Health and Wellness Leads : Workplace Wellness Program Ideas: Support for Healthy Changes

Group reinforcement and encouragement can be very helpful 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 providing onsite reinforcement for healthy changes include:

• Employees can be asked to voluntarily submit recommendations, advice, and strategies related to particular healthy practices they have successfully implemented in their lives. For example, ex-tobacco users can be asked to submit recommendations about what worked for them when they quit; then those ideas can be shared in newsletters, brochures, classes, etc.
• Topics like weight management, 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 a regular basis to share ideas, resources, support, etc. Company Health Promotion Programs can offer some help and facilitation in getting a group going. The group then itself takes charge of keeping the group going. Periodically the wellness program can offer to bring in a speaker 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.