Wellness Challenges Are Popping Up Everywhere

Wellness Challenges are definitely hot right now and they are encouraging more and more people to get healthy and live better. Whether it is a city or a school or a social group or even a whole state, competitive spirits are being ignited by the challenge to be the healthiest team. The challenges are usually about a six months to a year in length and they are made up of several teams, these teams all get points for physical activity, selecting healthy foods, and just making better life and health choices overall.

The best part about wellness challenges is even though there really is only way “real” winner; everyone that participates in the challenge is a life winner.

Wellness Challenges Provides Incentive to Get Healthy

Establishing a wellness challenge in your office is a great way to get employees to participate in your established wellness program. Have employees form teams and receive points for everything from attending a corporate health fair to getting a health risk assessment to starting an exercise regimen. At the end of the year, the teams will win prizes based on the number of points they have accumulated.

Wellness Challenge Kick-Off

Contact Employee Wellness USA and have our team come out and provide on-site health screening for all participating employees, so that everyone has a baseline to judge their improvement from. We will then work with you to create a wellness program that will be the foundation of the challenge.

Wellness Challenges Improve Corporate Health

Not only will wellness challenges improve the health of your employees, it will improve the overall health of the corporation by providing benefits such as reduced injuries, reduced frequency of worker’s comp, reduced healthcare costs, better employee attendance, and better corporate morale.

Like we said earlier, everyone is a winner in a wellness challenge!

What is a Wellness Proposal?

You probably have seen this term many times and wondered what exactly it means. A wellness proposal is a proposal put together by a wellness company, such as EmployeeWellnessUSA.com, that makes suggestions for what type of wellness programs you should choose, what tools you will need to accomplish your corporation’s wellness goals, and costs associated with it.

Wellness Proposals Assist Human Resource Departments

A wellness proposal is a great thing to have in hand when HR Departments go to upper management to request funding for a wellness program. It will provide necessary stats and trends, background information, and costs that will enable the HR Department to fully present their case. Upper management will appreciate the preparedness and the research that has gone into your wellness request.

Wellness Proposals Lead to Better Wellness Programs

A well thought out wellness proposal can lead to a better wellness program, because the building blocks will already be in place. Wellness proposals will guarantee that your corporation gets the proper wellness program established. Wellness programs can vary greatly, but when your employees ask, you can tell them that they generally include the following:

• “Walking Wellness,” which incentivizes employees to take walking breaks around the vicinity of their workplace.
• Company sports teams, yoga classes and massage therapists at the workplace.
• Dietary advice, weight-loss and healthy cooking classes, stress management sessions, and either an employee wellness resources column in the employee newsletter or a wellness newsletter.
• “Take the stairs” initiatives to show how stair-walking can improve health.

How to Get a Wellness Proposal

You can get a wellness proposal by contacting an Employee Wellness USA corporate wellness representative. They will ask you all sorts of questions regarding your corporate goals, employee goals, budgets, etc, to assist them in putting together your personalized wellness proposal. The best of all, at Employee Wellness USA, it’s FREE. So what are you waiting for?

Is It Necessary to Incentivize Corporations to Initiate Wellness Programs?

Corporate incentives may seem like an effective way to get employees excited about employee wellness - but is it wise?

Our opinion at Employee Wellness USA is that if it helps and encourages employers to understand the importance of maintaining a healthy workforce, not only for the welfare of its employees, but as well as the welfare of the corporate bottom line … then, yes, it could be necessary.

Tax Breaks as an Incentive for Corporations to Offer Wellness Programs

In 2007, two senators decided to band together to create the “Healthy Workforce Act.” This act is designed to encourage businesses to keep employees healthy and prevent disease. The senators believed that having a country focused on “well care” versus “sick care” would decrease the overall costs of healthcare for everyone. They decided to start with the America’s workforce.

The legislation, introduced by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin and Oregon Senator Gordon Smith, states that companies would receive a corporate incentive - a fifty percent tax credit - if they offer to their employees a wellness program that meets the following criteria:

1) A health awareness and education component, which could include health risk assessments and health screenings.

2) A behavioral change component – such as counseling, seminars, or self-help materials to empower employees to lead healthier lifestyles.

