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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.


workingwellness_a250pxWe know that wellness is personal — and effective wellness solutions must be personalized for an individual's needs, goals, and circumstances. Given this, to understand “Why well-being matters,” the USA Today recently published a panel discussion sponsored by MediaPlanet.

The panel includes Cathy Kenworthy, President and CEO, Interactive Health; Jim Prendergast, CEO, HealthiestYou; Danna Korn, Co-Founder and Chief Energizing Officer, Sonic Boom Wellness; and Jan Bruce, CEO and Co-Founder, meQuilibrium.

One question these leaders addressed covered the role employers should take in encouraging employees to take a more active role in their well-being? Responses include:

  • Kenworthy: “Setting and meeting health goals successfully is empowering for both employees and employers, and is consistent with a workplace environment, assuming that issues associated with privacy and fairness are well-managed. The health of an employee base sets a tone for an organization, and the opposite is true as well. Employers pay for more than half the health care in America, which gives the private sector a vital interest in the promotion of preventive care, and an opportunity to take action and generate change. And, with the right approach, one that is in line with an organization’s goals and personalized for each employee’s health risks and goals, the outcome can be truly transformative. The opportunity to effectively apply preventive care techniques within employee populations is known science and smart business.”
  • Prendergast: “Employees should take more control over their health because health care is transferring more and more risk to the employee. Failure to take control of your health will mean more out-of-pocket expense, less employer savings on health care and thus, diminish wage increases. If the financial shift does not motivate employees to take care of themselves and make better, more informed decisions about their care options, then the increase in costs will be shared by all and limit the growth of the company as well as the employee.”
  • Korn: “People sometimes want to shirk the responsibility of their well-being to others: “Doctor, give me a pill … Employer, pay my bill … Mom, why’d you pass me those fat genes?” But like anything else, once someone realizes, “I’m in control of this,” they become empowered… It only makes sense that the employer should encourage employees to take a more active role in their well-being. After all, it’s the employer who is typically burdened with the bulk of health care costs. It’s the employer who bears the brunt of rising rates. It’s the employer who gets stuck with the bill for lack of productivity due to presenteeism, absenteeism and ineffective, stressed-out employees.”
  • Bruce: “Command and control is out. The strategy today is to take care of your employees and they’ll take care of your business. Inherent in this idea is to encourage people to take a more active role in their well-being. What’s really significant is the profound impact that emotional well-being–stress management, resilience and mindfulness can have on employee productivity, capacity and motivation. People are working harder, working longer and, are often actually doing more jobs as technology enables us to complete more tasks. It’s really important to recharge. We recharge our cell phones each night. Let’s recharge ourselves as well.”

The entire discussion can be read here.

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