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Workplace Wellness Lab delivers leading insights, ideas and information on wellness, health management, and healthy living.

Our goal is simple: Workplace Wellness Lab provides regular and better information as an important path to create healthy individual outcomes, while helping change health care in America.

By connecting the audiences that matter – consultants, corporate executives, policymakers, thought leaders, journalists, customers, and more – we establish a positive, substantive, and influential voice within the wellness industry that makes the case that:

    • Left unchecked, current trends in health spend and outcomes are unsustainable.
    • Given that half the healthcare dollars in this country are incurred by employers, well-executed preventive care health management programs in the worksite are clearly enduring and valuable, helping drive improved workplace environments and individual outcomes.
    • Industry coherence around private sector innovation to drive effective health management programs is economically vital, given what’s possible in a spend category that is arguably one of the greatest challenges in America today.

Workplace Wellness Lab comes at this challenge principally from the employer point of view: What are the credible and demonstrated best practices in preventive care to structure programs that have an enduring impact? How can the impact be made explicit, as something that is both the right thing to do and a proactive business initiative that lowers the cost of care, as experienced by both employers and employees?

And Workplace Wellness Lab goes beyond the workplace. It’s a robust platform filled with ideas and insights from those that influence how employers think about this opportunity: research organizations, non-profits, think tanks and more.

From an editorial point of view, great ideas can come from anywhere. With that philosophy in mind, we will combine our own original content with other content across the web. We organize the content, with a view to making it as simple and useful as possible.

All content will be sourced. If we found it somewhere, we’ll tell you where we got — and how to get to that site yourself.

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It's a topic we've addressed frequently: How can fitness trackers be most useful as part of a well-run workplace wellness program? (For example here, here and here.)

Now a new study addresses the question: “Are wearable ATs [activity trackers] reaching a population that has not been reached by the fitness industry?” The study, published in the American College of Sports Medicine Health & Fitness Journal, is titled MOVE MORE, SIT LESS, AND BE WELL: Behavioral Aspects of Activity Trackers.

The authors looked at a wellness program and the investigated: “Could wearable ATs combined with training or coaching help to change personal movement patterns? ATs may serve as a reminder of the need for behavior change by increasing awareness.”

The answer: Combining health coaching with activity trackers matters.

The authors write that the “results revealed that a combination of coaching and AT usage increased the importance of regular PA [physical activity] for employees as well as their confidence to sustain PA and movement. Ninety-three percent of employees agreed working with a student coach helped them develop effective health and fitness goals. Ninety percent agreed that the combination of coaching and AT usage helped employees sustain their health goals after their coaching ended. When asked about their social connection with students, 92% of employees agreed that engaging with students connected them better with the university.”

For some participants “it was initially hard to focus on PA and sedentary living rather than the exercise portion of human movement patterns, but they eventually appreciated the difference a small amount of movement throughout the day can make in participants’ lives. Breaking the traditional focus on what counted as movement was enlightening for both students and employees. Could ATs better meet the needs of those who have not joined a gym? Could this concept help account for the mass popularity of these devices? ATs might be reaching a market that is untapped by the fitness industry but also could appeal to a much larger portion of the population. The fitness profession’s perception of human movement patterns has traditionally been focused on the exercise portion of human movement patterns. ATs could help the fitness professional transition to include the PA and sedentary living portions of human movement patterns.”

 

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