Are you planning to host a biometric screening during the summer? If so, there are a few things you might want to be prepared for.
Each season offers its own unique challenges when it comes to hosting wellness events. In all honesty, though, there is no bad time for a biometric screening. It’s always a good idea to get the conversation about health started in your office.
Something things you might run into during the summer season…
Attendance
This is just correlated with the attendance challenges you’ll see in the office throughout the summer. From family vacations to little league games to “mental health” days. People just don’t want to be at the office during the beautiful summer season.
While attendance might be a challenge during the summer months, there are some things you can do to overcome attendance as a screening roadblock.
Communication
Communicate early and communicate often. Don’t let your employees forget about your screening event. Be sure they know there’s an opportunity for free health screenings. And make the date and time loud and clear.
Screening Options
There are lots of ways to do biometric screenings that provide more flexibility than an onsite event. Events at your workplace are an excellent option! They can be supplemented with home screening kits and visits to a primary care physician. That allows your MIA employees to get their screenings on their own time.
Focus
It can just be more difficult to focus when the sun outside is calling your name. For your screening, that might mean difficulty in understanding health metrics and next steps—which is a huge challenge for developing a healthy workforce. If employees aren’t focused on what their screenings actually mean in their lives, it kind of defeats the purpose.
You can overcome the struggle to focus and the summer distractions in a few different ways.
Communication
Be sure you consistently communicate your employees’ wellness options to them. Let them know how your program can help and what features relate to their personal healthy journeys. It’s also important to use communication as a strategic health education tool so everyone knows exactly what troublesome health metrics means.
Summer Health Benefits
Summer comes with screening challenges, but it also comes with a wide variety of healthy opportunities. People love to get outside and be active in the summer. It’s also an ideal time to stock up on fresh, farmer’s market produce. Focus on those appealing, summer activities to ensure your employees really want to be healthy this season.
Educational Materials
If focus is a serious struggle where you work, it might be helpful to provide handouts or fliers for common health challenges like high blood pressure, high cholesterol and overweight/obesity. These types of handouts ensure your employees have something to take home with them. They can refer to the handouts later when they’re ready to think about health. We’ve got quite a few handouts ready to go, so feel free to ask your account manager if you’d like to use them!
Results
The summer season might actually impact your employees’ health metrics—and it could go either way. Employees might exhibit healthier numbers than normal because they’re more active and focused on their beach bods. They also might exhibit numbers that are less healthy than normal because they’ve been having a blast hanging out with friends and family—and eating and drinking as such.
Either way, health metrics taken in the summer might not exhibit the health status employees have all year long. Here’s what you can do.
Communication (see a pattern here?)
Communication is key to understanding what health metrics really mean. Ensure your employees know what it means to have high blood pressure or high cholesterol. You also need to communicate about the behaviors that contribute to those things, and the patterns that might crop up during the summer.
Current Snapshots
Ultimately, a biometric screening is a snapshot of an employee’s health at any given moment in time. So while the screening might not show his or her year-round habits, that doesn’t mean it’s incorrect. A biometric screening illustrates an employee’s health status as it stands at the moment of the screening.
Be sure your employees recognize that, and realize that if the numbers trend negative, it’s still important to make some changes. And if the numbers trend positive, they’re doing something right and need to keep up the excellent work!
Even though summer screenings present unique challenges, every season is a good season to talk about health. Get your employees on board—despite the challenges of the season—by communicating and focusing on the details that make a summer screening successful.
When is your biometric screening? How are you addressing potential challenges?
