Working Towards Wellness

While some companies put granola bars in the vending machine and call it a day, others have found more creative ways to get employees engaged in their health and wellness at work. Wellness programs can reduce absenteeism, promote a culture of fitness and fun, and can positively impact insurance premiums.

One start to making a wellness program successful is to determine if it’s tailored to the needs of employees. That’s where health risk assessments come into play. They can tell human resources administrators whether to prioritize exercise or smoking cessation with employees. Costs are kept low by using established wellness program templates and putting together wellness committees with employee volunteers to spread out the work and boost participation.

Of course, employees don’t want to be forced to participate, so remember to keep your wellness program fun. Cool incentives or cash are always great ways to encourage employee involvement.

First, Assess

Health risk assessments look at such factors as weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, stress, fitness, smoking, sleep, and safety to benchmark an employee’s overall well being for their age and gender. Most health risk assessment providers create a confidential report for the employee and an anonymous, aggregated report for employers. The information in the report determines what employees need in a wellness program.

At Augsburg Fortress Publishers, the Minneapolis-based publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, a health risk assessment is used as a baseline to determine where the publisher’s 160 employees most need to improve their health.

“We found out through our health risk assessment last fall that 76 percent of our employees didn’t know their numbers for cholesterol, blood sugar, and body mass index,” says Jennifer May, senior benefits and human resources information systems manager at Augsburg. With the assessment, May was able to determine her wellness program’s goals—the big one being disease prevention—and learned that Augsburg employees had high cholesterol and high rates of depression and stress.