Health Wellness ProgramHealth and Wellness Programs and Wellness Program Consulting

Group reinforcement and encouragement can be very beneficial in helping employees make healthy changes. Create situations, peer groups, or information avenues where the expertise and experiences of coworkers can be shared with others. Some ideas for offering workplace reinforcement for healthy changes include:

• Employees can be asked to voluntarily submit ideas, advice, and strategies related to particular healthy practices they have successfully implemented in their lives. By way of example, ex-smokers can be asked to submit ideas about what worked for them when they quit; then those ideas can be shared in newsletters, brochures, classes, etc.
• Topics like weight control, stress management, managing change, increasing exercise, etc. lend themselves to this development of collective wisdom sharing.
• Behavior change support groups, created based on employee interest in making healthy change, can meet on regularly to share ideas, resources, support, etc. Employee Wellness Programs can offer some assistance and facilitation in getting a group started. The group then itself takes charge of keeping the group going. Periodically the wellness program can offer to bring in a presenter on a topic relevant to the group. Be sure to help the group set ground rules that everyone agrees to before the group is left to itself.