Comprehensive Wellness Programs and Why they WORK

Wellness programs are a great way to increase health awareness among your employees. There are many great companies out there that can provide health assessments, life health consultations, and overall benefits management. They offer great tools that can help keep the healthy people healthy and assist the unhealthy towards moving in the right direction of health. 

A great tool to help your employees track their health is the American Heart Association's Heart360 Program. https://www.heart360.org/Default.aspx

Here your employees can track blood pressure, blood glucose, physical activity, smoking cessation, and weight management.  There are reporting capabilities here that you could instill in your employees and have them report their progress to you.  In order to encourage participation and create the most promising results, incentives are always vital to the success of a program like this. 

A great system that has worked for one of our clients is using this reporting system for their employees. Each month the employee tracks their activity and the client reports this activity to us at Bukoo to load the points into the system. The points they earned during the month turn into buying power for items on their customized rewards site.

Other options are to seek out agreements with local gyms for your employees if you do not have the budget or space to put a gym in your office or on your campus to promote physical activity.  Bring out the competitive side of your employees by holding a contest for who can lose the most percentage of their body weight over a given period of time. However you choose to implement a program, know that it is a great investment of resources and you will save in healthcare costs, and maybe even save a life.