MOST Analysis

Mission Statement

Strategic Wellbeing Plan: most of us are used to creating strategic business or marketing plans. But when it comes to health and wellness, we don’t even think about applying our strategic thinking to assist us in creating a bespoke plan.

This module looks at the difference between corporate and individual wellness plans and why they’ve been treated differently for so long. This module will then show you how you can integrate the two to create a strong wellness platform for your organization.

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Objectives

01. Why You Want a Well Workplace – understand the components of wellness and why it’s critical to get them right in your workplace.
02. Corporate Wellness Programs – deep dive into the importance of developing and implementing a comprehensive and individualized health and wellbeing strategy to support employees.
03. Personal Wellness Programs – explore the role that personal wellness plans play, and how an organization can assist employees to develop a plan that works within the corporate wellness plan.
04. Strategic Wellness – understand the role that wellness plays within the strategic business plan and explore what can be achieved when a bespoke plan is championed from the top of the organization.
05. Personalization – explore what can be achieved when corporate wellness plans, personal plans and strategic plans come together and work towards the same goal.
06. Psychosocial Hazards – understand the changing landscape of workplace versus personal responsibility and look at the psychosocial hazards that are now identified within every workplace.
07. Wellness Leadership – understand the role that leadership plays in the wellbeing of an organization.
08. Meaningfulness of Work – deep dive into the wellness issues surrounding the meaningfulness of work and look at ways to increase meaning in every employee’s life.
09. Employee Morale – learn about the role that morale plays in a positive organizational environment and look at the ways that high morale can significantly impact the wellness of a workplace.
10. Employee Motivation – learn the impact that motivation has on the performance of a team and understand the role that motivation has on the day-to-day wellness of your workplace.
11. Employee Engagement – explore the critical role that engaged employees plays in the wellbeing of your workplace and learn about different ways you can engage your workforce in the wellness journey.
12. Investing in Health and Wellness – understand what it really takes to create and implement a bespoke wellness program for your organization.

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Strategies

01. Engage and elicit expectations for the program.
02. Understand the importance of strategic wellness planning and complete exercises that assist in embedding this knowledge.
03. Set aside time to study the information, tools and resources in the workshop.
04. Set aside time to meet with their team to discuss the elements of the workshop.
05. Identify, and make a list of, the key personnel needed to participate in health and wellness discussions.
06. Participants to complete the exercises as directed in each course manual.
07. Allocate time to consider the current effectiveness of any health and wellness program in place.
08. Without conducting any in-depth research, identify where strategy can play a role in adding depth and breadth to the existing health and wellness programs.
09. Identify elements where strategy can boost areas that are working well from existing health and wellness programs.
10. Identify the convincing rationale for creating a bespoke health and wellness program.
11. Create a clear narrative regarding the need to incorporate strategic elements in creating the framework for a health and wellness program.
12. Set aside time to identify, and write down, any additional commitment required to create a strategic plan for the health and wellness journey.

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Tasks

01. Set aside time to read through course manuals and make notes.
02. Allocate time to read the workshop’s preliminary analysis.
03. Identify the key personnel needed to create an effective health and wellness program.
04. Ensure relationships are built with key personnel through regular meetings, discussion and gathering ideas.
05. Schedule a meeting within the next 30 days for participants to meet and discuss workshop.
06. Participate in small groups during the workshop to share observations and reflections.
07. Determine and schedule the time needed to dedicate each workshop.
08. Demonstrate preparedness, commitment and personal presence at each workshop.
09. Prepare questions, seek feedback and create a plan for personal growth.
10. Each exercise in the workshop must be fully completed by the participants, and they must share the process and outcomes with the group.
11. Participants should identify and put into practice the adjustments presented throughout the workshop in order to finish their project.
12. Participants are asked to go over resources for ideas and choose at least one new tool from the list to use.

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Introduction

The second workshop in the Simplified Wellness Program – Strategic Wellbeing Plan – focuses on understanding what a well workplace is and why it needs to underpin the strategic goals and direction of the organization.

During this workshop, you’ll learn why you want a well workplace, how corporate and wellness plans differ, and where they need to come together. You’ll also learn about the importance of understanding the link between a well workplace and morale levels, motivation, psychosocial hazards and the engagement of your employees.

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History

The beginning of workplace wellness can be traced to the Italian physician Bernardini Ramazzini (1633–1714), who is credited with being among the first to write about the effects of work exposure on employees (occupational diseases) and to have been intrigued by the prospect of taking preventative measures to enhance employee wellbeing (Gainer, 2008). Due to the way work was reorganized and systematized during the Industrial Revolution, which began fifty years after Ramazzini’s passing, numerous new health issues and injuries emerged.