3) A supportive environment component – including offering meaningful incentives to participating employees, such as a reduction in health premiums or allowing employees to engage in walking wellness during the workday.

4) The creation of an employee engagement committee – which would tailor the wellness program to the needs of the workforce at a particular company.

If this legislation gets passed, many organizations will be scrambling to offer employee wellness programs in hopes of receiving the corporate incentive. Why not get ahead of your competition and start now? Contact our workplace wellness experts to get your corporation on the road to becoming healthy. We offer free consultations and are happy to answer any questions you have regarding our wellness services. At EmployeeWellnessUSA, we believe that encouraging your employees to be physically active, eat better and learn how to prevent disease benefits everyone.

Health risk assessments help you quantify employee health

Health risk assessments (HRAs) are an important tool to help you isolate the value of strong corporate wellness programs. In our twenty-plus years of health testing and analysis as EmployeeWellnessUSA and parent company HeathcheckUSA, we’ve found that executive leadership is best at assessing risk in a rigorous, bottom-line-oriented manner — which is exactly what health risk assessments do for you.

Health risk assessments: what’s an HRA?

HRAs (health risk assessments) got you mystified? They’re a bit of a puzzle because there’s no unified standard for health risk assessments. A health risk assessment is both a procedure and a document, too, depending on the context — you must answer questions and ideally undergo some simple biometric data collection to develop a document that describes what’s good and bad about your current state of health and wellness.

To add confusion to the situation, there’s a heritage of industrial health risk management to the term “health risk assessment.” Talk to an OSHA inspector about health risk assessments and she’ll assume you’re referring to an analysis of contaminants and industrial chemicals in a factory or manufacturing facility.

Health risk assessments: a typical HRA

However, even though there’s no government or agency mandate telling you what should be in your company’s health risk assessments, the employee wellness professionals at EmployeeWellnessUSA agree that a complete, comprehensive health risk assessment is aimed at producing a concrete baseline of a person’s health, and includes most of these features:

• a blood pressure test to find possible cardiovascular disease,
• a blood type test so the employee can receive prompt transfusions if an accident does happen to occur at the workplace,
• a cancer test to detect this insidious killer before it can cause harm,
• a blood glucose diabetes test that can detect this common disease, and
• a thorough investigation of the employee’s health management status.

The investigation ideally would analyze the employee’s:

• lifestyle factors,
• symptoms and ailments,
• pharmaceutical needs and prescriptions,
• functional abilities,
• quality of life,
• self-efficacy,
• fitness proclivities and interest level,
• clinical information,
• and fitness biometrics.

Health risk assessments: what next?

If your organization is pondering the costs and benefits of health risk assessments, contact a wellness expert at EmployeeWellnessUSA. We’d be happy to provide you with no-obligation advice about how to go about planning a corporate wellness program and improving the health of your workforce while augmenting morale and reducing your health insurance costs at the same time.

Here are a few more health risk assessment articles that you may find useful:

• Online health risk assessments
• Health risk assessment vendors
• Health risk assessment benefits
• Health risk assessment surveys

Corporate wellness is a marathon, not a sprint

“Corporate wellness” - what does that phrase mean to you? To many of us, it evokes an array of ambivalent thoughts — the gym membership we barely used, the nagging ankle injury from last year’s company picnic, the backaches, the bratwurst we had for lunch, the love handles and of course, the fad diets that failed us or that we failed. Usually, corporate wellness is a guilt trigger that causes us to feel remorse about our bodies and the health management we know we should be doing for them.

The sad fact is that we live in a sedentary society where our survival is dependent on sitting at a desk, not hunting game, picking berries and sprinting away from wolves. We also live in such luxury, nutritionally, that we can gain weight steadily without being wealthy. Cardiovascular disease, obesity and bad nutrition cause most of the corporate wellness issues that weigh down employee attendance and erode a company’s productivity.

It’s ironic that the poorest societies in our world - the ones furthest from the conveniences of modernity - often boast the fittest, most physically hardy members. And as for the animal kingdom — don’t look there for corporate wellness commiseration. In the wild, it is extremely rare to find an animal that suffers from our kind of wellness issues.

Pharmaceutical dependency degrades corporate wellness

It doesn’t help that Americans are descending into a deadly love affair with drugs — and drug testing won’t help you with these drugs.

