Four Steps for Implementing a Corporate Culture of Wellness

Many businesses are implementing corporate wellness programmes, but there are those for whom such plans are a privilege, or optional extra. According to Joshua Love, the president of national corporate wellness company Kinema Fitness, ‘When I stop and think about employee wellness, I have to step away from my day to day responsibilities and take a look from the employer perspective. I think it’s a no-brainer to install a wellness programme at every company, no matter the size, demographic, location or what service or product the company provides. My belief is that no company can be successful without paying attention to the wellbeing of their people — and people can’t be successful without feeling good every day.’

 

Love continues, ‘We live in a fast-paced, busy world, full of constant distractions. We’re constantly dialed in with technology and always on the move. Which is why it’s so refreshing to walk into a company where you feel the environment is different, one where people seem motivated, excited, inspired and really love what they do. My experience with corporate wellness leads me back to Google in Mountain View, CA (and how Google maintains its status as one of the top 100 best companies to work for year after year). Google doesn’t just create jobs, they create a culture, one in which people are valued and appreciated every day. Google’s locations have full fitness facilities, daily classes and healthy food available throughout the day; as a result, employees feel cared for and valued.’

 

Do you have to be as lucrative or as large as Google to create a culture of wellness? Of course not; every company has the ability to implement some kind of wellness programme. But how do you do it? Love has a four-step process to help you install a wellness programme that‘s efficient, smart, scalable and goal-oriented:

 

1. Determine the Needs of Employer AND Employee: ‘First, we ask a simple question,’ says Love. ‘What do employees need, and how do those needs fit with the goals of the employer? It’s impossible to answer these questions without assessing both sides. It is essential to understand the mindsets, challenges, and your audience first before laying out a framework for its path. This includes surveying not only the employees, but also the employer. A simple health risk assessment (which your insurance carrier may offer) followed by biometric screens is a good way to assess problem areas.’

 

2. Analyze the Data and Create a Plan: Love details, ‘Based on our survey data, we try to determine what elements will work for the existing culture. Is it fitness classes that will motivate the employees, wellness workshops, individual health assessments, or some combination of the above? We always recommend combining wellness education with physical activity — otherwise, many employees will not take advantage of classes and programmes they need to see real benefits.’

 

3. Create a Communication Plan: ‘A culture of wellness doesn’t happen without reinforcement,’ Love asserts. ‘Employers must create a communication plan that lays out the programme’s framework and different methods (and times) to communicate the information to employees. This keeps wellness at the forefront.’

 

4. Put an Incentive Plan in Place: Love comments, ‘We have found, time and again, that rewarding employees for getting healthy and achieving results encourages the type of change needed to get a programme off the ground and encourage a real shift in employee culture. However, because the required behaviour changes are new, challenging, and difficult to sustain, programmes must include incentives and rewards throughout the year in order to drive long-term engagement.’

Categories: Communication, company, corporate wellness, culture, employees, incentives, nbsp, Wellness, Wellness Programme

In-House and Outsourcing: Why Corporate Wellness Needs Both

While some corporate wellness practises have changed over the years, most things have remarkably stayed the same. For years, employers have been told to outsource their wellness promotion, administration and delivery, but does that approach to looking after employee wellbeing still hold true today? For the answer, we turned to Rob J. Thurston, President of HR Consulting Group and Bart Sheeler, co-founder of ActivHealth International, in order to take a real time look at the current approach to Wellness Programmes.

 

According to Thurston and Sheeler, ‘Most companies have heard of, would like to implement, or may have even attempted to offer a wellness programme. However, most have found they are too busy fighting tough economic times and watching expenses trying to make a profit to divert attention or expenses into the intangible world of wellness. While the concept of wellness may seem to be much more philosophical than the task of producing a product or service for a profit, they really have more in common than not. As companies strive to improve their processes and focus on the bottom line “health” of their business, the same happens to be true for their most valued assets, their employees. The happier and healthier the employee population, the better the productivity and lower the health care costs against trend – all of which add up to help improve the company’s bottom line.’

 

So how do you implement your own wellness programme without taking your eye off the day-to-day responsibilities of your business? ‘Respecting your culture and designing a programme that meets the unique needs of your population are essential in building a wellness programme,’ say Thurston and Sheeler. ‘We recommend surveying your employees to see what interests them and noting what the circumstances are specific to your company. Do you have one location, branch offices, multiple shifts and/or remote sales staff? All these factors will ultimately need consideration when you sit down to design your programme.’ So that’s that, then, no need to outsource your company’s wellness needs? Not according to Thurston and Sheeler.

 

The wellness experts write, ‘We believe that certain items must remain under your control, while other features will be better delivered via outsourced solutions. With this in mind, the question is not whether it makes sense for a company to offer a wellness programme, but more importantly, how to incorporate a programme that will capture the attention of the employees, drive engagement on a personal level and ultimately create a culture of health improvement. Every company is different, so the solutions will not all look the same. The key is to match a company’s available “internal” resources with a complimentary set of outsourced “external” resources.’

