Worksite Wellness Ideas: Support for Healthy Changes

Group support and encouragement can be very helpful in supporting 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 offering worksite support for healthy changes include:

• Staff Members can be asked to voluntarily submit ideas, advice, and strategies related to particular healthy practices they have implemented in their lives. By way of example, ex-smokers can be asked to submit ideas about what worked for them when they quit; then those ideas can be shared in newsletters, flyers, 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. Worksite Wellness 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 presenter 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 on its own.