Creating a Culture of Wellness in the Workplace

In today’s work environment, employers and their employees face the stress and demands of remaining viable in the competitive marketplace and our post-recession reality. More and more those corporate leaders are seeing wellness as a strategic business priority because they are finding the workplace itself has a powerful affect on people's health.

When people are satisfied with their jobs, they are more productive, tend to make healthier choices and show up to work more fully engaged.  On the flipside, when employees feel stressed and negative about work, this has a huge impact on their emotional and physical health affecting their ability, productivity, customer service and more.

Perhaps of even greater immediate impact for employers, they have seen a dramatic rise in their health insurance premiums over the last few years due primarily to three primary lifestyle risk factors: physical inactivity, poor diet and tobacco use.

Although proactive wellness programs can help to dramatically change employee behavior in these areas, provide the support they need and reduce the cost of insuring them, our experience has shown that a company must invest in making a real shift in their culture in order to build and sustain wellness over time.

Preventing avoidable, adverse health issues requires much more than informed outreach and a communications campaign, it takes a holistic approach.

Our extensive experience in organizational and individual human behavior has taught us a thing or two about sustained change.  Our work is deeply rooted in getting individuals to make a commitment to the changes long-term and also have the support system to get back on track if they should fall off.

Because this is a unique business situation where your employees' personal lives intersect with the goals of the company, this isn't a change that companies can just "mandate." It's necessary to uncover and address the desires and motivations of your employees and will work only through finding mutual ground where everyone can succeed.

Our approach:

Our team's focus is on creating mindset shift and engagement as well as the environment and programs for success.

Our proprietary process leverages a unique discovery and design phase that helps us to understand a company's employee population at a deeper level (what's in their hearts and heads) to drive action.

This ideation process works to reveal concepts for the key levers and programs that would most likely drive the employee population towards a "culture of wellness" - painting a vivid picture (and prototypes) of what it would look like in action.

Just a few of our offerings include:

• Cultural and organizational readiness assessments
• Business case development
• New behavior definition and aligned incentives
• Program development such as 40 day transformation, community building and wellness events
• Digital and interactive tools (iPhone apps, collaboration platforms, activity trackers)