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! https://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!
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.
So how can a holistic employee wellness program benefit your company?
Improve Employee Morale
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.
Reduce Injuries
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.
Diminish absenteeism
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.
Improve productivity
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.
Improve employee retention and attract talent
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.
In 2016, there was an article in the New York Times, about how Donald Trump – who claims to sleep between 90 minutes and 4 hours per night – exhibited all the signs of a person with chronic sleep deprivation.
The short term effects of sleep deprivation include lower cognitive abilities, mood swings and poor decision-making, which obviously can have impact on employee performance. But studies at Harvard Medicine show chronic lack of sleep is associated with long-term health consequences, including chronic medical conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease, all of which may lead to a shortened life expectancy. Read More→
Since October is Workplace Wellness Month, that will be the focus in our blog posts. Read the post below written by Curtis Health staff member, Nicole Wutschnik. It offers 4 suggestions on how you can improve your workplace happiness. Enjoy the read!
Let’s keep this simple. Chances are you’re reading this while you are on your break, and you likely already have a list of uncompleted tasks running through your mind. Perhaps you’re feeling overwhelmed and wonder how on earth you’re going to get through this work week, month, or year.
Believe it or not, you are able to find workplace happiness. Better yet, you can actually create it for yourself. Below are a couple of habits to equip you to build your workplace wellness. Start with one, and when you’re ready, add another. Read More→
Mental health is becoming a more important factor in overall health. Previously, workplace wellness focused on physical wellness with fitness challenges and blood pressure clinics. Studies are now showing that the key to workplace wellness is mental health. Give a read to the following article, that outlines some of the issues around mental health in the workplace and offers suggestions on how helping employees with mental health issues can benefit not just the individual but your business. This post was written by Jordan Cieciwa and re-posted from www.huffingtonpost.ca.
The benefits of exercise, active living and healthy eating are no longer debatable. There are dozens of preventable diseases that we die from, simply because we do not properly take care of ourselves. Disease prevention is a key reason organizations like the Heart and Stroke Foundation exist, they’ve even started a blog to get your the best info to live heart-healthy.
So, let me ask you this: Why are there so many people living sedentary lives and allowing disease to take root, if it is so good for us to be active and eat healthy?
Here is my theory after a career that spans more than a decade in the fitness industry.
Exercise, active living and healthy eating are not the first step in living a healthy lifestyle. The base needs to be set before anyone can live a healthy lifestyle. This is the problem — most people are not equipped to live healthy. Education is important to health, and more than anything, mental health is critical.
First, in order to build a solid foundation, we need education on how the body works — we are cellular beings. Our health depends on taking care of our body at its basic level. Your food and exercise habits affect your cells. Your cells build your organs and your organs create the systems in the body — the cardiovascular, nervous and digestive systems.
The systems show the failures at the cellular level. Those failures are what we call disease. Once we see those failures at the system level, our organs and cells are in dire straits.
Mental health is the most critical part of this whole health transaction. If I look at someone and tell them, you will die young if you do not eat properly and exercise, and they don’t change their life, something must be deeply wrong. What we miss in the promotion of health and wellness is empathy.
We tell people they need to work out — it will make them sexy, help them live longer and fix aches and pains. We show them pictures of what they could look like, and before and after images of people who have done it before them.
We never ask how their marriage is, or how their kids are, or if work is OK. We don’t talk about depression, anxiety or their mental state. Instead, we bombard them with more success from other people who “look good.”
As health, fitness and exercise is promoted, we forget one important piece. Health and fitness is easy if you are healthy and fit. Take away your mental health base, and your passion for the way your body works and whether you ask yourself, “Should I go to the gym? Would I look to be active today?”
If we focus on the workplace, I think this will make the most sense. The buzz words are flying around “wellness teams,” “wellness initiative boards,” “health spending accounts,” “health credits” — I could go on and on. And if your company has spent time and money on these with very little return, let me tell you why.
Every board I have consulted with puts their plans and spending together and “accidentally” creates a plan that amounts to getting healthy people cheaper gym memberships. Healthy people staff these boards, and they do things that make their healthy lifestyle easier and more cost-effective to maintain. The CEO or CFO signs off on it because they have solved a buzz word problem, or at least put a Band-Aid on it.
A business’s bottom line is not affected positively by this scenario, yet this is most company’s approach to wellness.
Magazines do the same thing with their workouts and menu plans. Our fitness world is designed to connect with those who are already healthy, inspire those who are already working out, and unfortunately it brings shame to those who don’t. EVEN IF THAT SHAME IS NOT INTENTIONAL.
To effectively change the health of a workplace takes something completely unique. HR can’t spend enough time, and a board of healthy people won’t be able to do it, either. In large corporations, there is a small percentage of the population incurring the greatest time and productivity losses, and increase spending on short-term and long-term disability. It is these people that need empathy, support and an unwavering commitment.
I firmly believe that all people want to work, be productive members of teams and positively interact with others. That said, without the proper tools and supports, not everyone can. Mental health can take us out of a happy state in an instant. We become difficult to work with and, without explanation, less productive and a burden to a team. That same person stops caring for their health, develops issues and can’t stop the downward spiral by themselves.
That downward spiral could have started because of:
Work related stress
Relationship stress at home
Death in the family
Undiagnosed or diagnosed mental health disorders
The point is very simply this: our push towards getting people healthy and creating workplace wellness programs won’t affect the bottom line or get a return on investment until we acknowledge the human factor.
