Startinging a Employer Health and Wellness Program
Employee Wellness Plans start and end with individual health. Individuals, after all, are able to make decisions about maintaining and / or improving their health and wellbeing. Employee Employee Wellness Plans must therefore provide the tools and resources needed to assist and motivate individuals to actively participate in the program.
Individual health is only one part of creating employee Employee Wellness Programs. Below you’ll find some things to assist you in your efforts to create a healthy atmosphere for you and your coworkers.
Encouraging Your Employer to Create an Employer Health and Wellness Program
This is the first step in creating a Employee Wellness Program. In recent times more and more companies are creating to see the value of promoting and supporting the health of their employees. Partnership for Prevention, a nonprofit organization, has released a sourcebook called “Healthy Workforce 2010″ (http://www.wellnessproposals.com/pdfs/tool_kits/healthy_workforce_2010.pdf). This sourcebook is an excellent resource containing information on:
• Benefits of Employee Wellness Plans
• Suggestions on where to start
• Tools like surveys and assessment forms
These resources are for both companies and employees to lead the development and evaluate the effectiveness of their new Employee Wellness Program. Make available it to your employer as a place to start or read it yourself and present your ideas.
Taking Part in Employee Wellness Plans
Once you have an employee Employer Health and Wellness Program established, participating fully in all facets of the program is important. Many of us know that we need to more actively engage in Employee Wellness Plans to improve our health, yet have difficulty finding and taking the time to do so. These simple steps can jumpstart your participation in an employee Employee Wellness Program:
• Review the offerings that interest you and that you need for health improvement.
• Schedule time to go to the presentation or service.
• Actively following through with recommendations from the program.
• Make a decision now to improve your health. You will feel better today and tomorrow and the next day for actively moving towards wellness.
Here is a list of potential Employee Wellness Plans that might be available to you at work:
• ergonomic evaluations and ergonomic training classes
• lactation rooms and classes
• prenatal education
• quiet rooms for relaxation
• stress management programs
• onsite fitness centers
• onsite corporate massage
• nutritional information
• worksite primary medical care services
• child care facility or resources and referral service
• smoking cessation programs parenting classes
• Senior care resources and referral service
• cholesterol, blood pressure and glucose screening programs
• influenza vaccinations
• weight management programs
• medical care consumerism programs
• employee assistance programs
• lifestyle coaching
• onsite mammography
More information to follow in my next posting about Employee Employee Wellness Plans