 

In terms of what you can do internally, it again comes down to culture. ‘Outside influences can be enlisted,’ note Thurston and Sheeler. ‘But in the end, your employees are internal and will shape your culture from the ground up. There are internal components that must be maintained within the company to be effective. Leadership must be involved, “walking the talk” and communications that are reinforced through internal “programme champions” are a necessity to be successful in the integration of healthy living into a company’s culture.’

 

So what do you outsource for? Thurston and Sheeler explain, ‘Employers use outsourcing to maintain or improve service to employees; reduce workload to existing staff; reduce programme costs; and to free up resources to focus on other key objectives, like building their widgets for a profit…Such firms will offer Health Risk Appraisals, Biometric testing, onsite Fitness and Challenges, onsite coaching, online coaching and a variety of platforms that offer real-time programming via internet access.’

Categories: company, corporate wellness, corporate wellness programme, culture, outsourcing, Programme, real time, sheeler, thurston, Wellness, Wellness Programme

What Everyone Ought To Know About Workplace Wellness

The term ‘wellness’ is used a lot these days, especially in corporate environments. You will hear this word in the media, in insurance documents and within the HR departments of big companies, but what does it really mean?

 

Many of us have now read up more on how wellness in the workplace is an important thing and we now understand that employers can play a strong and very positive role in the wellbeing of their employees.

 

It is very easy for employers to get a bit tangled up in the wellness programme procedure, however, instructing employees to participate in specific programmes and fill in certain health assessments, without having a clear idea of what they hope to achieve from the programme itself.

 

This kind of surface approach tends to produce middling results at best, as it narrows the focus of wellness to what becomes by and large a simple case of nagging. This kind of programme fails to realise that the best way to motivate employees and change habits in the long term is through company-wide wellness programmes that engage employees fully and actually support them as they make serious lifestyle changes towards healthy behaviour, rather than simply lecturing them on how they ought to be behaving.

 

This is important at a time when around 52 percent of Americans surveyed recently admitted to being disengaged at work, whilst only 18 percent claimed to be actively engaged in their job.

 

To fix this, a culture-first mentality must be created in the workplace, where productive employees are created by focusing on their quality of life in every possible sense, including work-life balance, social, spiritual and financial wellbeing and even physical and mental health. Employers should care truly about their employees and aim to be a supportive part of their lives in a holistic sense.

Categories: culture, employees, employers, nbsp, Wellness, workplace

Warning: Teens And Parents Not Talking Enough About Sex

A study into the population of East Asians in Canada has found that teens are unlikely to talk about sexual health with their parents, which is putting their wellness and wellbeing at risk. Although it was found that East Asian students were less likely to be sexually active, those who were sexually active were more likely to indulge in risky sexual behaviour.

 

The study has emerged from the University of B.C in Vancouver, and suggests that language and cultural barriers may be to blame for the lack of frank and open dialogue between parents and their children on the topic of sex. The study was published in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality and has opened up further discussion about why East Asians may feel this taboo about sexual discussion between parents and teens.

 

It has become more commonplace for young people to be sexually active – in North America, around half of all students in Grades 9 and 10 say that they have had sexual intercourse. This 50 percent drops to only 10 percent, however, when looking solely at young people of East Asian heritage living in America and Canada.

 

Despite the low percentage of those actually engaging in sexual intercourse, those who do are at higher risk of unsafe practices. Around 70 percent of young East Asians who do have sex have some kind of other high risk behaviour. Around one in four say that they use alcohol or drugs as part of their sex life, over a third of them had had sex with multiple partners in the past 12 months, and over half of those surveyed had had sex without using a condom.

 

And seven out of those 10 reported high-risk behaviour, according to the study. One in four reported using drugs or alcohol, more than one third reported having had multiple partners in the last year, and more than half the girls surveyed had not used a condom.

 

It is thought that the more traditionally conservative cultures could be contributing to the problem, as children of this heritage were less likely to speak to their parents at home about sex or to be given advice about safe sexual practices.

Categories: Asia, condom nbsp, culture, east asian, east asians, high risk, language, multiple partners, risk behaviour, sexual intercourse, sexually active, young people

How Can Tackling Workplace Stress Save Your Business Money?

Last year, work-related stress cost the economy a massive £6.5bn – clearly, something needs to be done. Whether your employees take days off for stress, or come to work disengaged, tired, unmotivated and too stressed to work, you could see the costs to your business rise if you don’t take action.

 

According to the Health and Safety Executive, there are six management standards that you should review in your business, in order to reduce the levels of work related stress amongst workers and cover the primary sources of stress in the workplace. These include demands (workload, work patterns and the work environment), control (how much input your employee has in his or her own work), relationships (identifying unacceptable behaviour and promoting positive working), change (how organisational change is communicated and managed), role (whether each employee understands his or her purpose, responsibility and place in the organisational structure) and support (core training for the job whilst allowing for factors unique to the individual.)

 

So what might tackling workplace stress look like within your business?

