At the recent awards ceremony honoring Michigan’s Best and Brightest Wellness Champions, AFG had the pleasure of announcing the Elite winners in the Philanthropic, Faith-based and Education categories. It is evident after spending a day with these award-winning companies that wellness has had an enormous impact on their culture- from increased productivity and reduced absenteeism, to disease prevention and team-building, and better job performance.
In a recent SHRM article, Stephen Miller discusses a recent study, Opening a Closed System: The Influence of Health Culture on Job Performance, which reviewed the relationship between employer’s health culture and employees’ job performance. The study explored 1,268 employees at 52 U.S. organizations and the employees rated their organization’s interest in their health culture and measured the difficulties they encountered in their job performance.
The majority of respondents, 86 percent, rated their organization’s health culture as excellent or good. The study also demonstrated that employers with a weak health culture experience employees that are less careful at work, do not work as often or consistently as they should, have difficulty concentrating and get less work done compared to employees who rate their employer high in health culture.
This study supports the importance of incorporating wellness in the workplace, and employee benefits is a great place to start.
Here are 3 ways you can begin to incorporate wellness into your culture today:
1. Beef up your employee benefits education and provide wellness resources
Encourage preventive care, annual health screens and flu shots. Preventive care visits are covered 100%, and most insurance plans will also cover flu shots. Provide wellness resources by engaging your marketing and HR department to help produce healthy recipes, health tips, and other valuable information for your employees.
2. Company leadership message
Successful wellness programs and a health culture must be top-down. If leadership isn’t on board, your employees won’t be either. Consider a message from leadership about the importance of wellness and corporate acceptance of employees who wish to explore a healthier lifestyle.
3. Healthy snacks and H2O
Consider providing healthy snacks like fresh fruit and bottled water to your employees for free. It’s an easy place to start and they will appreciate it!
Congratulations again to all the organizations honored as a Best and Brightest Wellness Champion! You are leading the way towards a healthier Michigan!
