In today’s fast-paced and demanding work environment, prioritizing the well-being of employees has become essential for fostering a healthy, productive, and thriving workforce.
FVHD is able to provide small businesses with resources and information so that they can implement their own policy and environmental changes. The end goal is to improve employee health through sustainable changes, leading to positive workplace outcomes.
Workplace wellness programs play a pivotal role in promoting and supporting the physical, mental, and emotional health of employees within an organization or business. Programs can include initiatives such as health education workshops, fitness challenges, stress management techniques, mental health resources, ergonomic assessments, policy changes, and more.
Employed U.S. adults spend more than half of their waking lives working or engaging in work-related activities, on average. Additionally, 90% of the nation’s $4.1 trillion in annual health care expenditures goes toward the treatment of chronic physical and mental health conditions. Therefore, addressing health and chronic disease within the workplace is key in reducing health risks, improving quality of life for employees, minimizing health costs, and increasing employee productivity.
By choosing to become engaged with the health and wellbeing of your employees, you may see some of the following key benefits:
And your employees will benefit too:
A healthy workplace will not only provide opportunities for employees to individually learn and manage their health, but will be an environment where being healthy is the easy and natural choice. The FVHD encourages all workplaces to enact policy and facility changes so that the environment is conducive for employees to be healthy. Research suggests that workplace wellness programs only bring about effective change if this is the case.
A health-related policy can be either formal or informal written statements that are designed to protect and promote employees’ health and wellbeing. An environmental change is a physical change that makes the workplace an environment that promotes employee health.
The first thing you need to do is get your management team on board with your Wellness Program. Research shows that the most successful programs have active, supportive management teams that participate in the activities. If the program is valued by management, then the employees are more likely to be more willing to participate.
In order to promote your workplace wellness program, you will need to designate a person or committee that has enthusiasm for workplace wellness and strong communication skills to get the program running. If your workplace has someone who is responsible for workplace safety, they should be part of your wellness committee.
Once you have nominated a coordinator/committee to be your Workplace Wellness Champion(s), have them read through this toolkit. They should look at the suggested topics and decide what activities they would like assistance in implementing.
A Worksite Wellness Assessment Checklist can help you in determining what wellness strategies you already have in place and what you would like to prioritize. Your employees will be asked to complete an Employee Health Pre-Survey and Employee Interest Survey (both anonymous). Responses to these surveys will assist you in planning your program.
Each topic in the toolkit provides you with simple and easy-to-adopt sample activities that you can incorporate into your workplace. The policies have been written in a way that you can copy them as a whole and adopt them, or you can re-word, re-think, and re-design them to suit your workplace’s needs.
One of the most important parts of a wellness program is ongoing evaluation. Post-surveys can be distributed to gather feedback and identify any changes in employee health after your workplace wellness program has been implemented.
The Farmington Valley Health District provides chronic disease prevention and health promotion priorities that employers should consider addressing. This toolkit serves as an informational and educational guide. This toolkit has several topics you can choose to address at your workplace. Explore resources for each of the topics with the buttons below:
Access to the Toolkit