 

1. Train your managers to support employees, and identify, manage and minimise stress. Communication and awareness is vital in this process, as workers should feel comfortable approaching their line manager to talk though any stressful situations. Therefore, line managers need to be able to spot the signs of stress, develop their existing leadership and communication skills and to explore the importance of positive manager behaviours.

 

2. Take a look at your stress management policies. You may want to consider setting up staff consultation groups, or making your staff aware of who they can talk to if they have a problem, such as employee assistance programmes (EAPs), coaching services, occupational health, line managers and human resource managers. If an employee does tell a manager about work-related stress, the manager should then conduct a risk assessment and take action to reduce the impact of stress on your employee.

 

3. Create an environment of corporate wellness. Not only should you provide your employees with the tools and interventions they need to prevent and reduce workplace stress, but you also need to boost employee engagement, support management and leadership development and promote a culture of wellbeing.

Categories: culture, management, policies

Is Depression Only a Mental Disorder Because of Our Culture?

Last weekend, the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – DSM-5 – was published. The DSM-5 describes the symptoms of a vast range of mental illnesses and is intended as a guide to diagnosis, but the committee has been accused of continually expanding the categories of mental illness, resulting in “diagnostic inflation”.

 

Moreover, the US National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) dislikes the DSM’s symptom-based approach, asserting that laboratory tests for biomarkers are the only rational way to diagnose mental illness. Arguably, the categorisation of mental illness based on symptoms can be useful, but it’s important to remember that those diagnostic categories are cultural constructions, not global certainties. For example, susto, or fright sickness, of Latin America, and what people in India call the dhat syndrome – in which men experience fatigue, anxiety and guilt – is a well-documented example of a psychological culture-bound syndrome.

 

Professor Christopher Dowrick put forward in a recent editorial in the British Journal of General Practice, that depression could be a western culture-bound syndrome, rather than a universal disorder. He noted that psychiatrists constantly shift the diagnostic goalposts, and this lack of consensus as to what constitutes depression supports his case. Professor Dowrick explained, ‘In western anglophone societies we have developed an ethic of happiness, in which aberrations … are assumed to indicate illness.’

 

But it’s not just depression, but pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS) that wellness experts have argued is a Western culture-bound syndrome. Thomas S Johnson claimed, in 1987, that PMS symptoms are an expression of ‘conflicting societal expectations’ on women, while a 2012 meta-analysis of published research failed to find evidence that negative mood correlates to the pre-menstrual phase of the menstrual cycle.

 

However, Dr Rachel Cooper, author of Classifying Madness, comments, ‘I think the distinction between “biological” and “social” causes can get tricky. Lots of human practices that are clearly culturally patterned – child-rearing practices, diet, and sleep patterns, for example – affect our biology. You could have cases where a “core” biological disturbance is expressed differently in different cultures. Some have suggested that this might be the case with western-style depression and Chinese neurasthenia.’

Categories: culture, DSM-5, PMS

Corporate Wellness Begins with Culture and Resources

If you believe you have the resources to conduct wellness lifestyle behaviours throughout the workday, you will be more likely to actually participate in such behaviours. This is according to an April 2013 survey by The Ohio State University, who noted that thoughts of healthy behaviours shouldn’t stop when the workday starts, even though typical workday activities such as answering emails, attending meetings and completing administrative work aren’t necessarily conducive to your wellbeing.

In a similar survey, respondents from more than 90 universities and colleges indicated that they would feel more likely participating in on-campus wellness activities if they had ‘flexibility in work schedules, a culture that encourages wellness, good communication about available programs and activities, leaders/administrators being fully engaged and supporting wellness, convenient locations and improved access to wellness resources and incentives.’

According to Bernadette Melnyk, Ohio State’s chief wellness officer and dean of the College of Nursing, ‘You’ve got to build a culture and environment that makes it easy and fun for people to engage in wellness activities. So, building a culture and environment of wellness in addition to making wellness activities freely available throughout the system and working with individuals on behaviour change is super important.’

Melnyk added that general healthy behaviours can help to improve the corporate wellness of a company, as well as the individual: ‘Evidence from studies has shown that when people have higher levels of wellness, they are more happy, engaged and productive and have fewer chronic illnesses, which means they miss less work and cost less in terms of health care claims. There is an economic incentive to keep staff and faculty healthy, but it’s also simply the right thing to do as an employer.’

However, the survey results show that there are still obstacles to overcome, such as rigid work schedules and lack of leadership support. As a result, the administration at Ohio State has created the One University Health & Wellness Council to unify health initiatives across the university, in order to coordinate leadership. Melynk said that she receives a lot of correspondence from businesses and universities throughout the country asking her what they should do to implement their own healthy policies.

Corporate Wellness Begins with Culture and Resources

Categories: culture, Research, resources

Do Your Teenagers Understand the Impact of Rape?

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Categories: culture, high, rape, santa teresa, Sex, sexual, Sexual Assault, slut shaming, Teenagers, teens, teresa high