TITLE

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.


eight-dimensions-wellnessTo help people better recognize and achieve wellness – including in the workplace – the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) created the Eight Dimensions of Wellness:

  1. Emotional—Coping effectively with life and creating satisfying relationships
  2. Environmental—Good health by occupying pleasant, stimulating environments that support well-being
  3. Financial—Satisfaction with current and future financial situations
  4. Intellectual—Recognizing creative abilities and finding ways to expand knowledge and skills
  5. Occupational—Personal satisfaction and enrichment from one’s work
  6. Physical—Recognizing the need for physical activity, healthy foods, and sleep
  7. Social—Developing a sense of connection, belonging, and a well-developed support system
  8. Spiritual—Expanding a sense of purpose and meaning in life”

While individuals can adopt practical strategies to strive toward these eight dimensions on their own, employers can help by targeting that second dimension: the environment in which people work. In particular, employers can provide a number of services, such as healthy food discounts or organization group exercise, to promote employees’ cardiovascular health and, ultimately, their overall wellness.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), “employers play an integral role in helping individuals improve their cardiovascular health by creating worksites that support blood pressure control, cholesterol management, tobacco control, good nutrition, and physical activity.” The department’s national initiative Million Hearts® aims to prevent 1 million heart attacks and strokes by 2017 by bringing together employers, communities, and organizations to implement interventions that work.

So, what exactly do these interventions look like? The city of Asheville, NC, and a local hospital system implemented a community-based program to help 12,000 employees control their blood pressure control and manage their cholesterol. According to HHS, “participating employees received employer-sponsored face-to face counseling and educational classes with clinically trained educators and pharmacist, [along with] reduced or eliminated copayments on medications.” As result, employees experienced fewer cardiovascular health incidents, had lower medical expenses, achieved their blood pressure and cholesterol goals more frequently, missed fewer days of work, and improved their overall health.

In the Eight Dimensions of Wellness, SAMHSA emphasizes that individuals can still achieve wellness even when they have a health condition, like heart disease. And the employees in Asheville, NC, demonstrated just that. Inspired by their success? For additional tips on creating environments that support employees’ cardiovascular health, see the Cardiovascular Health Action Steps for Employers guide from the Million Hearts® initiative.

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This