5 TIPS BEFORE IMPLEMENTING YOUR WELLNESS PROGRAM

With large companies, like Google and Facebook, taking wellness programs to extremes – and spending a large chunk of money in the process — it can be difficult to understand how the costs balance out for smaller businesses. With just a little digging, though, it’s clear that employee wellness is a sound investment for even the smallest of businesses.

At a small business, employee wellness brings about a unique set of benefits. Yes, you could still see a positive ROI, which is a great perk to wellness in any business. You might also notice improved productivity, easier talent acquisition and retention and an increase in brand recognition.

Perhaps you’ve heard about all these great wellness benefits. Maybe you’re thinking of starting a wellness program where you work. Or you might even be revamping a program you’ve already implemented. Regardless, there are a few things you should know before diving into a wellness strategy.

1. There’s no “right way.”

There really isn’t a formal definition of “wellness program.” Your wellness program can include anything from providing health education materials to bringing preventive services into the workplace. There are a wide variety of things you can work into your program, and it’s completely dependent upon your corporate culture and goals.

Many people get caught up in the idea that employee wellness needs to include crazy and expensive wellness perks. That’s simply not true. Your program can be as robust or as simple as you need it to be. Don’t get caught trying to find rules, requirements or the right way to do wellness. None of those things exist.

2. Inclusivity is important.

One common misconception about employee wellness is that it excludes people with existing health conditions. Many people worry that wellness only works for people who are already relatively healthy. If that’s the case in any wellness program, it’s not being done right.

You can’t force employees to participate in your wellness program, but you do need to make it accessible to every employee at your company. If disabilities or health conditions are a concern, plan for that and make adaptations to your wellness activities as needed.

3. Adaptability is mandatory.

Like many corporate strategies, a wellness program isn’t something you can plan and then forget about. It needs to be a living, breathing strategy that changes as your company changes. Be flexible.

Ultimately, employee wellness should mesh seamlessly with your corporate culture. In a startup or small business, that culture can change as you try to settle into your industry, and develop your corporate identity. Let your wellness program be adjusted according to your culture.

4. It’s actually working.

There’s no reason to be skeptical about whether employee wellness is worth your effort. It is. And there’s plenty of research to show it. In fact, according to a survey by Kaiser/HRET, 59 percent of employers reported their programs actually improved employee health. Similarly, wellness activities have been associated with an eight percent increase in productivity.

The best way to tell if wellness is working at your company is to be sure you build you program with evaluation in mind. Obviously you’ll have measures to track your direct ROI – just as you would with any new business investment. You can also track things like biometric health results, productivity and employee satisfaction year-over-year (YoY) to determine the longer term impacts your program is having.

5. You’re not alone.

A majority of companies have begun to think about employee wellness as a business strategy. While the percentage of smaller businesses that have actually begun implementing wellness programs remains fairly low, few small business owners dispute the idea that a wellness program would be good for their bottom line.

Increasingly positive attitudes toward employee wellness suggest a coming surge of wellness program implementation. Staying ahead of that surge can help give your business an edge and one added benefit. Being an early adopter of employee wellness allows you to differentiate your business from others in your corporate space in regards to both public image and recruitment of talented employees.

Starting a wellness program is a great way for a small business to invest in both its workforce and its bottom line. Getting started with employee wellness can seem overwhelming or confusing, especially when it comes to scaling down the large, expensive wellness programs that are often thrust into the public eye.

If you’re considering wellness where you work, or trying to get a program started, you’ve made an excellent first step. Keep gathering information and building a program that works for you, your employees and your company.

You can also get more info by following the links: Chair massage company, Chair massage in Orlando, Marketing event chair massage, Event Chair Massage USA, Convention booth chair massage, Orange County convention chair massage, Trade show massage Orlando & Workplace Chair Massage.

HACKS CAN EASE THE TRIALS OF AGING

When Barbara Beskind, 92, had trouble reaching foods in the back of her refrigerator, she installed a lazy susan on an inside shelf. The revolving tray makes items much easier to reach. Ms. Beskind, a former occupational therapist in the Army who has age-related macular degeneration, a disease that reduces her central vision, also attached small tactile bumps to the “Answer” button and the “2” and “8” keys on her phone, making it easier for her to respond to and make calls.

Many older people, like Ms. Beskind, are forgoing high-tech gadgetry in favor of common – and usually much cheaper – items from office supply and hardware stores, repurposing them to solve everyday problems. Sugru, a moldable putty that turns into rubber, can be used to round out sharp corners on furniture in order to prevent injuries. Rubber bands can be affixed to cups to make them easier to grip. A clothespin can be clipped to the rim of a cup with a drinking straw taped to it to hold the straw in place. A pants hanger can hold a cookbook open at eye level.

