Walking Health Promotion Programs are some of the most popular Employee Health Promotion Initiatives. They set the bar for entry fairly low – most anyone can walk around the block or their building – and walking health promotion programs also offers workers with a good way to break up the afternoon doldrums and interact in a casual, more social environment with other workers. Just leaving your desk for a few minutes every day for a little sunshine can be a big stress reliever – and stress is the #2 leading cause of absenteeism, according to Employee Health Promotion statistics.

As a first step to beginning your Employee Health Promotion Program, we recommend that you have a designer draw up an attractive map of your corporate campus or vicinity. Plan out and test a few short walks of varying distances, and using a pedometer and watch, figure out how long each walk is in time and distance. Have a little fun with your walking Employee Health Promotion Program by equating each walk with a common office activity of the same duration, like a writing a one-page status report or filling out a common form. Post the map in the workplace and make sure people know about walking health promotion programs by using your office communication channels – newsletters, announcements, corporation meetings. Keep it fun by building weight-loss teams, setting up races or organizing healthy picnics and athletic activities around the walking health promotion programs route.

Here are some other walking health promotion programs tips from Tom Weede, author of The Entrepreneur Diet: The On-the-Go Plan for Fitness, Weight Loss, and Healthy Living:

Make sure to link the walking wellness program to work objectives. Employees need to be reassured that these walks are part of their responsibility to be healthy and productive. They’re not personal errands that need to be compensated for by longer days at the office.
Keep healthy snacks in the workplace.
Reinforce the walking wellness program message by regularly mentioning it during staff member meetings
Set up a health-related benefit that walking health promotion programs participants can use for health-related expenses.

Health Promotion Statistics tell a clear story – corporate Health Promotion Programs are effective , and they save businesses money.

You should take note of these interesting Health Promotion Statistics:

Some 25 percent of U.S. businesses were running corporate Health Promotion Programs in 1996.
Health Promotion Statistics depict a savings of $2.30 to $10.10 for every $1 spent on health promotion programs.
Coca-Cola’s fitness program recouped $500 per year per staff member, despite the fact that only 60% of their staff was enrolled.
A Ipsos-Reid Employee Health Promotion statisics paper in 2004 found the three major preventable causes of staff absenteeism to be mental health (anxiety and/or depression), stress and a bad relationship with a supervisor.
Health Promotion Statistics from Prudential Insurance reveal a benefit expense of $312 per individual enrolled in their wellness system, but $574 per non-enrolled staff member.
At the Coors Brewing Co., Health Promotion Statistics illuminate a savings of $5.50 per $1 spent on fitness, with a positive side-effect of participant absenteeism dropping by 18%.

Employee Health Promotion benefits still aren’t self-evident to some executives, even though the research, real-world evidence and cost-benefit analyses are demonstrative. With careful planning, almost every corporation can reap Employee Health Promotion benefits.

Part of the problem is that some executives erroneously believe that the Employee Health Promotion benefits are mostly on the staff member side. The truth is that Employee Health Promotion benefits both the employer and staff member – and according to Employee Health Promotion statistics , the employer stands to gain $2.30 to $10.10 in cost savings per dollar spent. Employee fitness saves businesses money.

At the same time, healthcare and insurance costs continue to skyrocket. Employee Health Promotion benefits are one of the only ways to cut those costs while helping workers at the same time. As Karen Roberts, senior vice president with Aon Consulting, said about Employee Health Promotion benefits in her address at the 2006 WorldAtWork Total Rewards Conference & Exhibition, “If you can’t afford to invest in wellness this year, you’re never going to afford it.”

Employee Health Promotion benefits include helping to prevent cancer, obesity, heart disease and hypertension. It’s rare that businesses can cut costs and assist struggling workers, support families and even arguably save lives. Isn’t that a good thing?

Employee Health Screening means better heath risk assessment baselines and better security

“Employee Health Screening” is a hot phrase these days, but it can help your employees with health management, too. When the pundits talk about Employee Health Screening, they’re usually referring to retinal scanners, fingerprint readers, and other high-tech security measures. However, if you trace the phrase “Employee Health Screening” back to its roots, it refers to the measurement of unique human physical and behavioral characteristics.

Both security and Employee Health Promotion are of critical importance to the modern business. As a result, Employee Health Screening should be one of the tools in the arsenal of a forward-thinking organization.

On-Site health screenings aren’t just a “feel-good” measure for your workers. Assessments of staff member health help your workers to prioritize their well-being, which results in happier, more productive workers. Health risk assessments also build your database of staff member biometric data. Employee Health Screening, when handled workplace by our experienced professionals, is hassle-free and smoothly organized. The biometric data we collect then can be stored digitally for years or even decades, helping you and your employees build better health risk assessment baselines that you can use to analyze employees fitness and the efficacy of your corporation’s Health and Productivity Programs. Collected biometric data can even allow an staff member’s doctor to assess that individual’s health over many years, helping him or her spot trends and diagnose disease.

Our Employee Health Screening extends to a wide variety of health risk tests, including measurements of blood pressure, blood type, body fat, substance abuse, and susceptibility to cardiovascular disease. You or your corporate security department may find it useful to coordinate our Employee Health Screening and health screenings with your own biometric security procedures. Collecting biometric data for security purposes – like fingerprints, facial recognition imprints, or hand geometry – can be dovetailed with our health tests to minimize workflow disruption.

