Having a solid foundation is as important to your worksite wellness program as it is to your home. Can you build a house without a foundation? Sure you can. You can assemble the walls, place the roof and move in – living comfortably for a short time. But at some point, environmental elements will disrupt and maybe even collapse your home.
Your worksite wellness program is the same way in that it’s only as strong as the foundation you build it on. If the foundational steps are not taken, a wellness program is likely to be short lived, or meet a variety of roadblocks, or experience many starts and stops before it really takes off.
Many corporate wellness initiatives tend to be disjointed, operate in isolation and have no process of measurement or evaluation. Often times an enthusiastic wellness committee will jump immediately to the creative process of implementing wellness activities and skip the steps that are critical to building a strong foundation.
The foundation of any wellness program should be biometric screenings and health assessments. These two components raise employees’ awareness of risk factors that are impacting their health while providing employers with information about the health of their employees. Knowing baseline statistics allows you to identify risks, evaluate trends and manage your wellness program to get the best results. Plus, by capturing this data you can truly measure the success of your corporate wellness program - just imagine being able to show your boss that the wellness program reduced the cholesterol levels in 30% of the employee population. After all, you can't change what you don't know.
Building a solid foundation with these two key elements will help your worksite wellness program reach it's full potential - ultimately changing your culture and impacting employee health. And even if your wellness program has been in place for several years, it’s never too late to add these foundational elements.
