What’s Corporate Wellness?
Corporate wellness is evolving. Early efforts to develop healthful workplaces focused on safety at the workplace and injury avoidance for employees.
More recently, wellness programs are intended to assist personnel to choose healthier behaviors like being more physically active or quitting use of tobacco.
Campaigns to elevate awareness, educational sessions to elevate knowledge, opportunities to learn new skills, and changes to policies to make it easier for employees to make healthy options are often included.
This approach is taken because the workplace is a good way to reach individuals , since most adult Americans spend a big part of their day at work.
While safety and way of life programs are two aspects that contribute to the health of staff members, company health promotion is more effective when a third factor is brought into the equation—the environment at work.
Precisely how the workplace affects health.
Increasingly, it’s recognized that the worksite itself has a powerful affect on people’s health. When people are satisfied with their job, they’re more productive and tend to be healthier. When personnel feel that the environment at work is negative, they feel stressed.
Stress has a large impact on staff member physical and mental health, and in turn, on productivity.
Consultant Graham Lowe has identified five components of worksite culture that directly affect employees’ health and the health of the business overall—credibility, respect, fairness, pride, and friendship.
The underlying idea is that companies must genuinely care about the well-being of their workers.
Businesses today who want to attract and keep good staff have leaders who understand the connection between employee satisfaction and employee health and believe that company health promotion is a company strategy.
Their executive management practices include making reasonable demands on time and energy, involving employees in decision making, rewarding work well done, openly communicating, and providing support to balance work and home life.
Businesses know that staff members are looking for jobs that pay well, have good benefits, are fascinating, and include great health and safety programs. So in today’s competitive hiring market, it is become more important than ever for companies to enhance job satisfaction and ensure that staff members enjoy being on the job.
Corporate wellness benefits both businesses and employees.
Exactly how does company wellness benefit the employer?
A wellness program may help a company to:
o Attract and keep employees;
o reduce the costs of disability, drugs, and absenteeism;
o reduce the effects of a stressful worksite;
o reduce health costs or keep them contained; and
o improve morale by creating a happy, supportive environment.
Precisely how does employee health promotion benefit employees?
Employees of companies that have a corporate wellness program are likely to have:
o increased awareness and knowledge of ways to improve their health;
o A better (less stressful) worksite;
o increased protection from injury;
o improved health and well-being;
o higher morale and greater job satisfaction;
o increased productivity and effectiveness at work;
o decreased personal health care costs; and
o A more relaxed/flexible approach to health concerns.
Both companies and workforce have a responsibility for creating a healthful workplace. Workers are expected to arrive at work in good health, and the company is expected to provide an environment that permits workforce to maintain good health, enjoy their work, and contribute to the organization’s success.
Employee wellness is more than a “lunch and learn” program. It is about developing a “individuals first” approach to doing company.
It is about taking care of workforce, establishing a positive work place, and paying attention to the factors that keep workforce healthy and happy at work.
A good wellness program has an impact on employees’ mental, physical, emotional, social, and spiritual wellness.