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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.


How significant is the connection between workplace wellness and the drive to help employees stay active — thereby helping them stay healthier, while also helping reduce businesses' health care costs?

As Jason Kelly, Bloomberg’s New York Bureau Chief and author of “Sweat Equity: Inside the New Economy of Mind and Body” told us in a podcast last year: “An entire economy… in apparel, gear, and entry fees” has formed around people’s “pursuit of wellness.”

But new UK research indicates that many employees may not sense sufficient encouragement from their workplaces, which in turn may reduce their inclination to stay fit.

Workplace Insight reports: “The majority of UK employees (61 percent) do not feel encouraged by their employer to lead an active lifestyle, despite most managers agreeing that exercise positively impacts employees’ productivity (78 percent) and their ability to handle stress (82 percent) claims new research from AXA PPP healthcare.”

Further: “Sixty-two percent of employees with good intentions to exercise at work find they’re cancelling their lunchtime exercise plans due to workload or work commitments.”

One solution may be for businesses to be more mindful about their engagement activities.

Indeed, as we reported previously, an estimated $2.2 trillion dollars is spent each year on chronic illnesses, employee disengagement, stress and work-related injuries, according to the Healthcare Trends Institute. To subsidize workdays missed, US employers spend $153 billion. Perhaps, it’s quite clear then, why workplace wellness strategies and the incentives used to increase employee engagement in such programs are top of mind for US employers.

If designing and kicking off a workplace wellness program is the one half of the battle, the other half is ensuring employees participate – and key to seeing returns on the company’s investment in workplace wellness.

Human psychology can help. B.F. Skinner’s positive reinforcement theory concluded that when good behavior is followed by positive reinforcement, such as a reward, that good human behavior is reinforced and highly likely to repeat in the future. One way to reinforce engagement in the workplace wellness program is through financial rewards.

As the Workplace Insight post states: “According to AXA PPP healthcare, whether it’s organising exercise classes at lunchtime, providing subsidised gym access or simply encouraging a more active commute, employers should do their best to promote and support employees to be active during the working day.”

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