Your body deserves to be healthy. It wants to be healthy, and it craves being healthy. That’s why you feel better when you’re in good health.

That’s just a simple fact about how we’re made as humans. No matter your health status—overweight, underweight, inactive, too active, stressed or bored—your body wants to be healthy. It’s true for every single person.

So why do you keep pushing employee wellness as a solution to a problem, or a punishment for bad behavior?

At the core, your wellness program is all about healthy behavior change. You want your employees to shift their behaviors from things that harm their health to things that can improve their health.

But in order to effectively change behaviors, you need to understand how they’re changed. Scientists have been studying what goes into behavior change for years—because that’s how decisions can be made to encourage healthy populations.

We looked through that science, and picked out some important elements for your wellness program. You can check out the science behind healthy behavior change by downloading our new guide right here.

We’ve all been there. Things at work can get stressful. The stress escalates those situations until things start to feel out of control and you’re slowing losing your grip.

Those situations can continue to heighten your stress levels—and we all know how harmful that can be for your mental and physical health. It can even damage your workplace relationships, which is one factor contributing to the insolvability of the problem you’re facing. Couple those relational strains with the fact that nobody is thinking clearly, and you’ve gotten yourself into quite a mess.

In the moment, you might not be sure which way to turn, or how to make progress. It can easily start to feel like you’re just stuck.

One of the huge challenges in any wellness program is addressing the mindset that wellness is a punishment. Many people view health and wellness as something they need to suffer through. But that’s just not true. Wellness is not a punishment. In fact, it’s the ultimate reward for your body.

A big contributing factor to this punishment mindset is all of the restrictions we associate with a healthy lifestyle.

Everyone loves summer, right?! It’s a time to get outside, relax and spend time taking part in all sorts of adventures.

The summer season can even come with some awesome health benefits. Largely due to the weather, people are much more active in the summer than they are in the colder months of the year. People are walking, biking, running and even doing more leisurely activities like gardening.

So how can there be health hazards associated with this usually-healthy season? The truth is every season comes with unique challenges. The best way to avoid the health hazards of any given season is to be aware that they exist.

A wellness portal is an online tool you can use to implement, manage and track your wellness program. Your portal can be what you make of it, depending on the details of your program.

A wellness portal might include incentive tracking, challenges and check-ins, educational material and employee health records. Housing these types of wellness program features in an online portal can be a great option for you and your program.

You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again, when it comes to your health journey, don’t be afraid to start small! Even the tiniest of first steps towards a healthy lifestyle is a great first step to take.

But why is that the common trend when it comes to health and wellness?

We’ll give you a hint. Small steps aren’t recommended because you have short legs. It’s not because you can’t do big things. And it’s not because you can’t handle big challenges.

Every year, we perform a lot of biometric screenings at companies across the country. We work with all types of companies to screen employees in all walks of business. In 2015, we performed over 85,000 biometric screenings. That means we screened over 85,000 American employees!

If you’re at all familiar with our biometric screening process—or any biometric screening process—you know that after a screening event, the company receives an aggregate report. This report is a snapshot of the health status of their employees. It provides group data about the overall health of the workforce.

As a wellness coordinator, your attitude can not only make or break employee participation, but can actually impact how well an employee does throughout the wellness program. Taking a positive, proactive approach to your wellness program can make it both more popular and more effective.

Being a proactive wellness coordinator means taking action when it comes to your wellness program. It means reaching out to your employees, encouraging them, and empowering them to make healthy changes in their lives.

One of the worst things you can do for your wellness program is to get stuck in a one-track-mind way of thinking. Many wellness coordinators do things one ways just because, “that’s how we’ve always done it.” That can be an easy way to get stuck in a wellness rut.

The best way to refresh your wellness program is to refresh your mindset—think outside the box a little bit. Even if you’re not super innovative when it comes to wellness activities, you can benefit from some outside-the-box thinking.

And it all starts with three big perspective shifts…