The WellRight Blog

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:

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.

An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but what about a good massage? Or maybe some herbal tea? Or perhaps some meditation?

Conventional medicine has long been the dominant source for treatment and advice when it comes to keeping us healthy. In recent decades, however, there is an increased interest in expanding our ideas of healthcare and what it really takes to be well. As a result, people are beginning to integrate other approaches and techniques into their lifestyle.

Read on to learn what integrative medicine is and whether you should make it a part of your employee wellness program.

After the all-too-short weeks home with your new baby, it’s time to go back to work. You head back into the office, say hello to everybody, and check in with your boss to get up to speed. During the conversation, you mention needing a private place to pump milk for your baby, only to hear, “Just go ahead and use the washrooms, nobody will mind.”

At this point, you do a direct stare into the camera like Jim from The Office.

Some people joke about the “man flu”—the idea that men tend to exaggerate their symptoms when they become sick. Recent research suggests there might be some legitimacy to this mythical ailment, however, with a true immunity gap existing between the sexes.

“Man flu” notwithstanding, men have an increased risk for many other serious, even potentially fatal, conditions. As we enter Men’s Health Month in June, it’s important to acknowledge five significant health risks men face and learn what employers can do to improve the health of this segment of the workforce.

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s “Winning with Wellness” report, more than 117 million Americans had one or more chronic illnesses in 2012, accounting for a staggering 75% of all healthcare costs and 70% of deaths in the United States.

And these health declines don’t affect only individuals. They also affect workplaces, driving up insurance costs and decreasing retention and morale. And while wellness programs are an increasingly popular way to tackle these health issues, what does the data say about them?

According to Gallup CEO Jim Clifton, “The single biggest decision you make in your job—bigger than all the rest—is who you name manager.” And for good reason.

Managers today account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement, with good managers having the ability to improve morale, increase productivity, and improve performance. In addition, a well-trained manager knows how to mobilize their employees and leverage employee strengths to meet company goals.

It makes sense, then, that developing these great managers should be a top priority for every company. And one of the best tools for doing so may be an unexpected one: their corporate wellness program.

Motivation. We all want more of it, but few of us can seem to find enough of it. And when we do find that burst of enthusiasm, how often do we use it to improve our health and well-being?

Odds are, you’re not the only one having trouble putting yourself first and taking steps to improve your health; your employees are, too. But imagine what could happen if you could change that—if you could boost motivation among your entire staff, energizing them to take action toward improving their well-being?