Health and Wellness in the Workplace
If the health of employees can help or hinder a company, then why do companies still have sick days? With the “on the go” lifestyles, how can we not question the health of employees and their families. Today we have high stress jobs, rush hour traffic, and demanding schedules. Being healthy and fit is the way to conquer tomorrow.
We, as people in the workforce, are depended on to follow through with work commitments. A healthy employee is able to do more and feel well enough to enjoy it. We strive to do our best but how can we when we have low morale at the office. Healthy employees directly impact the bottom-line of all companies, from the sole proprietorship to the large corporation (1996). Keeping health-care costs low, boosting morale, increasing productivity, and reducing the absent rate is a payoff that every good business owner should recognize. When a small business is trying to become larger, having employees who are healthy and stress free is important. Losing a member of an already small number due to being ill is not the way to succeed. Working in an environment that is happy and productive is the perfect place to work, regardless of what the job is.
With the health care costs reaching high number there is no wonder we have a large number of absenteeism. So many wait to the last possible painstaking work day to decide to see a doctor about their aliment, and all of that could be prevented. Preventing oneself to have to take time off from work is one way to keep costs low. There are so many areas that need to be addressed when it comes to what is going to slow us down as a company. According to estimates by Dr. Jaime Claudio(1991), a corporate wellness consultant for Health Plus, a provider of health-care insurance, a comprehensive eating awareness and weight- management program designed to improve long-term habits could generate an 80% reduction in the incidence of potential problems caused by obesity in the workplace. These problems include hypertension, diabetes, coronary heart disease, and diminished work efficiency. Obesity is not the only eating disorder that is a problem, there is bulimia and anorexia. Smoking, drinking, substance abuse, and stress are problems that are brought into the workplace and stop productivity. We have to be aware of issues that are there but are not usually thought of as an illness.
This is an essay written in the MIT Sloan Management Review that presents the correlation between businesses and the issue of obesity in order to persuade businesses to take action in regards to preventing the issue. Therefore, its target audience is anyone who currently works in business or plans to do so in the future. In this review, the author begins by citing four internal and external reasons for which businesses should care about obesity: self-preservation, public criticism, employee productivity, and opportunity. The author proceeds by providing an idea as to how businesses can assist in reversing the trend. In order to do so, he analyzes what he considers to be the two sides of the obesity problem: physical activity and food consumption.
Employee wellness programs, also known as a “worksite wellness program”, are programs that are designed to promote and support the health, safety, and well being of a company’s employees. Wellness programs are meant to improve the health of the staff, their morale, and in turn also help improve their productivity. There are many components that make up employee wellness programs, for example; Health Screenings, Health Fairs, Fitness classes, Smoking cessation classes, and even wellness issue workshops. Employers have begun adopting these programs in hopes of helping their employees while they are at an age when health interventions can still help transform their long-term health choice. This paper will focus on trends found between employee weight and productivity, and the impacts these could have on a business overall.
The people in the workplace can be categorized into two groups: the employer and the employees. The employees work for their employer and in turn, the employer has the duty and responsibility to ensure that the minimum safety requirements are met. However, employers are not required to provide health insurance benefits to their employees. More often than not, providing health insurance benefits is very costly to the employer and in an attempt to mitigate the costs, employers’ encourage employee participation in various healthy lifestyle programs and initiatives as well as providing incentives for their participation in such programs. These kinds of actions are not always met with enthusiasm, some find it unreasonable to be expected to do so on their own time to change their lifestyle to suit their employers.
There are a substantial number of policies in place in hopes to reduce obesity rates as well as encourage active living. However, there seems to be a large gap between why the policies are implemented in hopes to achieve a set outcome, and the knowledge of appropriate and effective steps to go about producing the desired change. Additionally, while there are policies in place with the intent of reducing obesity rates, there are few to none that with the intent of promoting active living within the workplace.
As someone who is in charge of the wellness program here at UIW, my job is to oversee all the aspects and find out what needs amending or implementation. There are six dimensions of wellness and each one has their benefits. The purpose is to take a look at each dimension of wellness and try to make some improvements for the staff and students.
Engaging employees and families in healthy work programs, regular check-ups and illness prevention strategies are smart investments.
