Best Practices for Health and Fitness Month

May is Global Employee Health and Fitness Month. So Healthyroads is offering employers nine best practice tips to encourage organizations to build a culture of wellness at their worksites:

1. Understand Your Goals – Study claims data, absenteeism, and other issues to understand the causes of increasing health costs. Then develop a wellness program that addresses those issues.  For example, does the employer have a lot of smokers?  Smoking-related health issues may be increasing health care costs. Are work-related back injuries increasing medical utilization?

2. Know what motivates employees – Set achievable goals and create incentives to motivate healthy changes.

3. Get senior management to support health improvement initiatives – Encourage company leaders to set an example for healthier lifestyles. A manager who is ready to quit smoking, lose weight, or get fit can encourage employees. Conversely, if senior managers smoke, employees will have a hard time believing the company’s commitment to go smoke-free.

4. Build a champions network – This network should include representatives of the entire company who support company-wide health improvement initiatives.

5. Provide consistent communications throughout the year – It may take sending many messages to get through to people. Use various ways of communicating with posters, emails, meetings, contests, bulletin boards, word of mouth, and onsite health activities. Different approaches work for different people.

6. Offer onsite health activities throughout the year – This will generate awareness and enthusiasm, especially when you sponsor competitions.

7. Promote a culture of wellness – Encourage healthy alternatives at luncheons; offer healthy foods in vending machines; organize lunchtime run/walk clubs; invited community health and wellness professionals to provide lunch and learn seminars; and sponsor things like health fairs, onsite massage therapy, and gym membership discounts.

9. Initiate and integrate – Wellness programs should be included in the employee benefit plans (medical, prescription drug, disease management, EAP, etc.) to provide a seamless program design that streamlines communication and education. For more information, visit Healthyroads.com.