Creating a Employee Health Promotion Program

The workplace setting is a powerful, but often overlooked, element in managing worker health. Here we will identify some of the best-practices in beginning a Employee Health Promotion Program that supports your organization’s employee health strategy and allows workers to take charge of their own health. For example, a Employee Health Promotion Program that includes a tobacco-free workplace policy increases the likelihood that workers will try to quit smoking and will quit using tobacco successfully. Similarly, a Employee Health Promotion Program that includes discounting healthy foods in your cafeteria and vending machines helps increase workers’ consumption of healthy foods which supports your investment in disease management programs for workers with diabetes, heart disease or hypertension. The following will guide you through the ten key steps in beginning a Employee Health Promotion Program and workplace setting that encourages worker health.

In an era of increasing health care costs and intense competition, businesses have a vested interest in the health of their workers. Research has found that, on average, workers with healthy behaviors (such as not using tobacco or being active for 30 minutes a day) incur lower health care expenses, are absent from work less often, and are more productive when at work (higher presenteeism) than workers with unhealthy behaviors.

Employee Health Promotion Program: Gaining Leadership Support

Employee Health Promotion Program support from the uppermost level of leadership is essential to your success in beginning a culture of wellness within your workplace. Look for Employee Health Promotion Program support from a leader who is respected by and can influence other leaders. (It’s not important that he or she be the fittest executive within your organization just that they directly support the Employee Health Promotion Program.) You will be relying on this culture-of-health champion to advocate for changes that you recommend and to ensure the organization allocates adequate Employee Health Promotion Program resources (staff, time, and money) to maintain and improve the workplace policies, physical setting, and social norms.

Obtain Employee Health Promotion Program Staff and Budget

The creation and maintenance of a Employee Health Promotion Program within your business needs to be someone’s priority. However, unless your business is quite large, you likely don’t need to hire a full-time staff person for the Employee Health Promotion Program. There are a number of ways to find an individual with the necessary skills to guide and support your business’s Employee Health Promotion Program.

Creating facilities and Employee Health Promotion Program policies, such as those allowing workers to be physically active during the workday, does not need to be expensive, but it does require adequate and sustained financing. If possible, include the creation of a workplace setting that supports the Employee Health Promotion Program as a permanent component of the operating budget; that helps to ensure it’s an ongoing priority for your business.

Worker Involvement in the Employee Health Promotion Program

Pulling together a representative group of staff members to advise your business’s Employee Health Promotion Program ensures that improvements in workplace facilities, policies and practices address the true needs and barriers of all groups of staff members. In addition, these workers can serve as the front-line Employee Health Promotion Program supporters of policies and practices with their peers.

Develop a Employee Health Promotion Program “Brand” and Vision

A Employee Health Promotion Program vision and a brand are powerful first steps in moving a Employee Health Promotion Program from an idea to a reality. What would you like your workplace environment to look like five years from now? A succinct Employee Health Promotion Program vision statement summarizes for all (workers and leaders alike) the reasons for beginning a Employee Health Promotion Program. It also reminds everyone of the link between worker health and your business’s ability to achieve its overall mission.

Branding your business’s Employee Health Promotion Program conveys to workers that the business’s commitment and support of healthy behaviors is important and is here to stay. Choose a Employee Health Promotion Program name and logo that resonate with workers. Then use that brand on all Employee Health Promotion Program communications with workers about the policies, facilities and programs your business offers to promote healthy behaviors.

Assess Your Existing Employee Health Promotion Program Situation

Exactly how your business establishes a Employee Health Promotion Program that encourages healthy eating, physical activity, and reduces tobacco use will depend on the unique characteristics of your business and employee population.

Assess how the current workplace facilities, policies, and unwritten norms support — or discourage — healthy behaviors.

Gather information on the health and health-related behaviors of your employee population. The most common method is by using a validated health risk assessment. If you don’t have data specific to your workers, you can estimate the prevalence of different health risks and behaviors within your employee population using state or national data. Note: Information on staff members’ health interests alone is not sufficient; but can be a useful supplement to health risk data and might help you set priorities.

Set Employee Health Promotion Program Priorities and Goals

Use what you’ve discovered about employee health and about your current workplace setting to determine your business’s Employee Health Promotion Program priorities. From those Employee Health Promotion Program priorities, define clear and measurable Employee Health Promotion Program goals for improving employee health and your business’s culture. Well written goals will provide the basis for planning and for measuring your progress.

Choose Employee Health Promotion Program Procedures

Focus your business’s Employee Health Promotion Program resources (time, energy and money) on tactics that are most likely to produce results: a rise in healthy eating, a rise in physical activity, and a reduction in tobacco use. There’s no need to guess at what might work. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reviewed thousands of studies and has identified the Employee Health Promotion Program approaches most likely to result in significant, lasting, and widespread improvements in health behaviors. Those Employee Health Promotion Program tactics are included in the physical activity, tobacco, and healthy eating sections of this website.

The formula for Employee Health Promotion Program success is to make the healthier choices the easier choices.

Implement Employee Health Promotion Program Procedures

Once you’ve chosen your Employee Health Promotion Program Procedures, it can be useful to arrange the work on a timeline. The “right” amount of time for implementing each Employee Health Promotion Program strategy depends on the staff time, budget, and business demands of your business. Work plans maintain your efforts moving and help to ensure that plans to start a Employee Health Promotion Program stay on track even if there are changes in staffing or other challenges.

Communicate and Educate About the Employee Health Promotion Program

Ensure workers are aware of the Employee Health Promotion Program opportunities you’ve provided. Planning your Employee Health Promotion Program communications allows you to communicate regularly with workers without overwhelming them at any one time.

Monitor and Report Your Employee Health Promotion Program Results

At the same time that you plan your Employee Health Promotion Program Procedures, think about how you’ll measure success. It’s much easier to gather information – or to start systems for collecting information — before you implement a Employee Health Promotion Program strategy rather than as an afterthought. Keep in mind that you’re likely to see improvements in worker morale and/or behaviors before you see decreases in rates of absenteeism or health care claims.

Report both your Employee Health Promotion Program successes in building a healthy workplace environment (such as complete implementation of a policy that provides workers time for walking during the workday), and Employee Health Promotion Program successes in getting staff members to take charge of their health (a rise in the number of workers who contacted the stop-smoking program, or a rise in the number of fruit-cups purchased from the cafeteria following a promotion and price-cut).