Good Workplace Wellness Programs: Personal Wellness

Wellness might be the fatal flaw in your Workplace Wellness Program. Is Wellness part of your strategy? Does workplace wellness stop when your employees leave the office?

Wellness Continuity

If employees don’t have the tools to pursue health and wellness on a Personal level, then it becomes easy for them to “fall off the wagon” and slide back into a unealthy lifestyles. If you have a walking program, for example, it should encourage employees to build walking routes near their homes, perhaps with the cooperation of the neighborhood association or coworkers who live in the neighborhood.

Workplace Wellness Programs: Always on Your Mind

Your Worksite Wellness Plan coordinator should have “vacation wellbeing” as part of their job scope. In other words, you don’t want a Worksite Wellness Plan to stop at the boundaries of the workplace campus. Instead, integrate Personal health and wellness with your Workplace Wellness Programs.

This can benefit your Workplace Wellness Programs in two ways:

it lowers the chance that the worker will come back to the office feeling unfit, overwhelmed and unable to resume their Workplace Wellness Programs; and
it shows that their company is just as invested in their Personal health and wellness as they are

Like a marathon, Personal health and wellness is a long-term venture and it’s difficult for anyone to do in isolation. Simply put, it’s easier to maintain your health and wellbeing when you know others are depending on you and watching your Personal performance. It’s easier to maintain to an fitness program when you have a jogging partner who wakes you up when you oversleep, or spots you when you’re lifting weights.

Similarly, it’s easier to maintain to your Worksite Wellness Plan when you know your company is supporting you and wishing you the best.

Don’t Dictate Personal Health

Just as Wellness surveys serve a vital function in building a Workplace Wellness Program, it’s imperative that you involve employees in designing an off-site wellness strategy. No one enjoys being told what to do, but everyone enjoys having assistance in tacking tough problems. Make it clear that employees are in charge of their own health and wellness. Your role as their health management partner is to support, advise, counsel, offer resources and information.

Of course, don’t forget that part of Personal health and wellness responsibility is to offer good health risk assessment baselines so employees can proceed safely on the road to better fitness.