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The Best Worksite Wellness Programs For Behavior Change
There are best worksite wellness programs all over the world that work to change employee behavior. These programs take a variety of different forms, but they all have one thing in common: participation. To get employees engaged and excited about their best worksite wellness program, these companies offer incentives and rewards for meeting healthy goals or participating in activities like exercise classes or nutrition seminars. Read on to find out which best worksite wellness program is right for your business.
The key to a successful worksite wellness program is behavioral change. The best worksite wellness programs keep the focus on motivating staff to adopt and maintain healthy habits. Changing your lifestyle is the key to lowering health risks, chronic disease prevalence, and employee-related costs. It is impossible to have good health without adopting healthy habits.
Wellness And Healthy Behaviors
Our behaviors affect how healthy we are, but they are not as important as other factors. Large studies give us the information we need. When people change their behavior, they are healthier.
What we eat, whether or not we exercise, and whether or not we use tobacco are all factors that influence the occurrence of up to 70% of all strokes, heart attacks, cancers, and type 2 diabetes. This implies that the major causes of chronic illnesses are putting the wrong things in our mouths, not moving enough, or smoking cigarettes.
Wellness And Genetics
Chronic diseases can be caused by genetics. This is why there are some people who always get the same disease. It affects 3-6% of people. And there are other things that make us sick. These include where we live and the air we breathe. We may also be exposed to toxins and have accidents at work that can lead to sickness.
Some people have a genetic tendency towards high blood pressure, diabetes, or high blood cholesterol. For the most part, neither do individuals have a hereditary propensity to develop any one particular chronic disease. Individuals who share common health concerns with other family members frequently express their thoughts.
These best worksite wellness programs work to change behavior in individuals who have made unhealthy decisions, regardless of what their family history may be like. They focus on making healthy choices easy and convenient by providing the resources they need for success.
It doesn’t matter which one it is, because the solution remains the same: we must assist people in adopting and maintaining healthy habits. Sometimes risk-reducing medicines are required, and taking a pill is a habit that has to be changed. The goal for all of us is to figure out how to get individuals to adopt and maintain healthy habits. It’s probably the most difficult challenge any of us will ever face in our lives.
Behavior Change Theory Models And Wellness Programs
There is a vast body of scientific research on how human behavior works and how it may be improved. This literature covers sophisticated behavior change models that precisely capture all aspects and intricacies of the behavior change process.
There are many research papers on behavioral change. You’ve probably heard of a few of these behavior-change theories before. The stages of change model, the trans-theoretical model, the precede-proceed model, the social cognitive theory, and a slew of others are some examples. They’re complicated theories of how people modify their behavior. This and other models, on the surface, do a wonderful job of explaining human behavior but in practice, they are practically useless. They’re so complicated to put into action that it’s almost impossible to accomplish so in a real-world scenario.
Even if you employ every bit of the models above, few, if any, wellness programs will be successful in producing behavior change.
With tight financial constraints and personnel shortages, it’s unrealistic to expect a worksite wellness program to execute any sort of programming based on these models. Employees don’t want to change their behaviors unless they’re given the tools and techniques that make it easier for them to do so. Because of these real-world roadblocks, a more simplified, understandable, and practical method of assisting people in changing habits has emerged. Fortunately for us, there is a simplified version of this.
How Wellness Programs Change Health Behaviors?
Dr. Michael O’Donnell recently introduced a simplified behavior change approach for businesses to help employees improve their health behaviors. The name of this model is AMSO (Awareness, Motivation, Skills, and Opportunities). This basic framework assists organizations in developing the best worksite wellness program that improves employee health.
The four elements are straightforward to grasp. Behavior modification is based on knowledge and education. Motivation is what propels us to do so. The terms culture and environment are often used to refer to the portion of a business’s operations that involve customer service, quality control, facility management, inventory management, call center operation, IT support services. It includes sections on employee training and development as well as cohesiveness in the company through good communications channels.
Which one do you believe is the most effective and able to inspire people to develop and maintain healthy habits? The most crucial element of any behavior-change process, as seen in the graphic above, is its culture and environment. When we establish a positive atmosphere and receive peer support from others, we may expect about 40% of the outcome of behavioral change.