You can’t put a blanket health program in and expect unhealthy people to simply pick it up, and get involved. My job as a workplace wellness consultant is to identify the employees with attendance issues, or on long term/short term disabilities and help them engage programs that are available.
It’s something I firmly believe HR can’t do alone. They can’t ask the questions about home life, current health issues, addiction issues, diagnosed mental health issues — the list goes on as to the cause of unhealthy lifestyles. I’ve found a solution for this part of the equation: empathy, counseling and focused attention.
If you want someone at the gym, living healthy or changing their eating habits so they “get on your workplace wellness plan,” you have to be willing and able to put the time in. A foundation needs to be created. Educate, and make the person understand they are supported. Then help them engage with your amazing wellness board initiatives..
Without identifying the target for employees, helping them to get grounded and giving them the face-to-face support they need, your workplace wellness program will not positively affect your bottom line. This is where I come in to play. Programs, third-party case management and goal-setting help ensure the employee spending your sick time, over time and disability money is truly cared for and brought back stronger to the work force.
Jordan Cieciwa has a degree in Kinesology and Applied Health and has worked with everything from couch potatoes to pro Athletes over the past decade is my key to battling obesity and inactivity.
We spend so much of our lives sitting. You’ve probably heard the expressions “Sitting is the new smoking” or “Sitting is killing us!” Give a read to the post below written by Curtis staff member, Caroline Chretien. Working with these five practices will rejuvenate your body, reduce stress as well renew your energy…Enjoy!
Get Moving!
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. 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.
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. Here are the top 8 desk stretches you can do to awaken your body and prevent muscular issues:
Remember to take a big breath in and then exhale into the stretch. Hold at least 10-20 secs. Only go as far as a mild tension. If the stretch is uncomfortable, ease back or stop stretching.
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.
Think a positive thought
Have you ever noticed that when you’re overly busy, stressed, or in a bad mood, that you feel drained of energy? Negative thought patterns can tax our overall energy. On the contrary, positive thoughts can shift our perspective and increase our zest for life. Re-framing a thought about a project, our health, or expressing gratitude for what we have can promote happiness and enthusiasm. Examples could be “I am making a valuable contribution to this project” or “I am in the process of improving my health and fitness. I respect my body” or “I feel fortunate to work with a supportive team”
5. Refuel through hydration and healthy snacks
A decline in energy can be due to low blood sugar or dehydration. Be sure to keep a bottle of water at your desk and take a couple sips every few minutes. Avoid excessive consumption of caffeine which can also contribute to dehydration and fluctuations in energy.
Keep your blood sugar stable by avoiding refined sugar in your diet which can cause sugar crashes. Instead, have healthy snacks on hand at your desk to graze on during the day. Avoid getting to a starving state because by this time your blood sugar is already dropping and you’re more lightly to eat foods on impulse. A drop in blood sugar can also contribute to moodiness and fogginess.
Caroline Chretien is a BCRPA Certified Personal Trainer, Fitness and Yoga Instructor, as well as a Reiki instructor.
If you’re going to spend 8 hours a day (and probably more) at the office, make them count.
Remember that it takes some time and effort to create new healthy habits, but as time goes on it becomes easier. Along the way, if you stumble, just get back into the fight. Before you know it, the struggle will be gone and you’ll be enjoying the feeling of doing good things for yourself.
By now, most employers are aware of the benefits of an employee wellness program. Healthy and happy staff are more productive, absent less and reduce health costs for the company. But in this fast-paced world, some employees are still too stressed to jump on the wellness bandwagon (ironic, right?). So if a comprehensive wellness program is failing to catch on, what small steps can an employer take to nudge the staff in the right direction?
Here are 5 small steps that a company can take:
Find an office champion. There’s always a few in every office that have fully embraced the idea of fitness and wellness. Enlist their aid at the grassroots level to get a sense of what the staff would be able and willing to participate in. You could also send out a survey where the responses would be anonymous.
Make healthy food more available. Good nutrition will help your staff take small steps to wellness. Whether it’s having fresh fruit in the break room at all times, or making sure the food ordered in for meetings has healthy options, companies should make sure their staff is not rushing off for a hit of fast food in the middle of the day.
Offer stretch and/or relaxation breaks. Cost is minimal to hire an yoga instructor to come in a couple times per week to offer stretch breaks and relaxation breaks. And the goal can be to empower your employees to incorporate this outside of work…you know give a man a fish, he eats for a day; give a man a fishing pole and he’ll eat for a lifetime.
Offer onsite medical services. Onsite blood pressure clinics or cholesterol testing a couple times per year can lead to staff being more aware of their health. Offering flu shots once per year can help stave off the illness running rampant through an office.
Walk the work-life balance walk. A lot of companies say they support the work-life balance of their staff, but the message that is sent by many managers is the opposite. Make sure that the message starts at the top of the organization and is made emphatic that high value is placed on allowing staff to flex their schedule in the interest of work-life balance.
Once you’ve tried these small steps and had success or if your company has already embedded these ideas and you want to move forward with a more comprehensive wellness program, Curtis Health will be happy to create a custom proposal for wellness services that works with your budget.
Curtis Health Is Partnering With Kintec: Footwear + Orthotics
Kintec is offering all Curtis clients (including friends and family) expert shoe fitting to best suit your needs at a 15% discount on regular price footwear.