Employee Health Promotion: A Long-Term Committment

“Corporate Health and Wellness” – what does that phrase mean to you? To many of us, it evokes an array of ambivalent thoughts — the gym membership we barely used, the nagging ankle injury from last year’s corporation picnic, the backaches, the bratwurst we had for lunch, the love handles and of course, the fad diets that failed us or that we failed. Usually, Employee Health Promotion is a guilt trigger that causes us to feel remorse about our bodies and the health management we know we should be doing for them.

The sad fact is that we live in a society where our survival is dependent on sitting at a desk, not hunting game, picking berries and sprinting away from wolves. We also live in such luxury, nutritionally, that we can gain weight steadily without being wealthy. Cardiovascular disease, obesity and bad nutrition cause most of the Employee Health Promotion issues that weigh down staff member attendance and erode a corporation’s productivity.

It’s ironic that the poorest societies in the world – the ones furthest from the conveniences of modern life – often boast the fittest, most physically hardy members. And as for the animal kingdom — don’t look there for Employee Health Promotion commiseration. In the wild, it is extremely rare to find an animal that suffers from our kind of wellness issues.

Prescription Drug dependency degrades Employee Health Promotion

It doesn’t help that Americans are descending into a deadly love affair with drugs — and drug testing won’t help you with these drugs.

For example, Greg Critser’s book Generation RX details how Americans spend about $180 billion dollars on Prescription Drugs each year, with the estimated 2011 tally at a whopping $414 billion. The average number of Prescription Drugs per United State citizens in 2004 stood at twelve.

Twelve! That means that your average staff member is taking 14, 18, or even more than 20 medications in an attempt to improve their Health and Wellness.

Is this effective, though? Critser is not convinced that the prescriptions help U.S. Employee Health Promotion. In fact, he points out a bevy of negative Employee Health Promotion consequences for America’s legal drug addition, which include drug interactions, liver damage, and the legions of people who now depend on prescriptions to deal with ordinary trials and stresses.

An employer has the potential to improve Employee Health Promotion

It’s not all bad news, though. Occupational health screenings and well-designed corporate Health Promotion Programs can help you fight the downward Employee Health Promotion spiral for you and your employees. In fact, good Employee Health Promotion efforts – like a strong walking health promotion programs initiative – can literally save lives and reduce the symptoms that cause workers to turn to prescriptions in the first place.

Health Risk Assessment: Helping Quantify Employee Health help you quantify staff member health

An Health Risk Assessment (HRA) is an important tool to help you isolate the value of strong corporate Health Promotion Programs.

Health Risk Assessment: What is it?

Does the term “Health Risk Assessment” have you puzzled? If so, then you are not alone. Unfortunately there is no standard definition or format for a Health Risk Assessment. A health risk assessment is both a procedure and a document, too, depending on the context — you must answer questions and ideally undergo some simple Employee Health Screening to develop a document that describes what’s good and bad about your current state of health.

To add confusion to the situation, there’s a field called health risk management. Talk to an OSHA inspector about health risk assessment and they will likely assume you’re referring to an analysis of contaminants and industrial chemicals in a factory or manufacturing facility.

Health Risk Assessment: The Typical Health Risk Assessment

A comprehensive health risk assessment is aimed at producing a concrete baseline of a individual’s health, and includes most of these features:

a blood pressure check,
cancer testing,
blood glucose test, and
a analysis of the staff member’s health status.

Health Risk Assessments would analyze the staff member’s:

lifestyle indicators,
medical conditions,
medications,
functional concerns and abilities,
quality of life,
self-efficacy,
fitness level.

Health and Wellness Fair activities put the spotlight on Employee Health Promotion

A Health and Wellness Fair is a brilliant way to shake your employees out of the doldrums and into better awareness of their health and wellness. A Health and Wellness Fair brings your organization together to discuss Employee Health Promotion, examine Medical Insurance and “cafeteria” plans, explore health savings accounts, publicize corporate Health Promotion Programs and share success stories and challenges.

Some common Health and Wellness Fair desired outcomes include:

better awareness of the health services and resources available to workers, both from their employer and from local, state, regional and national health services;
increased motivation for improving health behavior
increased participation in staff member Health Promotion Programs, commuter and carshare programs and health savings accounts
better awareness of individual health status through health screenings, Health and Wellness Fair activities, displays, handouts, and demonstrations, and
better information on what workers are seeking from their employer’s health management initiatives, and which workers are interested in participating.

Planning a Health and Wellness Fair

Planning a Health and Wellness Fair is a lot like beginning an Employee Health Promotion Program on a smaller scale. Just like an Employee Health Promotion Program, your Health and Wellness Fair will need publicity, logistical planning, programming, targeted goals, in-house marketing and of course, executive approval. Festive touches like free food, kid-friendly activities, live music, art displays, talent shows and other community-minded fun will help cement the appeal of your Health and Wellness Fair and ensure that the Health and Wellness Fair becomes a welcomed, annual event.

You can find some Health and Wellness Fair planning tips at the Family and Consumer Sciences site of Texas A&M University. These Health and Wellness Fair tips are aimed more at community and non-profit organizers, but you can discover many useful Health and Wellness Fair ideas at the site.

Health and Wellness Fairs and Employee Health Promotion Program Recruitment

Many Employee Health Promotion planners find that Health and Wellness Fairs are the primary reason why workers sign up for walking Health Promotion Programs, health savings accounts and other pro-staff member corporate Health Promotion Programs.

Don’t forget – not only do workers value these programs highly, but the increased energy and decreased sick leave associated with Health Promotion Programs also saves your corporation money. The Health Promotion Statistics are clear – healthier businesses work harder and pay less in Medical Insurance premiums.