I attended the WELCOA Summit this past week in San Diego. This was my first WELCOA summit, and I found it inspirational and of value to attend. There were a few hundred attendees from all over the country. Most of the attendees worked as wellness professionals inside organizations. The theme of this year's summit was "Start a Movement: Transforming Employee Wellness."
My four most important lessons from this year's summit are as follows:
1. Health promotion professionals must help turn workplace wellness into a movement. To do that, we must get away from talking about statistics and embrace more stories and more emotional buy-in. Stories and emotional buy-in often captures attention more than statistics. Laura Putnam and Josh Levine, two speakers at the Summit, talked a lot about this. Statistics are important, but they rarely persuade people to change. To start a movement, health promotion professionals must redefine themselves as "agents of change." They must take the expert studies on workplace health promotion and translate them into something meaningful for program participants. This usually entails listening to participants and understanding what gets in the way of them making healthy choices.
2. Health promotion professionals must redefine and expand wellness. Redefinition is necessary because not all organizations embrace workplace wellness programs. But, those organizations may be more willing to invest time and resources into employee training and development. Recasting wellness as "energy" - energy to do your job or fulfill your purpose in life may be a more effective way of incorporating wellness into a company's culture. Organizations can help boost employee energy by providing internal support, resources and tools, such as wellness programs. In addition to redefining wellness, we need to expand our scope to look at nontraditional determinants of health. According to Alexandra Drane, another speaker at the summit, "unmentionables" such as stress from finances, relationships, work, or care giving, are the factors that actually drive health or lack thereof. Health promotion professionals must acknowledge these unmentionables and then start asking people about them and finding resources for them.
3. Wellness programs must examine an organization's culture. As said by Dr. Rosie Ward, another presenter at the summit, "A toxic culture eats wellness for breakfast." In other words, an organization that has an unhealthy culture for its employees will not experience great success in any wellness program initiative. To turn culture around, Josh Levine recommends that health promotion professionals start small. Start with a business unit or a group of close-knit co-workers and encourage one another, getting coffee as a team, conduct "walking meetings." Others may then want to join in, and slowly, over time, this may change the organization's culture to one that is more supportive of employee well-being.
4. The law needs to be part of the wellness program equation. To my surprise, there was no discussion about wellness law at the summit. When the attendees sitting at my table discovered that I am a lawyer, they had numerous questions for me about GINA, HIPAA, the ADA and the FLSA. In fact, one of my table mates stood up during the summit and declared to all that her table had a lawyer who needed to be up on stage telling everyone about legal issues in workplace wellness program design. I was flattered she stood up for educating attendees about the law. The Center for Health Law Equity, LLC aims to fill that gap. The legal profession has neglected the wellness industry for far too long.
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