Search Weight Loss Topics:

Home » Exercise Programs » Workplace Wellness Isn’t Just for Big Corporations. Here’s How Small Businesses Can Build a Culture of Health. – Entrepreneur

Naps, salads, open dialogue and leading by example are great places to start, says a leading workplace wellness researcher

January30, 202011 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Over the past decade, wellness has ballooned into a $4.2 trillion business. In the crowded marketplace of self-improvement, hardcore health innovations jostle with softcore supplements in the jade egg domain. Meanwhile, hustle culture has spawned a kind of work worship that has many people burning out and questioning how much they should really expect to get from (or give to) their jobs. In the midst of all this, workplace wellness is on the rise; more than 80 percent of large companies and 50 percent of small companies have implemented such programs. Despite their pervasiveness, big questions linger over what, exactly, works.

Thats something that Dr. Ron Goetzel has devoted his career to studying. Goetzel is a senior scientist and director of the Institute for Health and Productivity Studies at Johns Hopkins, as well as VP of applied research for IBM Watson Health. He says the first idea worth considering is how we think about what works. Traditionally, the measurement for success has been return on investment (ROI), or what a company saves on lowered healthcare costs and reduced absenteeism given how much theyve invested in wellness initiatives. Goetzel does plenty of these analyses. Since 1994, hes run The Health Project, which gives a yearly award to companies with demonstrably effective wellness initiatives. He led a recent study showing that over a 14-year period, a portfolio of 26 of these companies significantly outperformed the S&P 500. The 26 companies that truly invested in wellness delivered a stock return of 325 percent, versus the S&P 500s 105 percent. Data suggests that wellness programs done right do, in fact, pay dividends.

Even so, Goetzel says that more and more researchers in his line of work are considering something called value on investment (VOI) over ROI. It's hard to put a dollar value on happiness and motivation, on attraction and retention of talent, he says. So a lot of companies are now thinking about value on investment. If theyre spending money, and keeping people healthy not just physically but mentally, socially, financially, intellectually, spiritually whats the value? Often the number one thing companies care about is engagement. You know, are people coming to work and loving their job, their coworkers, their boss? And ultimately, am I lowering health care costs?

Its notable that in America, 60 percent of people say their jobs are bad or mediocre, yet most do have a job (many people have more than one). Employment is at an all time low, but rates of suicide, depression and addiction are climbing. It stands to reason that if Americans are going to work, thats one place wellness initiatives can reach them. As Goetzel told CNBC last year, The younger workforce is beginning to ask for how their company is socially responsible, and this is one other element of that. How you treat the health of workers and the footprint in the community, and handprint on the community, has quite a bit of impact on reputation and consumer confidence, and it will become much more important.

So workplace wellness initiatives arent just hot air. But for an entrepreneur starting out, or a small business owner looking to scale, it can be difficult to know where to start. What, in the vast array of wellness offerings, is worth the expense? Dr. Goetzel offers some suggestions for thinking about how to integrate health and wellness into your business.

Offering health insurance is only the first step. Wellness initiatives that actually work dont conceptualize their plans as a program or classify a package of offerings and perks as distinct from the actual job. They view wellness as intrinsic to the company culture. You cant expect people to get healthy when you mandate unreasonable hours or excessive levels of output. You cant simply offer employees one-time health assessments and leave it at that. And you cant just pay for a health plan and direct employees to the website, to navigate on their own. Goetzel says that if you actually want healthy employees, you have to consider every aspect of their well-being: physical, emotional, intellectual, financial, social, spiritual. (He clarifies: Spiritual to some people means religion, but to others it means having a sense of purpose or mission in life and asking, Can all aspects of my life align with that mission?). Goetzel says its easiest to think of structuring wellness initiatives into three broad categories: policies, programs and environmental supports.

To create a comprehensive culture of health, policies function as guidelines, like flexible scheduling and parental leave, or feedback processes that give workers a sense of agency. Programs are optional perks like financial incentives for health goals or even classes (cooking, exercise, tech tutoring, etc.) and professional services offered (nutritionists, chronic disease specialists, financial advisors, etc.). And environment refers to the effort made by an employer to surround workers with healthy options: water versus soda, stairs versus elevators, natural light versus artificial light and so forth.

It starts at the top. Leadership commitment is the first step in taking a culture of wellness from theory to reality. And one of the biggest ways a boss can foster a healthy culture is by encouraging workers quality of life outside of work. If the leader is sending emails at 4:00 in the morning, saying, I need you to do this by 6:00 a.m., thats not good, Goetzel says. Whereas I know its true for me that when a boss walks around the office at 6pm and says, Hey everybody, 6:00 go home to your family, go home to your friends, get out of here. If you need to show up tomorrow morning bright and early to finish this, that's fine. Do your work. But right now it's your time. A boss who sets that kind of tone makes a difference.

