Health Incentives - Why Implement A Company Wellness Program?

As I mentioned in passing yesterday, there are many benefits to starting a company wellness program. Your full-time employees spend more time at the workplace than anywhere else during their waking hours, making it an ideal place to promote healthy habits and the benefits to both employees and employers can easily outweigh the costs of setting up such a program.

Benefits to employees includes lower body weight and better physical fitness, which will increase their overall stamina, self-image and self-esteem, while also lowering stress levels -- all important factors in raising employee morale and productivity levels. As if those benefits were not enough, employers will also reap additional advantages from lowered health care costs and reduced employee absenteeism due to illness and injuries.

Those benefits are nothing to scoff at as the company savings and profit margin boost can be quite significant. A 2002 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report on the benefits of workplace wellness programs discovered that employer health plan costs were reduced by up to 55%. Additionally, short-term sick leave were reduced by up to 32% and productivity shot up to an astonishing high of 52%.

These programs don't have to be expensive. As I demonstrated yesterday, a simple promotional hospitality or health care product can help start the process towards building a healthy corporate culture. However, this process takes time and there is a right and wrong way to do it. For more information, check back next week when I will be discussing how to start building a wellness-friendly corporate culture.