Wellness might be the fatal flaw in your Workplace Wellness Program. Is Wellness part of your strategy? Does workplace wellness stop when your workers leave the office?
Wellness Continuity
If workers don’t have the tools to pursue health and wellness on a Personal level, then it becomes easy for them to “fall off the wagon” and slide back into a unealthy lifestyles. If you have a walking program, for example, it should encourage workers to build walking routes near their homes, perhaps with the cooperation of the neighborhood association or coworkers who live in the neighborhood.
Workplace Wellness Programs: Always on Your Mind
Your Workplace Health Promotion Program coordinator should have “vacation wellbeing” as part of their job scope. In other words, you don’t want a Workplace Health Promotion Program to stop at the boundaries of the workplace campus. Instead, integrate Personal health and wellness with your Workplace Wellness Programs.
This will benefit the Workplace Wellness Programs in a couple of ways:
it lowers the chance that the worker will come back to the office feeling unfit, overwhelmed and unable to resume their Workplace Wellness Programs; and
it shows that their business is just as invested in their Personal health and wellness as they are
Like a marathon, Personal health and wellness is a long-term commitment and it’s challenging for anyone to do in isolation. Simply put, it’s easier to maintain your health and wellbeing when you know others are depending on you and watching your Personal performance. It’s easier to stick to an exercise program when you have a jogging partner who wakes you up when you oversleep, or spots you when you’re lifting weights.
Similarly, it’s easier to stick to your Workplace Health Promotion Program when you know your business is supporting you and wishing you the best.
Don’t Dictate Personal Health
Just as Wellness surveys serve a vital function in building a Workplace Wellness Program, it’s vitally important that you involve workers in designing an off-site wellness strategy. No one enjoys being told what to do, but everyone enjoys having assistance in tacking tough problems. Make it clear that workers are in charge of their own health and wellness. Your role as their health management partner is to support, advise, counsel, offer resources and information.
Of course, don’t forget that part of Personal health and wellness responsibility is to offer good health risk assessment baselines so workers can proceed safely on the road to better fitness.
