According to George Goyal from Houston, behavior change is the key to have a successful wellness program. The best wellness programs keep focusing on the need to help employees adopt and maintain healthy behaviors. Behavior change is key to reduce the health risks, reduce the prevalence of chronic disease and reduce employee-related expense. It is not possible to have good health without having healthy behaviors.
George Goyal Houston is here with the points showing how to establish and design the workplace for employees.
Wellness requires healthy behavior
There are many factors determining how healthy we are but none of them can be as important as our behavior. The large epidemiological studies that include hundreds of thousands of individuals giving us the information and rationale that we require to keep the focus on helping the employees to change their behaviors.
Behavior change theory meets reality
There exists an enormous body of scientific literature explaining how human behavior work and it can be changed in the real life. The literature explains the complex behavior change models that accurately show every complexity and nuance of the behavior change process. There are tens of thousands of published research papers explaining behavior change. You would have probably heard of such behavior change models.
Such models include the stages of change model, precede-proceed model, trans-theoretical model, social cognitive theory, and many others. All these have complicated explanations regarding how humans change behaviors.
Awareness and education
All of us are aware of the parts of the behavior change process. It can be considered as one of the easy parts of wellness.
The wellness programs use healthy risk appraisals, posters, biometric screening, videos, books, text messages, email notifications, internet sites, payroll stuffers, magazines, lunch and learn, company newsletters, special speakers, blogs, and many other forms of communication to develop wellness awareness.
Each of these wellness activities helps the users to become aware of and get educated regarding good health practices. All these help us to know what health risks are and what it really means to have an elevated health risk. These help to understand whether or not we have increased health risks or unhealthy behaviors.
Motivation
It is necessary to have extensive motivation in every wellness program. Most of the wellness programs keep on encouraging the employees to participate in the various types of health-promoting activities.
The use of incentives is one major strategy that can be used to motivate the employees for health-promoting activities. All of us can change our behaviors at one time or another depending on the situation or work.
We keep on changing our behaviors constantly and some of the behaviors become our daily habits. Think of the last major behavior change you implements in your lifestyle.
Skills and tools
This states “how” is the behavior change. It is one of the major aspects of having a successful behavior change and it is the one that we perhaps neglect the most. Biometric screening is a great way to help people understand their current health risks. Apart from this, screening also helps people with the skills and tools they need to reduce their elevated health risks but it may not do much to improve the health of your employee.
Culture and environment
The last step of the behavioral change process is also the most important. It is not only about changing the environment and culture but is about altering the policies of the workplace, creating social support, and changing the physical environment.
Adopting strict policies is not the only solution to have a successful worksite wellness program instead carefully crafted and supportive policies are. Having healthy food options in the cafeteria or canteen is a supportive policy.
The effectiveness of wellness programs in real world
Many companies use technology to facilitate the behavior change processes. Rather than relying only on the stand-alone wellness web portal for information, this wellness program is interactive. It is a behavior change platform using social media, weekly tasks, video, quizzes, goal setting, team competitions, reminders, push notifications, text messaging, and incentive tracking to educate, motivate as well health-promoting skills and tools.
The wellness programs in the real world may include various types of activities such as simple quizzes, short videos, games, wearable device integration, materials, team competitions, demonstrations, incentives, behavior change strategies, and peer support.
Conclusion
If the main goal of your wellness program is improving the health of your employees and reducing their related expenses, the only realistic solution will be helping the employees to adopt and maintain healthy behaviors. The above-mentioned ways are how the wellness programs work if they are to be effective.
George Goyal Houston brought you a few major pieces of information regarding the online wellness programs that help employees to establish and design them at the workplace.