The least significant component of this approach is awareness and education, which accounts for just 5% of the total model. This is where most workplace wellbeing initiatives spend the bulk of their time and money. Let’s have a closer look at each one of these components.
Awareness and Education
This is the most visible, well-known aspect of any behavior change strategy. This is where it’s all about you.
To create health awareness, wellness programs utilize health risk appraisals, biometric screenings, posters, flyers, videos, books, email notifications, text messages, payroll stuffers (such as snacks), Internet sites (such as blogs), magazines (for example), lunch and learns (to encourage healthy eating habits), special speakers (to educate employees about preventative care), and even contests (such as best weight loss, most steps walked in a day, etc.).
These health habits promote a positive, healthy lifestyle. They teach us what health risks are and what it truly means to have a higher health risk. They assist us in determining whether we have increased health risks or undesirable behaviors.
This blog is a testament to the power of awareness and education. Hopefully, the material you’re reading is beneficial to you, but awareness and education won’t be enough on their own to assist you in developing an effective behavior change strategy. You’ll also need to be motivated.
Motivation
Wellness programs frequently urge employees to adopt healthy lifestyles. The use of incentives is just one approach that may be utilized to encourage workers. We’ve all been able to modify our behaviors at some point in our lives.
We modify behaviors on a regular basis, and some of those changes become long-term habits. Consider the last major change you made in terms of behavior.
What compelled you to modify your old behavior? Why did you do it in the first place? Most likely, the last time you altered your habits, you didn’t do it because someone was offering you a financial incentive.
We may change behaviors for a variety of reasons. Peer pressure, affection, a desire for something greater, fear, and simply wanting to better our lives might all be enough motivation to make changes.
Skills and Tools
This is the “how” of behavior change. It’s one of the most essential components of effective behavior change, and we sometimes overlook it. Biometric testing is fantastic at identifying a person’s current health risks, but it won’t do much to decrease them unless it also provides people with the abilities and tools they need to lower their elevated health risks.
Knowledge and motivation are important stages in the behavior change process, but without the necessary skills and equipment, success is hard to achieve. We need to teach individuals how to modify their behaviors as wellness experts. We must demonstrate to them how to overcome the roadblocks that are preventing them from leading healthy lives. To eat properly, individuals must understand how to shop for, buy, and prepare nutritious meals.
It takes a lot of time, effort, and expertise to cook nutritious meals. It’s a talent to be able to read nutrition labels and discover flavorful veggies. Having the ability to plant a garden is a talent. It takes skill to conduct business meetings while ordering healthy food options.
Most of the abilities that are healthy have already been mastered by those who live a healthy lifestyle. People that live a healthy lifestyle know how to prepare vegetables in such a way that they taste good. There are skills for healthy eating, exercise, managing work-related stress, and avoiding tobacco. The best worksite wellness programs show employees how to do these things. You can teach these skills during lunch or by watching a video online. Having people bring in food from their hometowns will let them try different foods that are healthier for them.
Culture and Environment
The final stage in the behavioral change process is the most essential. It’s not simply about changing the culture and atmosphere; it’s also about updating workplace rules, creating social support, and altering physical surroundings. The most important because it has the biggest long-term influence on assisting individuals to adopt healthy habits. About 21% of Americans smoke cigarettes, but many people are attempting to quit.
Everybody should eat nutritious meals, but at least they are available and, in many cases, sold at a cheaper price point. This approach makes it simpler for individuals to purchase and consume healthier meals over less-than-healthy alternatives.
Employees can help promote wellness programs by participating in policy and environmental improvement efforts. To develop a healthy work environment, the worksite wellness committee must meet on a regular basis to discuss how to create one. This might also entail modifications in policy as well as actual changes to the working environment. It can cost more money to make your husband or wife part of the wellness program. But it is likely that you are also paying for their medical expenses. If the goal of the best worksite wellness programs is to reduce medical expenses, it only makes sense that you would help everyone improve their health.
Conclusion
People are always looking for new ways to improve their health and happiness. If you’re looking for a way to bring your employees together, help them become healthier, happier people, then investing in an effective best worksite wellness program might be the answer. Studies show that these programs can lead to improvements like decreased absenteeism rates or increased productivity levels. But not all of them work equally well across different types of businesses. So read on to find out which one is right for you.
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