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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.

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We have written frequently about the benefits of walking meetings as a way to increase movement — and even improve a culture of health — in the workplace (for example here, here and here).

The benefits of walking were addressed as well by Afekwo Mbonu, Master of Public Health (MPH) Candidate at Lakehead University: ” Research from David Dunstan’s lab in Australia suggests that frequent light-intensity walk-breaks can greatly reduce the metabolic impact of prolonged sitting.  Pronk and colleagues have also reported that the use of a sit-stand device which reduced overall sedentary time by 16.1% per day, significantly improved participants’ moods (i.e., fatigue, confusion, depression and total mood disturbance) and related health outcomes (i.e., upper back and neck pain) compared to baseline, or periods where the sit-stand devices were not available.”

Mbonu further notes that “Walking meetings can be an effective way of breaking-up prolonged sitting without disrupting workplace productivity. Evidence suggests that reducing sitting bouts during the work day is achievable and such changes do not necessarily disrupt workplace performance.”

But one challenge for many workplaces is logistics — literally, how to make walking meetings work. One answer is to create Walking Meeting Paths. Mbonu describes the approach by The HALO group at CHEO’s Research Institute:

“A total of 12 mapped out routes were created as walking meeting rooms ranging in time from 15-60 minutes in duration (1-5 km). These were organized through Microsoft Outlook public folders and set up so that all hospital and research institute staff are able to book a walking meeting room– importantly the walking meeting rooms are never unavailable or “booked” as they can hold multiple simultaneous meetings. In a work setting where booking meeting rooms is always a challenge, the use of walking meeting rooms at CHEO has also reduced the pressure to the find adequate space for all scheduled meetings.”

And while some may cite objections to walking meetings, Mbonu notes how “most can be overcome with some foresight and planning. Such concerns may be the inability to take notes, or access the Internet; however, with the advent of smartphones and tablets, many programs can record conversations, search the Internet, and capture the ideas of any creative mind while in motion.”

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