The workplace setting is a powerful, but often overlooked, element in managing worker 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 workers to take charge of their own health. For example, a Corporate Wellness Program that includes a tobacco-free workplace policy improves the likelihood that workers will try to quit tobacco use and will quit smoking successfully. Similarly, a Corporate Wellness Program that includes discounting healthy foods in your cafeteria and vending machines helps raise workers’ consumption of healthy foods which supports your investment in disease management programs for workers with diabetes, heart disease or hypertension. The following will guide you through the ten key steps in starting a Corporate Wellness Program and workplace setting that promotes worker health.

In an era of rising health care costs and fierce competition, businesses have a vested interest in the health of their workers. Research has found that, on average, workers with healthy behaviors (such as not smoking 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 workers with unhealthy behaviors.

Corporate Wellness Program: Gaining Upper Management Support

Corporate Wellness Program support from the uppermost level of upper management is vital 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 setting, and social norms.

Gain Corporate Wellness Program Staff and Financing

Starting and maintaining a Corporate Wellness Program within your employer needs to be someone’s priority. However, unless your employer 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 employer’s Corporate Wellness Program.

Beginning facilities and Corporate Wellness Program policies, such as those allowing workers to be physically active during the workday, does not need to be expensive, but it does require adequate and sustained financing. If possible, include the creation of a workplace setting that supports the Corporate Wellness Program as a permanent part of the operating budget; that helps to ensure it’s an ongoing priority for your employer.

Worker Involvement in the Corporate Wellness Program

Setting up a representative group of workers to advise your employer’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 workers 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 moving 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 (workers and leaders alike) the reasons for starting a Corporate Wellness Program. It also reminds everyone of the link between worker health and your employer’s ability to achieve its overall mission.

Branding your employer’s Corporate Wellness Program sends a message to workers that the employer’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 workers. Then use that brand on all Corporate Wellness Program communications with workers about the policies, facilities and programs your employer offers to promote healthy behaviors.

Determine Your Present Corporate Wellness Program Situation

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

Determine 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 workers, 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 Goals and Priorities

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

Choose Corporate Wellness Program Procedures

Focus your employer’s Corporate Wellness Program resources (time, energy and money) on tactics that are most likely to produce results: a rise in healthy eating, a rise 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 employer. 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 workers are aware of the Corporate Wellness Program opportunities you’ve provided. Planning your Corporate Wellness Program communications allows you to communicate regularly with workers 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 worker morale and/or behaviors before you see decreases in rates of 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 workers time for walking during the workday), and Corporate Wellness Program successes in getting workers to take charge of their health (a rise in the number of workers who contacted the stop-smoking program, or a rise in the number of fruit-cups purchased from the cafeteria following a promotion and price-cut).

Introduction to Corporate Wellness Programs

Risky health behaviors by workers cost a company. Changing those behaviors can save the employer money and raise the worker’s productivity.

Because work gives an worker a stable setting and support system, Corporate Wellness Programs can have a great impact on decreasing high-risk behaviors. This impact results in reduce health claims cost, less rates of absenteeism, and less short-term disability.

Corporate Wellness Programs may include:

Awareness Rasing Programs: Health and wellness newsletters, health topics covered in payroll stuffers, healthy emails.

Health Risk Assessment: Employee health screenings, wellness fairs, health rist assessments.

Educational Programs: Lunch & Learn wellness presentations, guest speakers at staff meetings.

Skill Building: Healthy cooking demostrations, activity challenges, CPR instruction opportunites, stress management classes, weight management classes.

Interventions: Massage, tobacco cessation, and skills to help you get the most out of your doctor visit.

Physical environment: Healthy items in the vending machines and cafeterias, clean air practices, ergonomics, bike racks, flex time, welllit stairways.

Assessment: Worker needs assessment, baseline Corporate Wellness Program assessment measures, ongoing Corporate Wellness Program assessment of overall effectiveness.

Why Provide Corporate Wellness Programs

The typical employer spends about $8,000 a year on an employee’s healthcare. This includes medical insurance, disability and worker’s compensation. As these costs climb, medical insurance is expected to rise at least 10 percent per year.

A 1999 study showed that companies using Corporate Wellness Programs had a ROI from $1.49 – $13 in benefits per dollar spent. The amount depended on the nature of the Corporate Wellness Programs used. (S. Aldana, American Journal of Wellness, 2001; 15:296-320)

One study showed that a “stop smoking” element to Corporate Wellness Programs may save between $404 -$40,829 per employee, depending on the age and sex of the worker.

The Corporate Wellness Programs at Traveler’s Company included a self-care book, a newsletter, single-topic brochures, and videotapes. The Corporate Wellness Programs saved the company $7.8 million in employee benefi t costs, decreased doctor visits, and it decreased rates of absenteeism by 1.2 days per worker per year. The estimated Corporate Wellness Programs ROI was $3.40 per dollar spent.

In 1998, the Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO) reported a study of 46,026 workers from six large employers for three years. Employees with an inactive lifestyle had 10 percent higher costs; workers with depression had 70 percent higher costs.

Benefits of Corporate Wellness Programs

Increased Productivity – The Canada Life Assurance Company realized a 4 percent increase in productivity after establishing an employee fitness program.

Increased Job Satisfaction – According to employee opinion surveys conducted by the Silverstone Group about thier Corporate Wellness Programs, workers’ morale increased, which helped support a more creative work setting.

Enhanced Recruitment & Retention – In the midst of a tight labor market, Corporate Wellness Programs could be a vital tool to draw new recruits.

Decreased Absenteeism – Canada Life Assurance Company’s rates of absenteeism dropped 42 percent among workers in the Corporate Wellness Programs.

Decreased Workers Comp & Disability – In one year, Boeing Company’s number of back injuries decreased by 34 percent. Six million dollars was saved by tracking injuries as they occurred.

Managed Health Care Costs – Golden, Colorado Adolf Coors Company’s Corporate Wellness Programs returned $6.19 for every dollar spent.