Communication is absolutely essential in making sure that health initiatives are well-received and helping who theyre intended to help. For small businesses in particular, Goetzel recommends simply asking employees what they need. The first thing you want to do is get baseline data, he says. Figure out what you and your workers would like to know about. Is it how to prepare healthy meals? Is it how to get a good workout? Is it how to manage your stress, how to meditate? Do they want yoga sessions or do they want aerobic exercise? So before you even introduce a program, go around, talk to people individually, in groups, or even in surveys. Then that can be the foundation for: Here's what we heard from you. Here's how we're going to respond to that. And here are the steps we can take.

To that point, Goetzel advises not to stop communicating and evaluating, by whatever means you can. With small companies, quite honestly, they can't afford big studies. You know, we do a lot of very large studies for large companies. But just having qualitative data What do you think of the program? How satisfied are you with its offering? What would you change? Does it improve your morale? Does it improve your satisfaction working here? You know, if you had another job offer tomorrow, would you take it? Those kinds of questions, I think, are meaningful.

Environmental influences can have a sizeable impact on peoples moods and decisions. A healthy workplace is made up of lots of small choices. Obvious policies are things like no smoking, Goetzel says. But having healthy food choices in the cafeteria and at company gatherings in fact, making them less expensive than the unhealthy choices is really important. One company I went to had a salad bar sitting right at the entrance of their cafeteria, and it looked delicious. You want a hamburger or cheeseburger? Well, you've got to go to the grill and wait 30 minutes for them to prepare for you. Do you have cookies at the checkout counter or fresh apples? Is it easier to get a water than a Coke?

Giving people space and permission to move around is another of Goetzels suggestions. If you have an outdoor campus, walking trails are fantastic. If you only have indoor space, treadmills are great. If you have stairs, Goetzel recommends making them more attractive. Instead of having people go up and down elevators all day, open up some stairs and make them inviting with carpeting and paintings and music, he says.

Some of the most famous workplace environments are in Silicon Valley. But Goetzel says he doesnt usually point to the big tech companies as beacons of true corporate wellness because the point of the perks is often to keep people at work longer and thats a mentality we need to move away from.

I visited Google and, you know, it's like Disneyland, he said. It's paradise. They've got massages and fitness centers with classes going on all the time. Theyve got bicycle rides. They have free food, smoothies. But people also work their asses off largely because they're brilliant and they love doing it. But eventually it does burn them out.

Still, there is one buzzy workplace trend that Goetzel approves of: nap rooms. There are now large companies offering napping rooms or meditation rooms for their workers, and Im a big proponent. Taking a 30-minute break absolutely makes sense, especially in safety-sensitive occupations like medicine or transportation. But even for a stockbroker or a journalist, you know, a half hour break is probably going to boost your productivity. He reiterates, however, that sanctioning naps shouldnt be contingent on workers getting in at 6 a.m. and leaving at 9 p.m. You have to give people a sense of work-life balance.

Theres an endless variety of health services that you could offer to your employees to build a wellness culture. But Goetzel says you cant just cobble together a network of outside vendors e.g. lifestyle coaches, financial advisers, nurse lines, disability managers, conflict negotiation experts, workers compensation specialists and so on and then walk away. Disparate vendors can easily overlap in their services or fail to see the larger organizational problems at the root of the symptoms theyre treating.

If you decide to hire an all-inclusive health plan provider, make sure they bring the receipts. My advice would be to go to a player out there who has a track record, says Goetzel. Theyve been around, have good references. Can they actually show data that they've made a difference? They can have the most beautiful brochures, but that just means they have a great marketing department. If nobody's using your service and if nobody's actually getting any healthier, why bother?

Once youve chosen a provider, Goetzel says, thats just the beginning of the journey. For small companies, I would go to the health plan first, he says, but know that they're going to be, quite honestly, very superficial and transactional and they may not know what is needed for your particular company. You have to keep skin in the game. You can't just hand off to a vendor, whether it's a health plan or anybody else, and say, Make my people healthy. You cant say, Call me when you're done.

Go here to read the rest:
Workplace Wellness Isn't Just for Big Corporations. Here's How Small Businesses Can Build a Culture of Health. - Entrepreneur

Your Full Name
Your Email
Your Phone Number
Select your age (30+ only)	30313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899100101102103104105106107108109110111112113114115116117118119120
Select Your US State	Select Your StateAlabamaAlaskaArizonaArkansasCaliforniaColoradoConnecticutDelawareFloridaGeorgiaHawaiiIdahoIllinoisIndianaIowaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMaineMarylandMassachusettsMichiganMinnesotaMississippiMissouriMontanaNebraskaNevadaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNew YorkNorth CarolinaNorth DakotaOhioOklahomaOregonPennsylvaniaRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexasUtahVermontVirginiaWashingtonWashington,DCWest VirginiaWisconsinWyoming
Program Choice	Select Your ProgramInjectable HGHInjectable TestoteroneInjectable SermorelinInjectable Weight LossInjectable HCG DietInjectable Vitamins
Confirm over 30 years old	Yes
Confirm that you resident in USA	Yes
This is a Serious Inquiry	Yes
Message:

Home » Exercise Programs » Workplace Wellness Isn’t Just for Big Corporations. Here’s How Small Businesses Can Build a Culture of Health. – Entrepreneur