Want to win a $50 Kintec gift certificate? Help us celebrate Canada’s Healthy Workplace Month by letting us how your employer supports a healthy workplace. Click the link below to participate! 
All you have to do is leave a comment about where you work and what employee wellness initiatives are available to you (i.e. onsite fitness centre, free exercise classes, wellness workshops, etc.) between now and October 15th. We’ll choose one winner at random!
Successful employers understand that workplace wellness programs need to reach beyond just physical fitness. Wellness workshops can provide a wide variety of useful health education topics in an interactive and engaging format. Hosting professional speakers to educate employees on issues that may be affecting their overall health can create positive behavior change and drive health initiatives within the organization.
Here are some tips to ensure your wellness workshops are successful: 
Provide food. The best time to offer a workshop is during the lunch hour. If employees need to push deadlines or cancel meetings to attend, turnout drops significantly. And free food always draws a crowd.
Don’t make them mandatory. Health education is a choice and should not be forced. Successful workshops are filled with engaged participants, not those busy constantly checking their watch.
Make sure your topics are relevant to your workforce. Do your employees work long hours in a high-stress environment? Try a work-life balance workshop. Are food options onsite limited? How about a workshop on easy ways to pack a healthy lunch? If you know your employees, you know the issues they are faced with.
Hosting wellness workshop for your employees shows that you care about their health and well-being, which leads to improved morale and greater retention rates.
Curtis Health has a wide variety of workshops offered at an affordable cost. Contact us today and find out how we can help your employees adopt healthy lifestyle choices! http://curtishealth.com/wellness-programs/workshops/
While some workplace stress is to be expected, excessive stress can interfere with productivity and performance, impact your physical and emotional health, and affect your relationships and home life. You can’t control everything in your work environment, but you can incorporate some daily activities to reduce the impact of stress in the workplace!
1. Movement
One reason your energy may be dropping at work could be that you’ve been sitting for too long. Try getting up out of your chair and moving around for at least a few minutes every hour. Try shoulder and arm circles, hip rotations, knees up, hamstring curls and reaching over the head to open up the area of your ribs. Instead of sending an email, go to your colleague’s office. Schedule a walking meeting. Take the stairs to the restroom a few floors away. Just find a reason to move around and be more active. Engaging in small bursts of physical activity can help to re-energize your body and mind.
2. Stretch it out!
Sitting at a desk can create imbalance in the body, overly emphasising certain muscles while “turning off” others. This can contribute to poor posture, back and joint pain, and more. Stretching is one of the most effective ways we can help bring the body into muscular balance.
3. Breath & Relaxation
We can completely change our physiological, mental and emotional state with deeper, more effective breathing and
mindful relaxation.
Nostril Breathing: Breathing through the nose as oppose to the mouth warms the breath and has an immediate calming effect as it brings us into our parasympathetic nervous system (our rest and relax system).
Abdominal Breathing: Initiating our breath in the belly uses the largest and lowest regions of the lungs, contributing to more oxygen and vital energy in the body as well as increased lung capacity.
Extended exhales: When it comes to releasing tension, the exhalation is of the most importance. Elongating the exhalation will further sedate the nervous system.
These breathing exercises can be learned in order (the nostril breathing being the most foundational) or they can be combined as a complete breathing practice as the practitioner becomes more experienced.
Guided Relaxation- Guided relaxation helps to replace our busy thoughts with a journey through the body and mind. This could include but is not limited to a conscious relaxing of the body, a positive visualization, or mindset exercises.
Curtis Health has a wide variety of programs to help your employees combat stress and improve health in the workplace. Contact us today to find out how!
Designing an employee wellness program can seem overwhelming. How do you address the individual health needs of an entire workforce? Sometimes, you just need to know where to start. 
Determine the needs of your employees. Crunching data on lost productivity only tells us one side of the story. Asking employees for input on wellness program offerings will help you determine not only which programs to put in place, but give ownership to those who will benefit the most. Surveys, wellness committees and coordination with department leaders provide valuable input.
Create a plan. Once you assess the needs of your employees, what will it take to put them into place? What is your budget? What is the level of commitment from key company leaders? How will you determine success? These are all questions that need to be addressed to start the framework of your program.
Get people involved! Now the real work starts. You’ve developed a program, but how do you increase participation? Create a marketing plan, recruit wellness ambassadors, determine incentives and coordinate with department managers to help ensure their employees have the time and resources they need to take advantage of program offerings.
