Since we’ve been doing wellness programs for well over a decade, one of the biggest problems that we find is trying to get people to deal with weight issues. It’s very hard in this day and age to get people to change their behavioral patterns to get them to focus on maintaining a healthy body weight.
The Problem
Today, most American families have kids that are involved in after-school school sports, dance, music and any other number of activities. As a result, both parents spend their evenings running in opposite directions to get their kids where that they need to be. With all this chaos, fast food, unfortunately, becomes an easy way to feed the family while running around.
So how do you find reasonably healthy food when you have little to no time to prepare it? Even if you want to eat well, it’s getting harder and harder to do with a family that’s always on the move. Our solution is to try and incorporate healthy alternatives within your busy schedule.
Challenge Accepted: Our Solution
From an employer/employee standpoint, we’ve found that creating different, six to eight week wellness challenges can improve population engagement and result in a better diet and healthy lifestyle changes.
An example of a wellness challenge could include a calendar where every day has two “events” or opportunities to earn points. In the first event, employees can earn a point if they exercise (we define exercise as being active for 15 minutes). This could be as simple as going for a walk, raking the lawn, or actually going to the gym if they’re a healthier person. The second opportunity to earn a point involves making healthier lifestyle decisions. Today, it might be sleeping eight hours. Tomorrow it might be drinking eight glasses of water. The next day, it may be encouraging somebody to quit smoking and so on and so forth.
Find a Healthy Work-Life Balance
The trick to designing effective wellness challenges is to find what works for your workforce given their schedules and daily routines. If you can create an activity or challenge that will work for everybody, you’ll see an increase in employee engagement.
The goal of these challenges is to get your population to be cognizant of the fact that being healthier isn’t just about dieting and not eating the foods they like, but it’s instead trying to be healthier in the way that they approach life and doing activities with their friends and family.
About The Lawson Group
Since 1978, The Lawson Group has been in the “White Horse” business. That is to say, we help companies do things that are ultimately good for them that they are sometimes not aware of. Our first endeavor was worker health and safety, mostly related to OSHA compliance issues, focusing on the industrial hygiene side of that equation regarding chemicals and noise, indoor air quality, and lead and asbestos in the workplace. Since becoming a third-party administrator in 1994, we now manage the workers’ comp programs for over 300 New Hampshire employers. In 2000, we entered the employee wellness business. Our primary effort is to work with employers and their employees to make better use of their health insurance dollars by working to help them become healthier and better consumers of healthcare. We welcome your inquiries regarding our services. Contact us to learn more.