For example, Greg Critser’s book Generation RX details how Americans spend about $180 billion dollars on prescriptions each year, with the estimated 2011 tally at a whopping $414 billion. The average number of prescriptions per American in 2004 stood at twelve.

Twelve! That means that your average employee is taking 14, 18, or even more than 20 medications in an attempt to improve their corporate wellness.

Is this effective, though? Critser is not convinced that the drugs help American corporate wellness. In fact, he points out a bevy of negative corporate wellness consequences for America’s legal drug addition, which include drug interactions, liver damage, and the legions of people who now depend on drugs to deal with ordinary trials and stresses.

An employer has the potential to enhance corporate wellness

It’s not all bad news, though. Occupational health screenings and well-designed corporate wellness programs can help you fight the downward corporate wellness spiral for you and your workforce. In fact, good corporate wellness efforts - like a strong walking wellness initiative - can literally save lives and reduce the symptoms that cause employees to turn to drugs in the first place.

Your corporate wellness resource

Starting a corporate wellness program can be daunting, but that’s when you can turn to an experienced provider like EmployeeWellnessUSA for no-obligation assistance. We’re here to help you with every step of the process, from surveying your employees about corporate wellness to setting up on-site health screenings to find out where your employees stand on critical corporate wellness metrics.

Don’t hesitate to contact our corporate wellness experts for assistance - we’re here to answer all your corporate wellness questions.

Biometric data collection means better heath risk assessment baselines and better security

“Biometric data collection” is a hot phrase these days, but it can help your workforce with health management, too. When the pundits talk about biometric data collection, they’re usually referring to retinal scanners, fingerprint readers, and other high-tech security measures. However, if you trace the phrase “biometric data collection” back to its roots, it refers to the measurement of unique human physical and behavioral characteristics.

Both security and employee wellness are of critical importance to the modern business. As a result, biometric data collection should be one of the tools in the arsenal of a forward-thinking organization. At EmployeeWellnessUSA, biometric data collection is our forte.

Our on-site health screenings aren’t just a “feel-good” measure for your employees. Assessments of employee health help your workers to prioritize their well-being, which results in happier, more productive employees. Health risk assessments also build your database of employee biometric data. Biometric data collection, when handled on-site by our experienced professionals, is hassle-free and smoothly organized. The biometric data we collect then can be stored digitally for years or even decades, helping you and your workforce build better health risk assessment baselines that you can use to analyze workforce fitness and the efficacy of your company’s health management programs. Collected biometric data can even allow an employee’s doctor to assess that person’s health over many years, helping him or her spot trends and diagnose disease.

Our biometric data collection extends to a wide variety of health risk tests, including measurements of blood pressure, blood type, body fat, substance abuse, and susceptibility to cardiovascular disease. You or your corporate security department may find it useful to coordinate our biometric data collection and health screenings with your own biometric security procedures. Collecting biometric data for security purposes - like fingerprints, facial recognition imprints, or hand geometry - can be dovetailed with our health tests to minimize workflow disruption.

Feel free to contact our health risk assessment experts for free advice on biometric data collection and how it can help augment your employee health and security.

Corporate wellness doesn’t have to be just about a hefty insurance policy. Increasingly, the corporate world is turning to proactive employee health programs to help reduce costs and improve the productivity of its’ workforce. It follows a simple logic. Employers benefit from having a healthy workforce which shows up to work.

It is estimated that the U.S. loses up to $300 billion a year due to absenteeism. Many of those absences are attributed to chronic pain and illness, hypertension, and headaches. With so much money at stake, it is about time that businesses start addressing the health, both physical and mental, of their employees. Corporate wellness trends suggest that many businesses are doing just that. Wellness coaches and consultants can help monitor, educate, and create individual health plans for employees. Some companies are even going further, creating health plans for employees and their families. Another approach to reducing chronic health problems (many of which stem from obesity) is to educate employees on nutrition, including lectures tailored to specific diseases, such as diabetes. Finally, other corporate wellness programs include health screenings, on-site chair massages, and reimbursement for gym memberships.

Here at Employee Wellness USA, we obviously support these steps. Our business is founded on the belief that if you give employees the tools to improve their health in a business setting, you can have a mutually beneficial relationship. One in which the both the employer and employee benefit