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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.

We also welcome your comments — criticisms, ideas, and, yes, we take compliments, too! Have a thought of what you’d like to see — or see something you think others should know — drop us a line.

Thanks for visiting – and please come back again!

Transparency is extremely important to us, so we are letting you know that we may receive a commission on some of links you click on from this page. See our disclaimer.

Earlier this week we reported on the continuing problem of presenteeism — the challenge of employees who do not feel physically or mentally well, but show up to work anyhow.

As we have reported: “Employees coming into work when sick are contributing to a rising trend of ‘presenteeism’ across the UK, with more than half (52 percent) of UK workers admitting to going to work when their performance is negatively affected by work-related health issues, a new survey claims,” according to an earlier Workplace Insights post.

It continues: “A third (34 percent) of workers have even considered moving jobs due to the negative impact of their work environment on their health – the highest percentage across Europe. The report from Fellowes, published to coincide with World Day for Safety and Health at Work, argues when a worker is present but not able to perform their function properly, it compromises their productivity. With most employees continuing to work at sub-par levels rather than taking days off to recover, this also prolongs the effect of illness. Subsequently, businesses are experiencing a detrimental knock-on impact on the quality and volume of work produced, with a further impact on overall business performance.”

As for the cost implications, Louise Shipley, European Business Team Manager – Workspace Management at Fellowes said: “With European businesses already losing a staggering €73 billion annually due to absenteeism, employers simply can’t disregard the worsening problem of presenteeism taking effect.”

A new Workplace Insights post reports on “a survey of 2,496 UK employees on their attitudes and behaviours around work presenteeism and illness in the workplace.”

Other insights from the report — while based in the UK — could provide useful guidance for U.S.-based workplace wellness programs:

  • The average British worker worked over four days when they were genuinely ill and should have stayed at home last year
  • 75.3 percent of surveyed UK employees reported having worked whilst genuinely ill last year
  • Over half of UK employees (52.0 percent) had delayed seeking medical advice because they didn’t want to take time off work
  • Over a third (38.8 percent) of UK employees have delayed seeking medical advice, only to discover that they needed treatment
  • Almost 80 percent (79.6 percent) of surveyed women reported going to work ill, compared to over 70 percent of men
  • Young people (those aged 16-24) were far more likely to go to work ill (86.8 percent), take unpaid leave (25.1 percent) or lie (14.8 percent) to see a GP

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