The Toolkit was developed to assist worksites with implementing proven, step-by-step actions that can be taken to help keep employees healthy and productive, all on a small budget. Starting and maintaining a wellness program is easier and less expensive than it may seem.
Step 1: PlanWhether your organization already has a worksite wellness program in place or is starting from scratch, planning is a critical first step.
Assessing your organization’s current health environment is an important first step to plan and focus your wellness efforts. An assessment will give you a clear understanding of what resources and strengths your business already has that support employee wellness, as well as the areas that offer opportunities for improving employee health.
Understanding your employees’ wants, needs, and motivations is another important step towards creating an engaging worksite wellness programs. Surveying your employees can help you identify where you can best focus your efforts and be successful.
Identify someone in your organization that can help champion your wellness efforts and get others excited about it.
Support
Top level buy-in or support of management is one of the most important pieces of building and sustaining a wellness program in a small business setting.
For more examples of how Live Well @ Work is implemented at local worksites, visit the University of California, San Diego Center for Community Health Live Well @ Work program page.
Communicating a safety and wellness vision is a key action your business can take to advance wellness within the organization. If you want healthier employees, your organization’s leadership should let them know that safety, wellness and healthy lifestyles are important priorities. Develop a brief vision statement that addresses the safety, health and well-being of each and every employee within the organization.
Goals and Objectives
Creating goals and objectives for your wellness program sets you up for success and allows you to track your organization’s progress.
The integration of a health and safety training for your employees and supervisors is a great way to support a safe and healthy working environment.
Step 3: ActDesigning and implementing a program is a vital step for the overall success and sustainability of a worksite wellness program. When developing a program, keep it simple. It must be easy for the employees to understand and provide activities in which every employee can participate. Focus on topics and activities that are of greatest interest to employees and the greatest need of the company, in that order. Make sure activities include awareness, education and components that address health behaviors.
The first step in creating a sustainable wellness program is identifying organizational supports. This includes securing upper management commitment, forming a wellness committee and setting clear program goals and objectives.
One way to support the health of your employees is to connect them to resources and programs to improve their overall health such as smoking cessation programs.
Encouraging a healthy food and beverage environment through meetings, events, dining spaces and vending machines at your organization is a great way to help improve employee health and your overall organizational culture.
Providing a breastfeeding-friendly environment, educational resources, and schedule support are meaningful ways to improve the health of new mothers and their children when they return to work.
Getting employees to move more during the workday is an important component to any employee wellness program. Whether your worksite decides to create employee walking routes near the office or add more activity breaks during meetings, there are many low-cost ways to make your workplace more supportive of physical activity.
One way to improve employee health and decrease risks of preventable diseases is to help employees maintain or attain a healthy weight. Many employees are interested in weight management and offering employees healthy, simple ways to manage their weight could be a great strategy for your organization.
Stress can play a big role in your employees’ health, which can affect their productivity at work. Reducing stress within the workplace is a strategy your organization can use to improve employee well-being.
Depression can arise from biological, genetic, or stress responses and can stem from within or outside of the workplace. Often employers try to separate work and home life, but depression can impact your organization and your employees’ health regardless of the source. It is important to provide your employees with the resources they need to receive help and to create a work environment where discussing mental health is not stigmatized or discouraged.
Encouraging employees to understand and regularly monitor their blood pressure is an important step towards improving employee health. When employees understand their numbers they are more likely to take steps to improve their health behaviors and seek help.
Employees who know if they have high cholesterol can take the necessary steps to improve their lifestyle to decrease their risks of heart disease and related conditions. As an employer it is important to provide resources for employees to understand the steps to decrease their risks.
Employees can reduce their risk for prediabetes and diabetes through healthy lifestyle changes. Your worksite can support employees by providing a healthy working environment, providing education and resources on prediabetes and diabetes and covering prevention programs, such as the Diabetes Prevention Program, through your health plan.
Heart attack and stroke are caused by a wide variety of factors and are often interrelated to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, prediabetes and diabetes, tobacco smoking, stress and even depression. Your organization can integrate these resources as well as a general guidance for improving physical activity and healthy eating to help employees prevent and manage these risks.
Occupational health and safety directly impact overall employee well-being. As an employer, it is critical to ensure that your physical workplace environment is safe for all employees and job functions.
Encouraging and incentivizing employees to take steps to prevent vaccine-preventable diseases is a great strategy to improve employee health and reduce employee sick days.
Step 4: AssessAssessment is a way to measure whether or not your efforts have made a difference for your employees and at your worksite. It can be a simple and practical way to highlight your efforts, improve those efforts and determine if your efforts have increased employee access to healthier opportunities. This step does not need to be complicated, expensive or time consuming.
Measuring progress, success, and failure is essential for sustaining worksite wellness efforts. This helps wellness leads to determine what efforts to continue and what areas to improve upon.
Sustaining your worksite wellness program includes improving it while continuing to develop it. In order to sustain your program, make sure long-term planning is included as an integral part of the process. Re-evaluating the past year’s successes and challenges while being flexible and creative with your process is essential to sustainability.