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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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Presenteeism — the challenge where employees who are not at their physical or mental healthiest still come to work, but don't necessarily perform at their fullest capacity — and abstenteeism are two significant business cost drivers that well-run workplace wellness programs are designed to help reduce.

We reported on a study titled “Healthy and productive workers: using intervention mapping to design a workplace health promotion and wellness program to improve presenteeism” that looked at the issue of presenteeism to determine ways to address this improtant workplace issue.

As the study states: “Presenteeism is a growing problem in developed countries mostly due to an aging workforce. The economic costs related to presenteeism exceed those of absenteeism and employer health costs. Employers are implementing workplace health promotion and wellness programs to improve health among workers and reduce presenteeism.” The study sought to “use an intervention mapping approach to develop a workplace health promotion and wellness program aimed at reducing presenteeism.”

Now a new UK-based survey looks at the role of mental health on presenteeism and absenteeism.

The firm Wildgoose conducted a survey of employees from 250 companies across the UK and asked the participants:

  • “Whether they had suffered from a mental health-related issue in the last year”
  • “What they did upon developing mental health symptoms”
  • “What they felt could be improved upon in the workplace regarding supporting those with mental health symptoms”

Of those who hadn’t taken a day off in the last year due to poor mental health, when asked what they thought they would do if were to suffer from mental health symptoms:

  • “62% of employees surveyed said they had taken a day off work in the last year due to anxiety, depression or stress”
  • “Of that 62%, just under half (44%) admitted to calling in sick with a different issue”
  • “43% said they would say nothing and try and carry on as normal, compared with 4% saying they probably would call in sick with a different issue”
  • “Only 15% said they would share the issue with a manager or someone within HR”
  • “Interestingly of everyone surveyed, only 3% of people who had suffered from a mental health-related issue managed to work through it without having to take a day off”

And this translates to real costs.

The analysis adds: “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.”

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