Worksite Health

Starting a Wellness Program - For Employees

Maintaining your individual health is only one part of creating a healthy work environment. Here you'll find information to help guide you in your efforts to create a healthy atmosphere for you and your coworkers.

Encouraging Your Employer to Start a Wellness Program

This is the first step in creating an all around healthy work environment. In recent times more and more employers are starting to see the value of promoting and supporting the health of their employees. Partnership for Prevention, a nonprofit organization, has released a sourcebook called "Healthy Workforce 2010". This sourcebook is an excellent resource containing information on:

Benefits of wellness programs
Suggestions on where to begin
Tools like surveys and evaluation forms

These resources are for both employers and employees to guide the development and assess the effectiveness of their new wellness program. Offer it to your employer as a place to begin or read it yourself and present your ideas.

Participating in Your Worksite Wellness Program

Once you have an onsite worksite wellness program established, participating fully in all aspects of the program is important. Many of us know that we need to more actively engage in health promotion and wellness efforts to improve our health, yet have difficulty finding and taking the time to do so. These simple steps can jumpstart your participation in a wellness program:

Examine the offerings that interest you and that you need for health improvement.
Schedule time to go to the presentation or service.
Actively following through with recommendations from the program.

Make a decision now to improve your health. You will feel better today and tomorrow and the next day for actively moving towards wellness.

Here is a list of potential wellness programs that might be available to you at work:

ergonomic evaluations and training classes
lactation rooms and classes
prenatal education
quiet rooms for relaxation
stress management programs
fitness facilities
massage therapy
nutrition education
onsite primary health care services
child care facility or resources and referral service
smoking cessation programs
parenting classes
elder care resource and referral service
cholesterol, blood pressure and glucose screening programs
flu vaccination
weight management programs
health care consumerism programs
employee assistance program
lifestyle coaching
mobile mammography
holistic health education sessions

Other NetWellness features about Worksite Health:

For more information:

Go to the Worksite Health health topic, where you can:

Read articles on this topic
Browse the previously asked questions
Ask your own question.

This article is a NetWellness exclusive. NetWellness Article

Last Reviewed: Sep 05, 2008

Elizabeth R. Click, ND, RN, CLE
Assistant Professor
Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing
Case Western Reserve University