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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.


As businesses consider which aspects of employee wellness to focus on, the results from a recent Gallup survey show that they may want to begin with smoking.

The report concludes that “Workers who smoke cost the U.S. economy an estimated $278 billion annually in lost productivity due to absenteeism and extra healthcare costs. This figure is based on an analysis of the cost of extra missed workdays due to poor health, partial absenteeism due to smoke breaks, and additional healthcare costs compared with workers who do not smoke.”

The data come from “more than 67,000 interviews conducted as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index from Jan. 2-Aug. 21, 2013, with American adults who work at least one hour or more per week.”

Some good news: The number of smokers is dropping. Gallup reports that “Smoking rates among U.S. adults dropped steadily from highs of around 45% in 1950 to 22% in 2005. Since that time, however, the decline in smoking has abated, with the national smoking rate staying in the 20% to 21% range consistently since Gallup and Healthways initiated the Well-Being Index in in 2008. The percentage of workers who smoke has consistently hovered just slightly below the overall rate.”

But the bottom line for employers is clear: “As employers increasingly engage in improving the health of their workers, smoking cessation programs continue to represent a substantial means of reducing healthcare costs and absenteeism. Although other wellbeing-based programs can and should be embraced, the critical issue of reducing smoking in the workforce endures as a high return on investment for employers.”

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