Getting the Most out of your Wellness Seminars (The Guardian : 24/01/2018)

Corporate Wellness Seminars are a means to share health information with the employees and are becoming more and more common as employers recognize the long-term benefits they provide to both employees and employers.

The benefit to Employers:

  • Promotes positive image for looking after employees’ health and wellbeing
  • A healthier and more active workplace
  • Reduced employee absence levels, therefore, reduced sick leave costs
  • Improved productivity, performance and motivation
  • Improved employee morale and employee loyalty

The benefit to employees:

  • Receive invaluable information about health issues
  • Receive recommendations to actively improve health and prevent any future problems from arising
  • Enhance self-esteem and job satisfaction.

Carefully designed Workplace Wellness Seminars should aim at helping your company achieve wellness goals. They should:

  • Introduce wellness goals to your employees
  • Be delivered by educators who are well experienced in adult education
  • Be interactive, participatory with a fun factor
  • Discuss practical adaptation of healthy lifestyle habits
  • Guide employees through improving their health safely
  • Help reduce health insurance premium costs.

Well planned and well-delivered seminars

  • Offer two-way communication with lots of interaction with the audience.
  • Are short and entertaining with one to two key health messages
  • Address practical subject matter and deal with an important employee health issue
  • Are friendly, respectful and approachable
  • Encourage audience to participate and ask questions
  • Create a cheerful atmosphere with lots of laughter and interruptions
  • Checks that the audience has understood

Poorly planned and delivered seminars:

  • Are a one-way lecture – only the presenter talks
  • Are long and boring with too many messages for the audience to remember
  • Are theoretical or decided on without considering company priorities
  • Use a lot of technical jargon
  • Have minimum/nil interaction with the audience
  • Insist on a formal atmosphere
  • Do not promote any interaction
  • Audience is silent
  • Do not check for audience understanding

Employee Wellness Seminars should be planned and delivered so as to help your employees achieve healthier, more productive and happier lives through health literacy on leading healthier lives and preventing and/or managing serious illnesses.

 

Reply back to bhakti@impactafya.com or call +255 754 694 643 with your feedback. We welcome your suggestions for corporate wellness tips you’d like to see covered in our future columns.

Bhakti Shah, MPH is the Founder and Managing Director of ImpactAfya Ltd, collaborating with Workplace Options and Mayo Clinic, USA to provide Corporate Wellness and EAP Solutions in East Africa. Bhakti is also the Advisor for the Africa Business Portal and the former President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Tanzania.

 

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