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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.

Last week we reported on a new survey that highlights connections between mental wellness and presenteeism and absenteeism — two key cost drivers that well-run workplace wellness programs seek to address.

Indeed, a key piece of analysis from Wildgoose focused on the bottom line cost to employers: “It is imperative that employers address the issue of mental health symptoms within the workplace, particularly as it is estimated that the average cost to a business per employee as a result of absence due to mental health symptoms totals £1,035 per year.”

The survey results support a related issue that we recently noted: A Workplace Insights piece reports that the challenge may be even greater than previously thought: “Two thirds of workers too embarrassed to tell boss about mental health issues.”

The data support the important role that a well-run workplace wellness program can play in promoting mental health awareness in the office.

The piece states: “New research from job site CV-Library claims that nearly two thirds (60.2 percent) of employees feel embarrassed about disclosing information on the state of their mental health with their employer. What’s more, 60.8 percent feel they cannot talk about it with their boss.

The Wildgoose post seems to support the conclusion — adding a key component to the ways that well-run workplace wellness programs need to be aware of mental health challenges.

The findings “suggest that employees feel they would not wish to be honest about the fact a mental health condition was impacting upon their ability to work, should they develop symptoms. This could be down to the fear of being stigmatised, or a reluctance to admit they are struggling.”

It continues: “The fact employees felt they would cite a different reason for having to take time off has implications for the perception of mental health in the workplace as a whole, as the more people feel they cannot be honest, the less likely the perception is to change.”

Indeed, the data are powerful: “20% of those surveyed who haven’t suffered from a mental health issue feel that destigmatising these symptoms in the workplace is essential, vs. 47,5% of those who have suffered, reiterating how essential sufferers feel it is to break the stigma of mental health.”

One conclusion: “Having a more effective mental health policy should go some way towards reducing the need for extended periods of time off work, whilst reducing the number of those who resign (7% of those surveyed).”

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