Three Workplace Wellness Programs and Recommendations

Smoking Cessation Program

Find Three Examples Of Workplace Wellness Programs. Assess Their Appropriateness For Your Workplace And Make Recommendations On What Programs Or Elements Of The Program Should Be Implemented At Your Workplace. Provide Justification For Your Recommendations.

The paper aims to discuss about the three wellness programs to be taken as examples and their appropriateness to the emerging issues operating in the industry concerning the health of employees. The paper focuses on the main three employee wellness areas namely- the physical activity, tobacco usage and the mental health.

The program is appropriate for the increased usage of smoking by the employees in their personal lives and the harmful effects created in their biological health. The excessive workload and the work stress cause the employees to take smoke breaks often in the workplace which cost the company the opportunity time lost (Kava et.al, 2018).

The Program Can Be Implemented Through Provision Of Gift Coupons To The Employees In Order To Encourage Their Motivation To Curb The Harmful Habit Of Smoking.

The workplace should put signs of no smoking in the stairs as well as outside the corridors of the workplace to prevent frequent smoking breaks

These recommendations are to be imposed to not only improve the morale and the urge to decrease their smoking habit but also keeping the workplace discipline maintained with less productivity hours misuse in terms of smoke breaks or leaves and the reduction of healthcare costs to the employees who may suffer from illness due to smoking (Papia et.al, 2018).

Figure1: The cost of smoking to the company per year on an average

This program is appropriate for the promotion of stress management and the mental health of the employees in the workplace. The employees often burnout and suffer from frustration to meet the deadlines and meeting the targets (Karimi et.al, 2019). This creates lots of physical and mental stress on the employees making their productivity drop and degrading their work values.

1. The program should seek active participation from all the employees in the workplace.
2. There should be practice sessions of meditation and yoga for thirty minutes in the workplace

The recommendations are justified in the sense that employees need to de-clutter their mind and structure their daily tasks with proper time management (Hafenbrack, 2017). This mindful Monday sessions can help them connect to themselves in a better way and self-reflect their mechanism of working. The employees can concentrate on their work better and their performance can be seen increasing with no procrastination.

Figure 2: The benefits of workplace meditation

The appropriateness of the program lies in the fact that employees in the workplace are often not involved in the physical activities keeping their body fit. They either sit down in their workplace or move seldom to bring coffee or visit cafeteria. The employees should be physically fit. The only way out for the employees to make them actively engage in the physical activity is to encourage the climbing of stairs rather than taking the elevator (Yang et.al, 2019).

1. The employees should be given physical fitness coupons in their lunch for climbing extra flight of stairs.
2. Three days a week should be the climbing the stairs activity being the initiative take n by the company
3. The calories are to be counted on the weekend and prizes to be distributed at the end of the month to highest stair climber with maximum frequency.

 The program is justified in the sense that climbing stairs help the employees who suffer from increase in heart beat, asthma, and illness with sugar and diabetes (Koster, Lehmberg & Kneidl, 2019). The employees should be encouraged to take the stairs more and look after their physical health beside the work commitments. This will help in increasing the employee commitment.

Table: The amount of calories burned on climbing the stairs 3 times a day with the number of flights

Conclusion

In conclusion, out of the three programs, the two most important programs being the mindful Mondays and the smoke cessation program should be taken on an emergency basis due to the increase in smoking rate and mental health issues.

References

Hafenbrack, A. C. (2017). Mindfulness meditation as an on-the-spot workplace intervention. Journal of Business Research, 75, 118-129.

Karimi, L., Kent, S. P., Leggat, S. G., Rada, J., & Angleton, A. (2019). Positive Effects of Workplace Meditation Training and Practice. International Journal of Psychological Studies, 11(1).

Kava, C. M., Parker, E. A., Baquero, B., Curry, S. J., Gilbert, P. A., Sauder, M., & Sewell, D. K. (2018). A qualitative assessment of the smoking policies and cessation activities at smaller workplaces. BMC public health, 18(1), 1-10.

Köster, G., Lehmberg, D., & Kneidl, A. (2019). Walking on stairs: Experiment and model. Physical Review E, 100(2), 022310.

Papia Sultana, M., Rahman, T., Roy, D. C., Akter, S., Jung, J., Rahman, M. M., & Akter, J. (2018). Tobacco control policies to promote awareness and smoke-free environments in residence and workplace to reduce passive tobacco smoking in Bangladesh and its correlates. PloS one, 13(6).

Yang, B. R., Zhang, Y. C., Lee, H. H., & Tanaka, E. (2019, August). An Automatic Transformation Method for the Walking Assistive Device to Walk between Flat Ground and Stairs Safely. In International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (Vol. 59230, p. V05AT07A036). American Society of Mechanical Engineers.