Ask for constant feedback. Successful wellness programs are constantly adjusting to meet the needs of their employees. Survey data and enlisting the help of wellness committees and ambassadors can provide a steady stream of necessary information to keep your program on track.
Change is good. Adapting to the ever-changing needs of your employees is crucial to program success. Combining key data points with employee and manager feedback will lead to the advancement of your program.
With so many employers beginning to understand the need for quality wellness programming, it is important to enlist the help of industry leaders with a proven track record of success. Curtis Health has been helping individuals and companies improve the health of their workforce for over thirty years. Contact us today to find out how we can help you!
Parents know that getting kids to adopt healthy eating habits can be a daunting task. We understand how important proper nutrition is, but the combination of busy lives, picky eaters and the availability of cheap and easy meals often leads us to make poor food choices for ourselves and our children.
With the new school year upon us, here are some simple ways to start making healthy eating habits together.
Share meals together – The benefits of eating together as a family have been studied extensively. According to numerous reports issued by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA), “children who eat at least five times a week with their family are at lower risk of developing poor eating habits, weight problems or alcohol and substance dependencies, and tend to perform better academically than their peers who frequently eat alone or away from home.”
Lead by example – Children look to their parents for guidance. If you choose to take the time to prepare a meal instead of stopping for fast food, your kids will take note. Keep healthy foods on hand to avoid falling into the convenience trap.
Have your kids help – Get them involved in the cooking process from start to finish. Let them choose ingredients and help them come up with a healthy meal. Instill a sense of pride in them that comes with seeing an idea turns into a finished product.
Stock your pantry with healthy snacks – When we’re hungry (or think we’re hungry), we grab easy snacks that we think will satisfy the taste we’re craving. If the only options are healthy ones, we’ll make better choices or realize we’re not as hungry as we thought.
By following a few simple guidelines, we can create healthy habits that will last a lifetime.
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When I was eight years old, I started smoking. Well, I didn’t start smoking until I was twelve. But when I was eight, I had my first cigarette.
My mother was a smoker. In 1960’s California, it was the thing to do. I remember seeing a picture of her and her friends on a beach blanket, Pacific Ocean in the background, smiling and laughing with cigarettes in hand. This same image would be used for decades by cigarette companies to show you how fun and exciting their product was.
When I was eight, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. My friend and I stole a cigarette from my mother’s pack and retreated to the side of the house. After some initial fumbling with the matches, we got it lit and puffed in the smoke, coughing and wondering why anyone would engage in such a painful activity.
In the 1980’s, things changed. Doctors and researchers were finally able to break through the deep pockets of the tobacco lobby industry and go public with news the cigarette companies did not want you to know – smoking causes serious diseases, and could kill you.
My mother continued to smoke, but thought that she could escape the potential damage by “cutting down,” a time-tested trick of the addictive mind to lessen the chances of adverse reactions to dangerous substances. She adjusted her smoking habits to deal with the shame that came with doing something that had been proven to cause serious physical problems. She hid her cigarettes from plain view, would only smoke outside, and became embarrassed if you ever caught her with one in her hand.
Even armed with so much information about the dangers of smoking, no warning is stronger than a teenager trying to fit in. My first day of high school reunited me with old friends that had attended the local Catholic school. All of them were smokers, and I wanted to be a part of their tribe. I asked to borrow a cigarette, and started a smoking habit that would span my teenage years and most of my adult life.
Over the years, my mother and I attempted to quit using every method available. Cold turkey, nicotine patches, medications, even hypnotism. Nothing worked. Some resulted in varying breaks of tobacco use, but we always returned to our addiction. In the late 1990’s, my mother and I briefly worked with one another, taking our breaks together to smoke. With every drag, came a hint of shame. For her, seeing that her habit transferred to me, and for me, showing her that even though I knew it was wrong, I was unable to quit myself.
In 2001, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. After several rounds of chemotherapy, my mother’s life was temporarily extended, but less than six months after diagnosis, she had passed away.
Even after losing my mother to a smoking-related death, I continued using tobacco. It would less frequently – with a drink, at a party or any other excuse I could dream up to justify inhaling tobacco smoke after seeing my mother buried at fifty-two from a smoking-related disease.
