Workplace Wellness 101  

Tired of your health plan becoming more expensive each year? Tired of seeing your staff on sick leave and disability?   Have you tried making your workplace more fun, engaging, and healthy? Of course you would love to do this! Who wouldn’t? At Belmont we are making the health of our employees our number one priority.

The Idea

In the summer, a wellness committee was formed, with the primary focus on making our workplace more engaging and getting staff to take ownership of their health. We didn’t feel we could talk the talk about wellness if we also weren’t walking the walk.  

The Beginning

Here are a few steps our committee followed to get started:

1. Analyzed our health claims
2. Surveyed staff on:
   1. Health concerns of interest
   2. Wellness Challenges
   3. Rewards
   4. Work Environment
   5. Stress
   6. Presented results to management and staff
   7. Brainstormed together ways to make the workplace better
   8. Organized low cost health challenges
   9. Invited practitioners in to speak on Wellness & Budgeting
   10. Committee meets every 8 weeks to go over programs

What We’ve Learned

Our most important recommendation is a workplace wellness champion. You need someone who lives and breathes wellness and brings life to the program. As your program grows the number of influencers (champions) will grow.   Wellness programming in most cases is the start of a culture shift. This is one of the cases where peer pressure is a good thing!! For example, if the majority of your staff is bringing healthy lunches, it is only a matter of time where staff members who are eating out or eating unhealthy will begin to follow suit or face peer scrutiny.   Contact our Wellness Ambassador at Belmont for more information regarding creating an employee survey and healthy challenges, and be sure to stay tuned for our future blogs, featuring our healthy challenge of the month!

Go Belmont! Go Health!

Source Url: http://gobelmont.ca/workplace-wellness-101/