Best Practices For Building a Culture of Wellness

Just having a wellness program in place doesn't guarantee it will succeed. Try these ideas to help employees stay on target:

• Align worksite policies and your program. For example, what's your employee break policy? Do you have a company policy on smoking to tie into your stop smoking program offering? Do you have a walking program and walking paths around your worksites?
• Integrate the program into other company offerings, such as:¹
  • Employee assistance programs, or EAP, to help with personal issues.
  • Occupational health safety, or OHS, to prevent work injuries.
  • Return-to-work programs to help rejoin the workforce after short-term disability.
• Create a brand for your wellness program and use it for program promotion. It creates recognition and helps lend credibility. We've got proven promotional materials you can use.
• Use data, diagnostics and metrics. The more ways you're able to hone in on your target audience, meet needs, and measure success, the more likely you are to build a long-term return on investment.
• Include personal coaching, especially in programs focused on long-term behavior change. Whether by phone, online or face-to face, coaching helps maintain employee engagement and positive reinforcement. For example, our Healthy Lifestyles program reported results from 2013-2014 that 69% of participants who were coached improved or eliminated at least one health risk.^2,3
• Build variety into the types of programs you provide. You can create a wellness calendar of events. Consider:
  • Lunch & learns
  • Workshops
  • Team challenges
  • Support groups
  • Volunteer opportunities
  • Health fairs

1 RAND Corporation website: Worksite Wellness Program Study (2013): rand.org.

2 Healthy Lifestyles program internal data study for 2013-2014. Measured population is based on members enrolled in coaching who completed the Well-Being Assessment in T1 and T2 and had at least two successful coaching calls.

3 The Healthy Lifestyles programs are administered by Healthways, Inc., an independent company.