Creatinging a Corporate Wellness Program

Corporate Wellness Programs begin and end with individual health. Individuals, after all, are able to make decisions about maintaining and / or improving their health and wellbeing. Employee Corporate Wellness Programs must therefore provide the tools and resources needed to assist and motivate individuals to actively participate in the program.

Individual health is only one component of beginning employee Corporate Wellness Programs. Below you’ll find some things to assist you in your efforts to develop a healthy atmosphere for you and your coworkers.

Encouraging Your Employer to Create an Corporate Wellness Program

This is the first step in beginning a Corporate Wellness Program. In recent times more and more organizations are beginning to see the value of promoting and supporting the health of their employees. Partnership for Prevention, a nonprofit organization, has released a sourcebook called “Healthy Workforce 2010″ (http://www.wellnessproposals.com/pdfs/tool_kits/healthy_workforce_2010.pdf). This sourcebook is an excellent resource containing information on:
• Benefits of Corporate Wellness Programs
• Suggestions on where to begin
• Tools like surveys and evaluation forms

These resources are for both organizations and employees to lead the development and assess the effectiveness of their new Corporate Wellness Program. Make available it to your employer as a place to begin or read it yourself and present your ideas.

Taking Part in Corporate Wellness Programs

Once you have an employee Corporate Wellness Program established, participating fully in all aspects of the program is important. Many of us know that we need to more actively engage in Corporate Wellness Programs to improve our health, yet have difficulty finding and taking the time to do so. These simple steps can jumpstart your participation in an employee Corporate Wellness Program:
• Review the offerings that interest you and that you need for health improvement.
• Schedule time to go to the presentation or service.
• Actively following through with recommendations from the program.
• Make a decision now to improve your health. You will feel better today and tomorrow and the next day for actively moving towards wellness.

Here is a list of potential Corporate Wellness Programs that might be available to you at work:
• ergonomic evaluations and training classes
• lactation rooms and classes
• prenatal education program
• nap rooms for relaxation
• stress management programs
• fitness facilities
• onsite corporate massage
• nutrition education
• workplace primary health care services
• child care facility or resources and referral service
• smoking cessation programs parenting classes
• elder care resource and referral service
• cholesterol, blood pressure and glucose screening programs
• flu vaccination
• weight management programs
• health care consumerism programs
• work/life programs
• wellness coach / health coach programs
• onsite mobile mammography

More information to follow in my next posting about Employee Corporate Wellness Programs