The WellRight Blog

January is the biggest month of the year for buying things we struggle to use.

In the rush of excitement to stick to our fitness resolutions, we splurge on exercise equipment, gym memberships, and sporty new workout clothes. All too often though, by February the equipment is gathering dust, the gym membership is nothing more than a monthly debit from our bank accounts, and the workout clothes still have their tags.

It’s a well-established fact: When employees make healthy choices, eat better, exercise more, and learn to reduce the stress in their lives, they engage more with their jobs. Absenteeism, presenteeism, and turnover go down, while productivity, creativity, and morale go up.

But as you probably know from your own life, reversing long standing habits is easier said than done. If you’ve become accustomed to grabbing fast food for comfort after an exhausting day of work, you may have trouble psyching yourself up for fresh produce. If you’re used to waking up to your Twitter feed, a 20-minute meditation may, at first, seem like a disappointing substitute.

That’s where an employee wellness program comes in. A good wellness program nudges your team toward healthy habits with a combination of fun challenges, community support, and education. But the best wellness program in the world won’t make much difference if your employees don’t use it.

Alcohol is a ubiquitous part of our culture. Socializing with colleagues after work, the office holiday party, unwinding after an exhausting day—all of these occasions often revolve around drinking and can be awkward for people who don’t partake.

Until recently, that is.

Health is a sensitive subject in America. Anything that touches on the health of your employees must navigate a tangled web of federal and state regulations designed to protect the privacy of your employees and ensure everyone is treated equally, regardless of their health status.

Designing a corporate wellness program can involve a significant amount of legal planning. Making matters more difficult, laws concerning corporate wellness programs aren’t always clear.

Here are some of the compliance regulations to keep in mind:

Thanksgiving and health tend to not go hand in hand: The average American consumed 3,000 calories during their big family dinner.

Despite this, there are health benefits that come with the holiday. (And no, we’re not talking about the meager amount of veggies you get from eating Aunt Sue’s green-bean casserole.)

The act of giving thanks is good for our physical and mental health. Gratitude is a habit worth cultivating and practicing not just around Thanksgiving, but all year round.

Here is what the science says about the transformative power of gratitude:

Every journey starts somewhere. But if you don’t know where your starting point is, plotting your course will be much more difficult.

For your corporate wellness program, the perfect starting point may be a biometric screening event. Biometric screening can give you a baseline from which to build a program that improves the health of your employees, boosts their productivity and morale, and lowers healthcare costs.

Biometric screening can also serve as a compass, keeping your employees oriented toward their health goals and your corporate wellness program on track.

Today we’ll break down the pros and cons of biometric screening and help you decide whether biometric screening is right for your corporate wellness program.

Health organizations are beginning to recognize burnout as a worldwide epidemic. By some estimates, burnout costs employers well over $100 billion every year and endangers the health of millions, striking without warning and affecting a majority of today’s workforce.

But some recent research suggests that women may burn out faster than men.

To reduce burnout rates at your workplace, it’s useful to understand the unique pressures women face at work and at home and how they can lead to burnout.

If you love your job, the old saying goes, you'll never have to work a day in your life. Unfortunately, like so many other bits of conventional wisdom, this one’s not entirely true.

No matter how satisfied your employees are with their jobs, sometimes work is going to feel like … well, work. In other words, it's going to be stressful.

When left unchecked, however, occasional stress can morph into chronic stress, which can negatively affect a person’s wellness in widespread and sometimes surprising ways.

People with a strong sense of empathy are more enjoyable to be around. Empathy makes someone more likely to help others, to show compassion, and to hold humane and reasonable expectations of others. On the other hand, a lack of empathy leads to situations like a boss crashing an employee’s chemotherapy appointment to ask about work-related matters.

We think about empathy primarily in terms of how we relate to other people. But is having empathy beneficial to yourself too? And how can organizations help nurture a sense of empathy among employees and management?

Jim’s workplace has just implemented a corporate wellness program and he’s excited about diving into some challenges. After all, his blood pressure is higher than it should be, and his doctor wants him to start developing healthier habits.

His stomach rumbles, so he heads over to the office vending machine, looking for a healthy snack that will quiet his hunger. He scans the machine and sees … chips, candy bars, chewing gum, and a lone, sad granola bar that looks like it was rescued from the bottom of a fourth-grader’s backpack.

Turns out, Jim’s employer isn’t putting their money where Jim’s mouth is.