Employee Wellness Plans : Worksite Health Promotion Program Ideas: Support for Healthy Changes

Group support and encouragement can be very beneficial 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 providing worksite support for healthy changes include:

• Staff Members can be asked to voluntarily submit suggestions, advice, and strategies related to particular healthy practices they have successfully implemented in their lives. For example, ex-smokers can be asked to submit suggestions about what worked for them when they quit; then those ideas can be shared in newsletters, handouts, classes, etc.
• Topics like weight control, 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 regularly to share ideas, resources, support, etc. Workplace Health Promotion Programs can offer some assistance and facilitation in getting a group started. 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 to itself.