World Wellness Weekend

This year represents the 5th year of World Wellness Weekends and the second year that it will be in Austin, Texas. World Wellness Weekend is a health, wellness, and sustainable living festival that is dedicated to educating and empowering people to be healthier and happier. The festival takes place this weekend, May 30th through June 1st at the Austin Convention Center.

World Wellness Events

The World Wellness Weekend will include speakers such as; Marianne Williamson (A Return to Love), Bill Phillips (Body for Life), Marci Shimoff (Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out), and John Gray (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus); will be providing tips and sharing experiences on how to live better and healthier.

Musical entertainment provided by Michael Franti, Papa Mali, Carolyn Wonderland, Afrofreque will fill the air of the convention center with the sounds of the world. There will even be an Eco-Fashion show this year that will feature fun and sustainably produced fashion.

World Wellness Expo

The wellness expo will feature over 150 booths and 80 classes, presentations and workshops that will teach attendees all about living a better life. Attendees will learn creating financial prosperity, healthy relationships, better lifestyles, as well as to improve physical, mental and emotional health.

This will be an interactive event that invites attendees to sample organic and healthy foods, to sample new nutritional products, enjoy a mini-massage and shop for hand-crafted items by local and global artisans.

World Wellness

The World Wellness Weekend represents the increase and interest in the importance of living a healthier lifestyle and to make healthier choices for yourself and your loved ones. Corporations can share this concern by encouraging their employees to pay more attention to their wellness and their health habits. EmployeeWellnessUSA.com offers valuable advice and information on how employers can help their employees live better.

Good Corporate Wellness Starts with Personal Health and Wellness

Personal health and wellness might be the fatal flaw in your corporate wellness plan. Is personal health and wellness part of your strategy? Does corporate wellness stop when your employees leave the office?

Give Your Employees Personal Health and Wellness Continuity

If employees don’t have the tools to pursue wellness on a personal level, then it becomes easy for them to “fall off the wagon” and slide back into a less healthy lifestyle. If you have a walking wellness program, for example, it should encourage employees to build walking routes near their homes, perhaps with the cooperation of the neighborhood association or coworkers who live in the neighborhood.

Personal Health and Wellness Means Never Being “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”

Your corporate wellness program coordinators should have “vacation wellness” as part of their job scope. In other words, you don’t want corporate wellness to stop at the boundaries of the corporate campus. Instead, integrate personal health and wellness with your employee wellness programs.

For example, what if Human Resources were to give out a personal health and wellness wallet card whenever someone goes on vacation or sabbatical? With some card stock and a small laminator, these cards could be easily customized to remind the employee of the employee wellness programs that he or she is currently participating in, making it easier for them to continue with their health and wellness on a personal level when away from the familiar environs of the office.

This benefits your corporate wellness programs in two ways:

• it reduces the chance that the employee will come back to the office feeling unfit, overwhelmed and unable to resume their health and wellness activities; and
• it shows that their employer is just as invested in their personal health and wellness as they are

Like a marathon, personal health and wellness is a long-haul commitment and it’s difficult for any one person to do in isolation. Simply put, it’s easier to maintain your health and wellness when you know others are depending on you and watching your personal performance. It’s easier to stick to an exercise program when you have a jogging partner who wakes you up when you oversleep, or spots you when you’re lifting weights.

Similarly, it’s easier to stick to your personal health and wellness plan when you know your employer is supporting you and wishing you the best.

Don’t Dictate Personal Health and Wellness

Just as corporate wellness surveys serve a vital function in building a health and wellness plan at work, it’s critical that you involve employees in designing an off-site personal health and wellness strategy. No one enjoys being dictated to, but everyone enjoys having assistance in tacking tough problems. Make it clear that employees are in charge of their personal wellness. Your role as their health management partner is to support, advise, counsel, provide resources and dole out information.

Of course, don’t forget that part of your personal health and wellness responsibility is to provide good health risk assessment baselines so employees can proceed safely on the road to better fitness. For that purpose, and for any health and wellness questions you may have, think of EmployeeWellnessUSA as your health management partner. Don’t hesitate to call our health and wellness experts about how we can help with onsite health screenings or simply for obligation-free advice.

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

Health screening: knowledge is power

A health screening is one of the most important tools in the corporate wellness toolbox for improving employee health and wellness. However, it’s hard to look beyond the simple pragmatic details of an on-site health screening to understand its power for unlocking improved employee wellness, lower health insurance premiums and reduced absenteeism. Just as small, systematic changes can revolutionize an individual’s fitness, seemingly minor systematic changes within your organization - like regular health screenings - can revolutionize the fitness of the individuals who collectively are your company’s finest asset.

How health screening works

“How does one little blood test do all that?” you may be asking. Yes, a health screening looks like a simple blood test, but the fact is that a well-administered and carefully organized group blood test can enable a health screening that will isolate dozens of risk factors for you and your employees.

Health screenings, such as the health risk assessments (HRAs) performed by EmployeeWellnessUSA, produce an easy-to-read series of reports on the health hazards that threaten your workforce. Depending on the health risk tests that you choose, your health screenings can point out possible problems posed by high blood pressure, obesity, osteoporosis, cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and many other common health issues. Health screenings can also highlight dangerous levels of toxic workplace substances or industrial chemicals. Lastly, a thorough health screening, whether an on-site health screening at your campus or one arranged at one of our nationwide testing laboratories, can test for health risk management issues with illegal drugs like amphetamines, marijuana, heroin and cocaine.

The advantages of health screenings with EmployeeWellnessUSA

If you elect to work with EmployeeWellnessUSA when performing your company’s health screening, you’ll have some advantages that will make your job easier.

We’re veterans of distributed laboratory testing and our services have been written up in a variety of national publications, including TIME, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. We bring that experience to every corporate client who chooses to partner with us for health screening.

We also use our proprietary online health management system to perform health screenings. Our system allows us to deliver online scheduling of employee tests, email reminders that work the way you do, confidential medical reports (aggregated for you, and individualized for your employees), online consent forms, health surveys, secure data handling and more. You can rely on our experience when planning your company’s health screening.

Talking to EmployeeWellnessUSA about health screening

Early detection makes a world of difference for almost all major diseases, including the big killers like cardiovascular disease and cancer. Don’t delay in setting up your organization’s health screening. The corporate wellness statistics are clear about the benefits of implementing wellness programs like health screenings. It’s worth it - both as a fiscal decision and as an initiative that will be emotionally satisfying for you and your employees. Please contact our health screening specialists for a no-obligation chat.