A recent study has shown that the US healthcare system deals with nearly 25 million cases of influenza each year. In a typical year, as many as one person in five in the US comes down with the flu, resulting in more than 200,000hospitalizations. The financial costs are huge, not least for employers. For each episode of illness, an employee typically misses between a half day and five days of work. The cost incurred due to reduced productivity and disruption to work flow; together with other indirect costs, is enormous.
As a new leader, I want my staff to be confident in my decisions. I will not know the policies well, and my understanding, Human Resources (HR) knows the absenteeism policy well. As soon as I know about a policy that is HR related, I will invite my representative to a meeting to discuss this new policy. Practice Standard 10 of the American Nurses Credentialing Center (2017) states “healthy work environments demonstrate collaboration among health care professionals as a key component for the delivery of safe, quality care, with the added benefit of higher job satisfaction for all disciplines involved”.
Find Trends in Your Profession I. Introduction: As waistlines continue to expand in the US so have health care costs. In an effort to slow rising healthcare costs, improve performance, and increase productivity, employers implement workplace wellness programs. Workplace wellness programs can include a number of components, such a health assessments, nutrition services, health education, and stress management. However, since a large percentage of preventable healthcare costs can be attributed to weight related conditions, a large focus of most workplace wellness programs is on fitness and physical activity.
Many factors such like time pressure, psychological stress, and depression among other things influence workers’ diets. These findings are completed and supported by workers interviews, examination of national data and other scientific reports. All these informations consolidate the fact that the working conditions play an important role in the development of overweight/obesity among lower-income workers.
Problem Statement: National Association of City and County Health Officials proposes a policy for health workforce development. The policy attempts to answer what are the challenges faced in workforce development? And why we need workforce development plan? One of the fastest growing industries of the U.S is healthcare. With this what comes into the picture is health workforce.
Human resources will need to place emphasis on employee wellness my initiating programs that “include work-life balance processes, stress management, and therapy programs, and facilitating an open dialogue about mental health and illness to remove much of the stigma that plagues the conversation and ailments (Guppta, 2016).” By utilizing flexible work schedule options, demanding jobs with high-stress levels are possible because employees’ free time does not have to be sacrificed.
Another large debate in the issues and impacts of obesity is the responsibility of employer’s. Especially for those whose obesity comes from a sedentary lifestyle. Or perhaps need the preventative measures of keeping obesity at bay. A hot topic on the rise is whether or not employers should be mandated to give employees a work-out period in their schedule. The employers could offer employee’s incentives for utilizing resources (a company gym, discounted memberships, and dietician, walking a company track) and by using the resources keep costs low. Though initially it could be costly to take on the responsibility to offer extra incentives to employee’s it could offer long term potential savings. (Villareal, Apovian, Kushner, and Klein 2005) Those whose companies offer various programs and actively engage in them express more happiness, productivity, a greater quality of life, and overall better health. Better health allows for employee’s to serve their employers better. They use less sick pay, keep insurance premiums low, and are more likely to be in tune with their daily job. So while the initial cost may be high, the long term financial gain of a happy, healthy, productive team is hard not to invest in!
Workers of every organization need to embrace the culture of living a healthy lifestyle rather than implementing specialized health programs and insurance plans (Goetzel, 2012). Coca-Cola Company initially perceived health and well-being as only integrated into the safety programs that employees are given. The company needs to distinguish between health and wellness from safety concerns. Many governments have encouraged wellness programs through the Affordable Care Act; this raises the legal limits on the penalties imposed on the employees by employers for the health-contingent wellness plans (Baicker,
Throughout our healthy brains, healthy bodies course so far, we have learned time and time again about the strong and important relationship between our brains and our bodies. Health and wellness is not one single thing, it is a collection of practices, attitudes and ways of being in the world, which help us cultivate the best form of ourselves. Finding and understanding the ways in which we can best take care of ourselves, and then applying them, gives us the opportunity to improve our physical, cognitive, mental and emotional wellbeing. Embodying our healthiest selves helps not only us, it helps those around us by providing a positive example about how to exist within our own bodies, and exist within the world. Throughout this paper, we will