In 2008, my wife informed me that she was pregnant with our first child. I instantly dialed up the memory of stealing a cigarette from my mother in 1983 and lighting it up. I also remembered the constant harassment my mother was exposed to by my father and siblings for her smoking habit and the dangers associated with it.
By using these memories, I had finally had found my motivation to quit smoking forever. I wasn’t going to be responsible for giving my future child a reason to pick up a cigarette. I wasn’t going to deal with the guilt that came with the label “smoker.” And I wasn’t going to leave this world before my time because of a disease that I had brought on myself.
Finding your motivation to stop unhealthy habits can come from numerous influences. A doctor who issues a strong warning, running out of breath while playing with a child, waking up with pain instead of energy and even the overwhelming feeling of guilt that is often associated with addictive behaviors.
When you do find your motivation, it is always helpful to enlist people and programs that can help you stay on track. Aligning yourself with health professionals can turn your motivation to be healthier into positive, lifelong behaviour changes. Curtis Health has numerous programs designed to help turn your motivation to be healthier into a reality. Contact us today to find out how!
Each of the four seasons brings change and focus along with it. In the fall, we wind down summer trips and enjoy our last lazy days by the pool as we prepare for the air to cool, the sun to set a little earlier each day, and for parents, the start of a new school year. In the winter, we physically and mentally prepare ourselves for chilly weather and get excited about the upcoming holiday season. In the spring, we wake up from our winter slumbers and anxiously await the warmth of the sun and the new growth that comes along with it.
But what about the summer? Along with increasing temperatures and the excitement of upcoming vacations, it’s easy to forget to take time for yourself each day. Summer is about increasing your energy and creating joy in your life. When we hear of seasonal effective disorder, summer is usually the last season on the list.
So how can you use mindfulness to help balance summer days?
Practice mindfulness daily, and make this summer one to remember!
Fruits can be added to almost any breakfast dish either on top or as a side. Use fruits in salads for lunch or dinner, as a garnish, or a go to in between meals!
As employee wellness programs continue to grow in popularity, it’s important to consider how you determine return on investment. Traditionally, programs used general data, such as health risk assessments and biometric screenings to determine ROI. Now, more employers are shifting the measure of success to focus on improved employee morale and increased productivity. Happy employees improve workplace morale and create a better company culture. Employees who feel supported at work are much more productive than those who become so stressed out that they start missing work.
Successful wellness programs focus on the “whole” employee, and not only individual physical achievements (weight loss, quitting smoking, increased physical fitness). By broadening the definition of wellness to go beyond physical statistics, employers can see happier employees, higher productivity and greater employee retention rates.
Low employee morale is usually a sign of high stress, low engagement and a lack of exercise. Successful wellness programs focus on the “whole” employee, and not only individual physical achievements (weight loss, quitting smoking, increases in physical fitness). Survey results consistently show employees are more productive when they work for an employer who takes an interest in their health. A recent poll by Refresh Leadership noted that 71% of employees consider benefits package offerings are extremely or very important to their job satisfaction.
Injuries occur more frequently among unhealthy employees with higher risk factors. On site fitness classes such as group exercise and walking groups can increase the physical health of your employees, while health education, such as back care and tobacco cessation classes can help employees make positive lifestyle choices that reduce potential injuries.
When employees are sick or injured and they take time off, companies lose thousands and sometimes millions of dollars on temporary employment and downtime. Wellness programs tend to result in fewer sick days and fewer absences. According to the Health Advancement Research Organization, absenteeism was 27 percent lower for those workers who ate healthy and exercised regularly.
Employees who feel better and are healthier are more productive, which improves your organization’s bottom line. Offering stress management and meditation classes can help promote mindfulness and increase productivity. Recently a Health Advancement Research Organization found that employees who ate healthy and exercised regularly improved job performance 11 percent higher than their peers who were obese.
Employee turnover is extremely expensive, and wellness programs show employees that their employer values their health. Working for a company who cares about you as a human being leads to increased retention. In addition, offering wellness benefits demonstrates to job seekers how committed you are to the health and happiness of your employees. And the numbers are remarkable. Almost half (45%) of employees at small or mid-sized companies reported that they would stay at their jobs longer because of employer-sponsored wellness programs, according to the latest Principal Financial Well-Being Index.
Want to learn more about how an employee wellness program can benefit your company? Contact Curtis Health today to find out how we can design a program specifically designed to meet the needs of your employees.
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