Welsh social reformer Robert Marcus Owen suggested a 10-hour workday in 1810 to better safeguard the welfare of laborers. The 8-hour workday was his goal by 1817, and he also came up with the term “eight hours labor, eight hours pleasure, eight hours repose” (Donnachie, 2000). The Ford Motor Company was one of the first businesses in the United States to broadly adopt Owen’s concept.

Charles Turner Thackrah is credited with penning the first recorded report of industrial workers’ health issues in 1832 (Gainer, 2008). As a result, Thackrah’s book is regarded as trailblazing in its effort to enhance employee wellbeing. The evil of employment is the accidental one of intemperance, according to Thackrah’s book (Thackrah, 1832, p. 18). This comment from Thackrah may have been suggesting that in these times, employers frequently ran their businesses without consideration for moderating or restricting the working circumstances for their employees.

Despite these significant accomplishments, workplace wellness was typically a secondary concern for businesses until the introduction of Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) in the 1950s, when businesses started to provide wellness interventions primarily centered on alcoholism and mental health problems (Owens, 2006). True workplace wellness initiatives didn’t truly start to exist until the middle of the 1970s, claims Reardon (1998).

Aat this time, a perceived shift in financial responsibility for health care was from the government to the employer. Cost-cutting was the main driving force for the establishment of worksite wellness (Reardon, 1998). It was also connected to the initiatives of the worksite health promotion movement (WHP), which emerged in the late 1970s, and the occupational safety and health movement (OSH). The following factors have been attributed to the development of worksite health during this time:

• a broad cultural change that prioritized fitness
• insights from recent studies demonstrating the expense of employees’ bad behaviors
• newly established organizations that promote workplace health, like the Wellness Councils of America and the Washington Business Group on Health.

A further indication of the growing concern for employee health was the establishment of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) in 1974. To protect the people who are part of these plans, it created the minimal requirements for the majority of freely organized pension and health care plans in the private sector.

In 1979, Johnson & Johnson launched the Live for Life initiative, which went on to serve as the model for major corporate worksite wellness initiatives. The program included a questionnaire and a physical examination to gather data on each participant’s levels of exercise and body fat measures. Using this data, the business could then offer assistance with managing risk behaviors, such as stress management, diet and weight control.

When a new political government took office in the United States in 1980, the federal level’s focus on health promotion changed. However, occupational wellness initiatives started to appear in scholarly publications in the early 1980s. The majority of the publications at this period focused on how workers’ health and performance were affected by their efforts to be physically active. The Journal of Occupational Health began publishing articles in 1982 that examined how wellness programs for the workplace can lower absenteeism and other costs associated with illness, as well as a couple that talked about how fitness centers might perhaps draw in top talent.

Outside of EAPs, workplace wellness initiatives in the United States in the 1980s appear to have prioritized physical wellbeing over other facets of health. Companies began addressing psychological wellbeing issues as part of a more comprehensive workplace wellness strategy in the late 1980s. The OSH launched a program that focused on the mental health of employees in 1986. Its objective was to address the problem of diseases of mental health at work (mainly focused on stress-related illness). The National Institute of Mental Health then introduced another program in 1991 called Managing Depression in the Workplace.

The federal government proposed that 75% of firms with 50 or more employees give health promotion services as a benefit in the 1990s as part of the Healthy People 2000 initiative. Although there was little data to support the benefits of workplace wellness, managers who began promoting such programs more broadly began to hold the view that workplace health promotion benefited a firm by having a beneficial impact on employees. Wellness and health promotion initiatives during this time were typically split into three levels:

• Level 1 – focused on awareness (e.g. classes, posters, health fairs)
• Level 2 – focused on behavioral and lifestyle changes (programs that typically lasted up to 12 weeks and provided instruction to promote habit change).
• Level 3 – focused on the environment (these programs had no time limit and encouraged the work environment to support the changes through organizational structure and increased knowledge)

CAN’T READ CHART 2.14

According to the National Survey of Worksite Health Promotion Activities from 1994, 44% of businesses had facilities for exercise and encouraged participation in activities, and 30% of them conducted employee health risk assessments. The Pender Health Promotion Model started offering guidelines for creating occupational wellness programs in 1996. This model expanded on the physical aspect of health by adopting a holistic perspective on an individual. It provided businesses with a framework to work within and focused on changeable habits. A new edition of the initiative Healthy People 2000 – called Healthy People 2010 