"Workplace Wellness - Why Promote Wellness"
Workplace Wellness: Why Promote Wellness
What is Workplace Wellness?
Workplace wellness refers to the education and activities that a worksite may do to promote healthy lifestyles to employees and their families. Examples of wellness programming include such things as health education classes, subsidized use of fitness facilities, internal policies that promote healthy behavior, and policies or environmental changes that affect the health of employees. Wellness programs can be simple or complex. Most programs require some investment of time and money.
Why Workplace Wellness? - It affects your company's bottom line in many ways.
Here are three key factors:
Decreased healthcare costs
Increased productivity
Better morale
Rising healthcare benefit costs are a significant concern. Poor health habits and unnecessary medical care costs consume portions of our corporate resources as well as the employee paycheck. The worksite is an ideal setting for health promotion and disease prevention programs, since employees spend many of their waking hours at work, nearing 50 hours per week.
Why Start a Company Wellness Program? - Wellness programs help control costs
An investment in your employees' health may lower healthcare costs or slow the increase in providing that important benefit. In fact, employees with more risk factors, including being overweight, smoking and having diabetes, cost more to insure and paid more for health care than people with fewer risk factors.
An employee wellness program can raise awareness so employees with fewer risk factors remain in a lower-cost group. A program also can encourage employees with health risk factors to make lifestyle changes to improve their quality of life and lower costs. The payoff in dollars as well as in quality of life can have a big impact on your company's bottom line.
Increase productivity
Healthier employees are more productive. This has been demonstrated in factory settings and in office environments in which workers with workplace wellness initiatives miss less work. Presenteeism, in which employees are physically present on the job but are not at their most productive or effective, is reduced in workplaces that have wellness programs.
Reduce absenteeism
Healthier employees miss less work. Companies that support wellness and healthy decisions have a greater percentage of employees at work every day. The cost savings of providing a wellness program can be measured against reduced overtime to cover absent employees and other aspects of absenteeism.
Improve morale and enhanced image for the organization
A company that cares about its employees' health is often seen as a better place to work. Those companies save money by retaining workers who appreciate the benefit of a wellness program and they can attract new employees in a competitive market.
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