A Wellness Program In A Wellbeing Workplace
For the last 50 or so years of its approximately 130 year history, the worksite wellness/wellbeing community has encouraged employers to create, invest in and operate worksite wellness programs. For several reasons though, wellness was sold to employers not as the multi-dimensional — multi-domain concept it was conceived and published to be. Instead, it was sold as being a singular, exclusive focus on the physical health of employees. This meant that worksite wellness was never really wellness at all, but rather the term wellness became a proxy term for physical health, much the same as mental health is used today as a proxy term for mental illness.
The good news is that employers heard our message and created worksite wellness programs. The last number I saw estimated that approximately 80% of large employers and approximately 50% of small employers offer some type of wellness program to their employees.
As you might expect, these programs encompass a wide range of programming and interventions. The last nationwide worksite wellness program survey in the U.S. in 2017 revealed that only about 17% of the responding employers offered what is considered to be a comprehensive worksite wellness program.
Thanks in part to several random controlled (the gold standard of program evaluation) evaluations of worksite wellness programs which found that worksite wellness programs studied didn’t work, the worksite wellness community began to promote workplace wellbeing as opposed to worksite wellness. Today, employers are widely being encouraged to focus on wellbeing instead of wellness. Wellness is out, wellbeing is in.
But here is the funny thing… Anyone familiar with the published models of wellness and wellbeing can quickly and easily see there is no appreciable difference between the two. They are, in fact, synonyms, so the terms can be used interchangeably.
While wellness models are just as broad and deep as wellbeing models, only the physical health domain of wellness was ever implemented by most employers. The broader concept of wellness was never really implemented. As a result, employers became comfortable implementing a one-dimension (physical health) worksite wellness program.
I would suggest that because of their breadth and depth, wellness and wellbeing can never ever be successfully implemented as a program. They are just simply too big of a concept to implement.
But as we saw and learned from the implementation of the domain of physical health, we can implement programs around or about any one domain of both wellness and wellbeing. Domain specific programming and interventions can certainly be implemented according to each employer’s model of wellbeing with its own specific domains as chosen by the employer.
Since employers are already familiar and comfortable with the term wellness program, all that is needed is for employers to recognize and understand that the term wellness program can be applied to any domain within the employer’s wellbeing model. There can be worksite wellness programs devoted to physical health, mental health, economic security, career, socialization and so on. Essentially, you end up with worksite wellness programs within a model of wellbeing.
By promoting domain specific worksite wellness programs within the model of wellbeing, there might be a greater willingness on the part of employers to begin addressing employee wellbeing in the workplace.
What do you think of this idea?
