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Wellness In The Workplace
August 2009
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Thoughts on Wellness

This month we're trying something you could call "variations on a theme." The theme of course, is wellness. You'll see that each article presents a variation on why wellness is important in the workplace, and suggests ideas and solutions (including LoneStart's proven Team Esteem Challenge) that will help make your organization's employees and their work environment healthier.

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Viral Wellness and Social Media

Some people get it right away; others look at the word "viral" and wonder what it has to do with wellness. Now, add "social media" into the mix.

We know some illnesses are contagious. Behavioral scientists have also demonstrated that happiness is contagious. Smile at a stranger and chances are, they will smile back. Now, studies have shown that overweight and obesity seem to be "shared" within families and circles of friends. And, for the past four years, LoneStart Wellness has proven that wellness too can be spread, from employee to employee, employee to family, and organization to community. In a very real sense, we're out to create an "epidemic" of viral wellness.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of "Viral Marketing," a term coined by Harvard Business School professor, Jeffrey Rayport in 1996. This marketing technique uses pre-existing social networks to increase brand awareness through a self-replicating, or "viral" process. It's the same concept LoneStart Wellness employs to create enthusiastic and successful program participants. Once LoneStart participants prove to themselves that they can be successful, they tend to become enthusiastic advocates for the strategy that helped them meet their goals. This is how "Viral Wellness" spreads, both individually and within organizations.

Social networks already exist between employees within an organization, in school districts and churches, and in families and communities. Now, we have social networks and social media such as Twitter and Facebook that continue to evolve and expand, spreading trends and experiences. When the focus is on wellness, it becomes embraced within those networks, and spreads "virally."

Nicholas Christakis, a physician and professor of sociology at Harvard University, has published a series of papers examining how health spreads among people who know each other. "People are connected - and so their health is connected," he wrote. He found that "the spread of obesity in social networks appears to be a factor in the obesity epidemic - and that the relevance of social influence also suggests that the same forces can be used to slow the spread of obesity."

Christakis found that when one person quits smoking, friends and colleagues are more likely to do so as well. When someone loses weight, the individuals in that person's social network have an increased probability of losing weight. Christakis noted that wellness offerings that provide peer support within a social network are more successful than those that do not. According to Christakis, "network phenomena can be used to spread positive health behaviors, in part because people's perceptions of their own risk of illness may depend on the people around them."

The same forces that power social networking Websites, can be used to drive an employee wellness program.(Click here to find out more about the LoneStart Team Esteem Challenge.) Peer-to-peer engagement provides a social model for motivating employees to participate. Rather than singling out at risk employees, you are effectively uniting all employees through the message that they are responsible for working together to create a "healthier" organization. That healthier organization can be yours'.

Please share the links to our Wellness and Well-being Blog, Facebook business page and Twitter with your employees. You'll find wellness tips and articles, as well as links to wellness-related materials.
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Why Should You Even Want to Create a Culture of Wellness?

Through the LoneStart Wellness workplace Team Esteem Challenge, we talk a lot about creating a Culture of Wellness. Why?

With all of today's health care reform conversation / debate / finger-pointing and name-calling, we're actually beginning to hear some serious references to the essential role that preventive health and wellness will play in any realistic strategy to improve the health of our nation and its health care delivery system. The more rational of the policy-makers even understand that wellness can and will work so long as we create a new and sustainable Culture of Wellness within our families, our organizations, our communities and our society.

If as an organization you do nothing to move toward a Culture of Wellness, what ultimately happens to your employees (and your healthcare expenses) in terms of risk and cost? Or, look at it this way. If you change risk, you can count on costs changing in the same direction. Reduce risk . . . reduce cost. It doesn't take much improvement to make a wellness initiative pay off (less than a 1% reduction in risk factors.) In general, employers can earn back the cost of a wellness program if they can reduce risk factors by less than .2% (yes, that is point 2 percent, not 2%). And, employees -- and the organization, benefit.

But, this means engaging your employees. They have to "buy-in" to wellness. And, this means wellness has to be embraced as a core organizational value - not an afterthought. We'll always pay for sickness, but, think about what happens when we expand into wellness. As an employer, rather than paying only for sickness coverage, look at the benefits of "health promotion" and wellness. After all, health is much more than just the absence of sickness. And, this takes us back to prevention and creating a sustainable Culture of Wellness.

We all know that creating (or treating) wellness is an economical investment compared to treating sickness. It's no secret that our American lifestyle contributes to chronic disease. Almost one-half of all Americans report having a chronic illness-and those illnesses account for 75 percent of our national spending on health care. Furthermore, almost 80 percent of all chronic disease is caused by three preventable health behaviors-physical inactivity, obesity and overweight, and smoking. And, it's no secret to any organization or employer, that chronic disease leads to increased health care costs.

We know what leads to chronic illness, but look what happens if we focus on what leads to wellness. What if we were to focus our energies on getting well, staying well, and becoming a part of what really is a tangible Culture of Wellness?
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Our Five Cents Worth -- Part Two

What if we paid ourselves first?

Last month we pointed out that only 5 cents of every health care dollar we spend goes toward wellness and disease prevention while the other 95 cents goes to treating illness after it occurs. We also pointed out that well-planned employee and community wellness initiatives can deliver an R.O.I. of 6 to 1, or more. And we speculated as to what would happen if we were able to actually make a $125 billion (5% of the $2.5 trillion we'll spend this year on health care) investment in a proven, accessible, cost-effective and easily-implemented national wellness initiative. That would be an investment of $417 for each of us 300 million Americans. (Which is way more than we need, by the way.) Furthermore, that investment could result in a total savings of $750 billion, or about 30 percent of our total health care tab.

So why aren't we investing that "wellness nickel" before we burn our way through the other 95 cents of our "sick care dollar?" The answer, as we all know, is that the system doesn't work that way. As much as we believe that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," we'll always need acute medical care. But it needs to be accessible and affordable. And right now, it isn't. In 1994 we spent $912 billion (a mere pittance by today's standards) on health care and we thought that was unsustainable. At least we were right about that.

It's tempting to wonder what things would be like now if we'd made a concerted effort to promote wellness fifteen or even thirty years ago. Would one half of all Americans suffer from chronic illness as they do today? Would skyrocketing employee health care costs be crippling corporate profitability as they are today? Would we even be having this national conversation about health care?

Here's a better question: What would happen if we all decided today to pay ourselves first by insisting that our "wellness nickel" be spent first and that it be spent wisely? For the last four years, we've been proving that when people are presented with an opportunity to engage in a positive, realistic and forgiving strategy to take charge of their personal health and wellness, they are eager to do so. They're making an investment in self and they're getting the most out of their "wellness nickel."

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If your organization is ready to take responsibility for promoting healthy lifestyles and a healthy work environment, LoneStart is an effective, low-cost and easy-to-administer employee wellness program, which functions equally well as a stand-alone initiative or as a high-impact jump-start to existing or proposed employee wellness strategies.

Contact us today to find out how the LoneStart Wellness Initiative will change your workplace.

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A Challenge. An Opportunity. A Solution.
The LoneStart Wellness Initiative
phone: 512.894.3440