🔒Tips to jumpstart a workplace wellness program

Recent research shows that roughly half of U.S. employers with at least 50 workers now offer wellness benefits at some level to their workers.

Is your company thinking about jumping on the wellness bandwagon?

While wide-ranging in design, and difficult to succinctly define, wellness programs often share several key goals: encouraging healthier lifestyles, lowering health spending, boosting worker productivity and serving as an employee-retention tool.

Before getting started, it's best to spend time defining what goals are important to your company and which activities best align with its overall corporate mission.

Worksite wellness programs often aim to improve employee health by offering preventive health screenings, which identify and make individuals aware of particular health risks, and educating employees how to lower those risks through lifestyle changes.

The scope of these programs has expanded over time from simple educational strategies, like “lunch and learn” sessions on nutrition or heart health, to workforce wellbeing and total population health that expands the scope of wellness to include elements targeting mindfulness, fiscal stability and emotional wellbeing.

In recent years, many employers have added incentives and enhancements intended to drive employees toward healthier behaviors. Incentive trends may include insurance premium discounts, cash or gift cards, or a paid “wellness day” off from work.

Incentives are often tied to participation in biometric screenings, preventive physicals, fitness challenges, weight loss and smoking-cessation programs.

Best-practice programs begin with a baseline evaluation of the worker population, using an evaluative tool known as a health-risk assessment questionnaire. This baseline is a critical metric in monitoring a program's successes and trends in population health.

The second step involves educational campaigns and initiatives that encourage employees to make positive changes. More than half of wellness programs include disease-specific features targeting diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other conditions, according to a 2016 RAND Corp. survey commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor. These programs are referred to as outcomes-based or results-oriented wellness programs.

Before investing your time and money into a wellness program, there are some key factors to consider:

• No wellness program can be successful without the support of management at all levels.

• Look back to previous corporate initiatives that were successful. What worked then will tend to work with embedding wellness programs too. Wellness should be treated as part of an overall business strategy.

• Reflect on the worksite environment. Often, when the importance of workplace culture is overlooked, both time and money are wasted, and management may brand wellness as a failure.

• Employee feedback on wellness programs is important. By forming a wellness committee the program will influence the entire population.

• Incentives are more likely to increase employee engagement; thinking creatively regarding incentives will excite and motivate your employees.

• Don't aim to accomplish too much too soon. A multi-year strategy allows for cultural growth and effective worker engagement. Look to industry standards, through organizations such as WELCOA or a benefits advisor, to help determine where to start.

Sara Tarca is a workforce health consultant with OneDigital Health and Benefits in Farmington.