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Wellness In The Workplace
May 2007
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Workplace Wellness Challenges
money flies

Why a Behavior-based Wellness Program Makes "Cents"

Wellness programs have a time-tested return on investment, but only when employees follow through with the programs. Otherwise, you're just watching your wellness efforts fly away.

The problem with so many wellness programs is that employees may not stay with them long enough to establish and reinforce behavior change. There's a lot of information out there, but none of it does any good if it isn't acted upon. This is precisely why the LoneStart Wellness Initiative is a behavior-based program, designed to achieve positive and sustainable lifestyle change. As participants begin to realize tangible results from their positive choices, they become protective of what they have accomplished, and are more determined to engage in those behaviors that support their efforts to improve their personal health. Several participants have even used the fundamentals of the LoneStart strategy to quit smoking.) See: What Smoking Really Costs

What does this mean to you and your employees?

For a wellness program to work, you must be able to put the right ideas into action, balancing insight with implementation and the bottom-line. This means rather than promoting an abstract "wellness program," you are really promoting good health and weight loss, and the prevention of diseases associated with unhealthy behaviors contributing to the risk of developing specific diseases.

The behavior-based elements of a workplace wellness program can be used to enhance, complement and sustain your organization's overall continuous improvement system. At the same time, behavior-based strategies are better designed for integration with other ongoing improvement processes. Behavior-based strategies build-in a result-driven support structure to accommodate a new process, such as weight loss or smoking cessation, until it becomes integrated into the organization's wellness culture. Management supports and offers the program, but it is the employees themselves who drive the program and benefit from the positive results. And through the LoneStart Team Esteem Challenge, employees learn how to communicate with and support team members. They experience a "wellness culture change," finding ways to get comfortable talking to people about something as personal as weight loss and health.

Behavior-based programs also typically result in the highest levels of sustainment since employees continue to develop and utilize new behaviors while at the same time, management discovers how easy behavior based strategies are to administer, promote and reinforce.

boardgame
Here's a game. Question and answer. We'll give you the questions, then you can click through for the answers (if you want to compare them to your own).

  1. Do you value your employees?
  2. Do you want to retain your emplyees?
  3. Do you want healthy employees?
  4. Are a significant number of your employees overweight or obese? (BMI Calculator)
  5. Do you like paying higher health care costs?
  6. Do you want to increase productivity and decrease absenteeism?
  7. Is there a good reason you're not taking steps to lower employee health care costs when it costs you more not to?
  8. If you have questions of your own, please contact us (www.lonestartnow.com/contact)
apple core
Why Wellness Is Like Poetry

What could poetry and wellness possibly have in common? How about the fact that both are abstract concepts. While all of us could recite, or even write a poem, few of us could define poetry. It's the same with the concept of wellness. We know what it means when we aren't well and we probably all agree that wellness is a valid individual and organizational goal for which there is a real and concrete need, but we have trouble defining it. In order to create a strategy to meet this goal of wellness, we have to turn the abstract concept into something real and tangible. The challenge is getting to the core of wellness.

And to get to the core of a successful wellness program it means:
  • Taking simple, small steps
  • Creating a "Connection"
  • Targeting the specific need, motivation and justification
  • Promoting goals that require participants to make "a little effort every day" to emphasize a healthy lifestyle
  • Creating a catalyst
  • Understanding consequences for poor health choices
  • Promoting the perceived "value" of health
  • The power to drive permanent long-term lifestyle changes
  • A high rate of program participation

While wellness may well be an abstract concept, keeping it simple, targeted and attainable, and offering it as an opportunity to create a "culture of wellness" through a series of small, positive changes has proven to be an effective and demonstrable solution. (If you Google "Wellness Programs" you'll see that there are about 2,620,000 websites to choose from.) This abstract concept is obviously getting a lot of attention. But what matters most is getting to the core of the concept, and taking action. Next month: Part 2 of Getting to the Core.

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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 21-Day Wellness Initiative will change your workplace.

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A Challenge. An Opportunity. A Solution.
The LoneStart 21-Day Wellness Initiative
phone: 512.894.3440