Glen Hougan, who teaches industrial design at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, calls creative and resourceful repurposes like Ms. Beskind hackers, a term often applied to computer programmers who develop creative workarounds, or hacks, to particular problems. He began researching hacks designed to ease the burdens of aging in the early 2000s, after finding that many of the store-bought items that were available to the elderly were sterile, generic and lacking in variety. One of his favorite hacks involves hanging an old stocking in a shower with a bar of soap tucked into the foot. As the soap gradually shrinks, it remains inside the stocking instead of a becoming a slipping hazard on the floor. The slightly abrasive nylon stocking material has the added benefit of exfoliating the skin.

As part of a fellowship at the Center for Innovation at the Mayo Clinic, Mr. Hougan interviewed residents at a nursing home and found that they hacked products for a variety of reasons. Some could not afford to buy new things on a fixed income. Others had a background in engineering or design and liked the challenge. For some who grew up during the Great Depression, resourcefulness was a lifelong habit.

The most common adaptations centered around making prescription medications easily accessible and trackable yet portable enough to carry to the doctor’s office, Mr. Hougan found. The organizational systems varied but generally consisted of a calendar tacked to the refrigerator, a spreadsheet recording the names and dosages of each medication, and dollar store bins or shoe boxes arranged in drawers.

A Pew research study found that many older people lack digital literacy and remain skeptical about the benefits of learning to use the latest technology, or find that off-the-shelf products fall short.

“When I’ve tried prescription management apps and entered multiple medications, I’ve found them to be quite a hassle,” said Dr. Leslie Kernisan, a 40-year-old geriatrician in San Francisco who writes about geriatrics and technology on her blog, GeriTech: In Search of Technology That Improves Geriatric Care. She finds that many of her older patients bring in written paper logs of their daily medication use, which can be easier for both doctors and patients to use. “In fact, I find that paid home caregivers and agencies also prefer paper records, even though their workers are clearly adept with smartphones,” she wrote in an email.

To help his design students better understand the challenges of aging, Mr. Hougan had them wear an “empathy suit” — a specially crafted suit that emulates the physical sensations the elderly go through on a daily basis. The suit includes shaded goggles that create a narrow field of vision. The suit’s legs are tethered together so the wearer has limited mobility and must shuffle instead of walk. Headphones muffle atmospheric sounds. Gloves limit the ability of fingers to manipulate objects, and the wearer breathes through a straw to simulate having diminished lung capacity.

Many of the students who donned the suit expressed how much they dreaded growing old. Mr. Hougan now calls it the “aging/ageist suit” and uses it in workshops as a tool to talk about the psychological effects of aging and to confront biases about growing old. The exercises helped him to revamp a number of home health care products for his design studio, BlueZone Design, including a redesigned, foldable bedside commode that can be easily squirreled away if visitors drop by.

Ms. Beskind, the 92-year-old who installed the lazy susan in her fridge, has put her resourcefulness to good use. Since 2013, she has worked as a designer at the global design firm Ideo, where she is developing an idea for eyeglasses equipped with a micro camera, earpiece and facial recognition software that would make it easier for those with central vision problems like hers to recognize others.

Ms. Beskind’s presence at a prestigious design firm provides a unique perspective. “Designers think they can put themselves in the shoes of the aging, but you don’t really know until you’ve lived with the realities,” she said. “Seniors are living longer and more productive lives. This community is an untapped resource for designers. We need more designers open to working on what works for us.”

You can also get more info by following the links: Chair massage company, Chair massage in Orlando, Marketing event chair massage, Event Chair Massage USA, Convention booth chair massage, Orange County convention chair massage, Trade show massage Orlando & Workplace Chair Massage.

3 WAYS TO CULTIVATE GRATITUDE AND BOOST YOUR HAPPINESS

“Gratitude can turn common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.” ~William Arthur Ward

Living in India for more than two years now has been an eye opening experience for me, as I’ve realized how I used to take so many things for granted. While growing up and living in my home country (Bosnia and Herzegovina) in Europe, I was lacking gratitude for all the blessings that surrounded me.

While sitting in our penthouse apartment in the New Delhi suburbs, in an air-conditioned room, still feeling the need to chill with a cool water or a mango shake due to the intense heat (which can reach up to 118° in the summer), I could observe the construction ground across from our building.

Constructions workers would come in at 9am and work for twelve hours, with only a short lunch break, without proper safety equipment, chilled water, or any shaded cover to rest.

While they’d wipe sweat from their face, I’d imagine how hot they must be feeling, as I was sweating even in an air-conditioned room.

