Wellness Training Program Components

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Public Health recommends wellness education and personal counseling in their Wellness At Work Program. For your company to achieve the maximum return on investment, such a comprehensive and integrated Wellness Training program would consist of five parts:

• A Wellness Training to educate employees and their dependents,

• A personalized Wellness Profile for each employee and dependent to identify their specific opportunities to increase their wellness,

• Individualized coaching of each employee and dependent to identify how to take best advantage of those opportunities and provide the necessary accountability over time to create new behaviors

• A personalized wellness program will be recommended for each employee and dependent regarding sleep; exercise and diet; and when necessary, recommendations for nutritional supplementation to compensate for inadequacies to achieve increased wellness.

• Establishment of an organizational Core Value of Wellness through training of all management and employees to generate a continually increasing positive work environment that improves both psychological and physical wellness to sustain improved employee lifestyle behaviors.

The five parts of the program are interdependent and all are essential to achieve the desired objectives.

Just as employees at one time did not understand the risks of accidents and how to prevent them, many have poor comprehension about what conscious actions and habits are required to produce wellness. Most people do not understand how

• insufficient sleep and high stress increase the risk of infection and major illness, or

• inadequate exercise reduces energy and performance, or

• lack of specific nutrients leads to body deterioration and vulnerability to minor and major disease.

The majority of people do not appreciate that the cells in their body have limited lifetimes and that millions of them must be replaced every day using the nutrients from the food they eat. Without this knowledge, employees and dependents have neither reason nor motivation to take action to reduce their illnesses and associated costs.

The first step in creating new wellness improving behaviors is for employees and their dependents to become fully aware of how wellness is produced in the human body. Most people know that wellness is the product of sleep, exercise and nutrition; but few people understand how these three interrelate to produce wellness. It is common knowledge, whether people apply it or not, of how to sleep. Similarly, most people know how to get adequate exercise, again whether they do it or not. The fact is that very, very few people know how their body operates internally and specifically how the food they eat determines that operation.

A Wellness Training with a series of 10 sessions has been developed to present a close look at the factors that affect a person’s health and wellness. The training provides a unique systems approach to understanding the interconnection of the human body’s subsystems and the impact of sleep, exercise and nutrition on each of them. In addition, the training addresses the four most significant wellness threats and how to reduce their risks and the probability of needing expensive medical treatment for them.

Critical wellness concepts are reinforced through repetition in the training to assure a clearer understanding of these interrelationships allowing people to accept the need for behavior changes that will improve their quality and quantity of life. During the training, audiences develop a deeper understanding of what can be done to increase wellness and to create motivation for them to move toward optimum wellness. This information is sourced from reputable medical publications on wellness.

While each of the 10 sessions in the series focuses on a particular topic, each session is complete on that subject. However there is a logical sequence in the series with following sessions building on the previous ones. Maximum value is obtained from attending all sessions so as to understand the interconnection between all of the wellness topics. With the basic theme of "Your Body", the series provides practical and applicable information to increase wellness and decrease risks to major health threats. Experience has shown that when attendance is only voluntary, less than 25% of employees will participate and gain the knowledge necessary to consider developing wellness-improving behaviors. Consequently, to maximize the reduction in health care costs, a very high percentage of employees and dependents should attend.

These are non-commercial, educational sessions with each running about 40 minutes, are designed to fit into a noon hour or other convenient time in busy schedules. This training has been presented to a number of organizations and has been rated high in quality, value and quantity of information. While these sessions provide general education about what produces wellness in the human body, they do not identify for the individual specifically what she or he needs to do to increase their own wellness. That is the purpose and necessity of the personalized Wellness Profile.

Once motivation to change behavior has been established through the Wellness Training, individuals require personalized guidance to address their unique wellness opportunities. The personalized Wellness Profile is a survey of the individual’s current physical symptoms and identifies sub-clinical conditions that if left unaddressed can become wellness issues that would require health care services and costs. Without this specific guidance, attendees would be left on their own and could waste time and valuable resources while trying to guess what would most improve their wellness. The Wellness Profile was developed by Ph.D Physiologist Lee Coyne.

While both the Wellness Training and Wellness Profile provide vital information to the employee or dependent about how to improve their wellness, neither provides the structure necessary to develop the new habits that will increase and maintain their wellness, which is why personalized wellness coaching is necessary. Experience has shown that for the greatest decrease in health care costs resulting from greater wellness, it is essential that the majority of employees and dependents participate in the personalized wellness coaching process.

Personalized coaching provides counseling and accountability over a period of time long enough to establish new behaviors, typically 4 months. The first coaching session will use the Wellness Profile results to empower each participant to choose the areas of wellness she/he most wants to address. Based on her/his selection, the specific behaviors they can adopt to increase their wellness will be identified. Subclinical nutritional inadequacies relevant to wellness will be identified and a program to establish optimal biochemistry to correct those deficiencies will be started. Follow-on coaching sessions will assess progress in establishing new wellness behaviors. The Wellness Profile will be repeated at the end of the first and fourth months to assess improvement

In addition to accountability, these coaching sessions will provide the time-spaced support, positive reinforcement and encouragement that are critical to establishing the new wellness behaviors. The coaches that will be supporting your employees and dependents each have decades of success in guiding hundreds of individuals to greater wellness. Their individual wellness coaching experience is multiple times that of coaches in any other organization providing this service. That unique experience is critical to producing success for a company.

While positive behavior changes in employees’ sleep and exercise will improve employee wellness to a degree, they will not deal with the dominant factor decreasing employee wellness: poor diets resulting in subclinical nutrition inadequacies deteriorating the body. Significant improvements in employee and dependent wellness are only possible by improving the individual’s body chemistry. Numerous peer-reviewed studies in the American Journal of Health Promotion (www.healthpromotionjournal.com/database.htm) database validate the improvement in wellness that results by changing body chemistry through better nutritional behaviors of employees.

Every case of reduced wellness; whether due to disease, infection or other situations; is the result of body biochemistry that is inadequate to maintain/restore wellness. Exercise and sleep cannot provide the body with the biochemicals/nutrients necessary to achieve wellness nor can either be effective without all of the nutrients needed to accomplish the chemistry both enable. Only nutrients obtained from food will give the body’s biochemistry the building blocks needed to overcome those deficiencies and increase wellness.

Unfortunately, it is impractical for employees to correct those inadequacies effectively without gaining excessive weight from consuming the very large quantity of food that would be necessary. If food supplements need to be recommended, only those derived from food and that have been proven to be effective in independent clinical tests that have been reported in credible medical journals will be recommended to the employees’ to assure increase in their wellness.

Psychological stress in the workplace dramatically reduces wellness by decreasing immune system function, as well as diminishing the body’s ability to maintain wellness, and must be minimized. For that reason, a psychological work environment that strengthens the immune system is essential to preserve the improvements produced by the other parts of the Wellness Training Program. A unique part of the best-in-class program accomplishes this by addressing the one psychological factor that according to National Institute of Health research strengthens the human immune system and simultaneously increases employee performance, attendance and retention. This requires creating an organizational culture with Wellness as a Core Value, where management and employees are effectively trained to create and maintain such a workplace environment that minimizes fear and stress.

Get Started Today!   or   Learn more...