in charge of their own health and wellness. Your role as their health management partner is to support, advise, counsel, offer resources and information.

Of course, don’t forget that part of individual health and wellness responsibility is to offer good health risk assessment baselines so employees can proceed safely on the road to better fitness.