Some of them were working together with their wives, who would help them earn their daily wage (equal to $1).

These women would carry piles of cement and bricks on big pots on their head, from one side of the construction site to another, sometimes climbing many stairs as well. In my home country, I never saw women working on construction grounds or carrying such heavy loads on their heads.

Their children would play in front of the construction ground with sand and small rocks, as their parents could not afford to send them to school.

I thought about how, in my home country, children often complain that they “have to” go to school and people complain about how tough their jobs are. These people in New Delhi could not even dream of sending their children to school or having an eight-hour job in an air-conditioned office.

The wives who didn’t work on the construction ground would work in our building as maids. One of them cleaned our home. Every day she came in with a water bottle, which she’d cool in our refrigerator, as they did not have an electricity, not to mention a refrigerator, in the slum where she lived with her family.

After cleaning our home, she’d run back to hers with a chilled water bottle in her hands, almost losing her breath, as if she was afraid the heat might warm that water before she would return. Then she wouldn’t be able to cool her small children, who were waiting in the heat in a slum without a fan.

Since that day, I never look at the ice cubes in my drink the same way I once did. Ice cubes were just pieces of frozen water, until I saw that for some people, even chilled water is a luxury! Ice cubes are a symbol of wealth and abundance to me now.

I suddenly became grateful for all the things I am blessed with in my life, even the small things, like ice cubes, chilled water, nutritious food, a fan, an air-conditioner, mosquito repellent in the night, clean running water in my home, electricity—not to mention the “big” things, like an opportunity to get educated, to grow up in a beautiful home, which was warm in winters and cool in summers, my job, the power to choose my own husband.

I never thought I should be grateful for choosing my husband. Yet, in a place where arranged marriages are still tradition, I realized that it was a blessing that I was born and raised in an environment where I could fall in love with a man and choose to marry him.

Although arranged marriages do work here, and I see people fall in love after marriage, or at least create a relationship based on kindness, mutual respect, and care, I feel so grateful every day that I had a chance to choose the man I thought was the right for me, with my parents’ blessing and best wishes.

We often take the things we have for granted, yet in many other parts of the world, there are people who would feel blessed and happy if they could enjoy them on a daily basis.

If we just take a look around us we could find so many things to be grateful for.

Some of the practices that can help us to cultivate the feeling of gratitude in our life include:

1. Gratitude journaling.

Keeping a gratitude journal, where we note all the things (or at least three things) we feel grateful for every day, can be a powerful reminder of how blessed we are.

Noting down even simple things—like a delicious dinner we enjoyed, a warm home, a cup of tea or coffee, time spent with our beloved—can be a powerful practice to keep us grounded in a positive mindset on a daily basis.

2. Creating a list of possibilities and blessings.

It helps to write a list of all the things we are blessed with, things we usually see as givens, that in other parts of the world are not available to many people.

So many women around the world still do not have the right or the opportunity to get educated, and so many children cannot attend school or University due to lack of financial resources. According to WHO, 12.9 percent of the world’s population (over 1 billion people) is undernourished and will probably go to bed hungry tonight.

Millions of people around the world do not have an access to clean, running water and electricity, which in Western countries we usually take for granted.

Having a roof over our head, a warm room, a meal on our plate, a degree or opportunity to go to University, electricity lighting our home, and cool water in summers are all big reasons we can feel grateful every single day.

3. Shifting our perception.

Instead of feeling sad and frustrated about being single, we can look at this same circumstance from another perspective—as the freedom to be able to choose our partner and wait until we find the right one. This simple shift can help us move from a negative emotional state to a state of gratitude.

In the same way, we can shift our perception of looking at other things, like the job that we don’t like or our living conditions.

When we catch ourselves complaining about housework, we can see it as a blessing that we have our own home and, as a result, clean it with gratitude.

Instead of feeling annoyed that we have to cook dinner, we can feel grateful that we’re able to afford groceries. We can also consider it a blessing that, in this modern era, we do not need to manually wash our dishes or clothes.

When we catch ourselves complaining about the job we hate or feel bored with, we can feel grateful that we have a job and regular income that can pay our bills.

We can also be grateful for small things, like air conditioning in our office, having weekends off, or the fact that we don’t need to be exposed to harsh weather conditions or safety threats every day, like so many people in other corners in the world.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to achieve more and move ahead in life, but we can never be truly happy if we do not appreciate what we already have.

You can also get more info by following the links: Chair massage company, Chair massage in Orlando, Marketing event chair massage, Event Chair Massage USA, Convention booth chair massage, Orange County convention chair massage, Trade show massage Orlando & Workplace Chair Massage.