Redesigning Wellness Podcast

Today I talk with Stephanie Downs, WellBeing Coordinator at Iowa State University. Stephanie has been a health promotion practitioner for 25 years so has seen the evolution of worksite wellness.

Stephanie has always favored a non-traditional path to wellness and really likes to see the whole person. She tells us about her 5 Guiding Principles, challenges at a University and what she’s most excited about today. After this interview, I can see why Stephanie was recognized as one of WELCOA’s Top 50 Health Promotion Professionals for 2016. 

For full show notes, visit: https://redesigningwellness.com/category/podcast/

Today I talk to Mitch Martens, Employee Wellness Administrator at Cedars-Sinai Health System. I met Mitch at a HERO conference about 2 years ago and he’s one of those people I immediately connected with. Mitch has a background in psychology and got tapped by the hospital to start their wellness initiative in 2012.

Mitch provides some insight into how he became in charge of wellness at Cedars-Sinai, challenges with a population of healthcare workers and his thoughts on incentives and ROI. Also, he’s co-facilitating a workshop at the upcoming WELCOA summit called Youniversity, which he tells us more about.

Mitch provides some smart takeaways for any wellness professional who wants to change the status quo of wellness and/or influence leadership that employee wellbeing is worthy of a long term investment.

For full show notes, visit www.redesigningwellness.com

When you think about it, wellness is a bit of a caregiving field, where we strive to support people in advancing their health and wellness. For the typical wellness coordinator, the job can also be a bit frustrating as you battle office politics, limited budgets, and work environments that don't support health and wellness.

Today I talk to Angie Siebert, a former wellness coordinator who experienced burn out, and in her words, she was broken, angry and felt betrayed by the industry.

Angie left her corporate wellness job in September of 2016, where she had a good salary, a government pension, good benefits, a flexible work arrangement, and a supportive boss. All the things you want in a job. She left a job most people in this field wanted because she didn’t believe in what she was selling anymore.

In this episode, Angie shares her story. I didn't do my normal Q&A interview but instead just let her describe her thoughts, feelings and actions over the past 2 years with my follow up questions.

I want to thank Angie for sharing her story and being open, honest and vulnerable to the challenges she's faced and is facing as she starts a new career as a consultant, speaker and coach.

For full show notes visit https://redesigningwellness.com/category/podcast/

Behavior change…it’s what we are all trying to help our employees accomplish, right? If you’ve been in health promotion for awhile, you have probably heard of Prochaska’s stages of change (or theoretical model). Today’s guest, Sara Johnson, is Co-President & CEO of Pro-change behavior systems, which was founded on the stages of change.

In this conversation, Sara tells us more about pro-change behavior systems, the ways she’s collaborating with others both inside and outside of the wellness industry and her thoughts on the wellness industry.

Most importantly, Sara has a 2 year old chocolate lab named Cooper that makes his appearance on the podcast.

For full show notes, visit www.redesigningwellness.com

How would you feel if you could get 100% of your employees to be healthier at work with just some up front implementation? There’s a way!  Today I talk to Dr. Whitney Gray, SVP at Delos, a real estate and technology firm. Whitney is responsible for the oversight of health research and the development of innovative design strategies and products that seek to improve human health and wellness through building design.

Today Whitney and talk about Delos and how it got started, how she paved her own path after getting her PhD in Public Health and the WELL building standard. Whitney offers a ton of reasons how the built environment can impact our health and what we can do about it.

For more info on Delos, visit: http://delos.com/

For more info on the Mindful Eating Workshop, visit: https://redesigningwellness.com/mindful-eating-trainings-individuals/

If you’re a regular listener to my podcast, you may know I have been interested in the Zappos culture since I read “Delivering Happiness” by Tony Heish a few years ago. I had the pleasure of talking to Kelly Maher, the wellness coordinator at Zappos.

Kelly was such a fun guy to talk to and I really could have asked him a million more questions but spared him (and you) from a really long interview. Kelly and I talk about what it’s like to work at Zappos, his wellness efforts, incentives and the Holacracy deal that happened less than a year ago. And of course I ask him if he ever sees Tony, the CEO.

If you’re ever in Las Vegas, they do offer guided tours of the campus. Something I’ll check out the next time I’m in Vegas!

For full show notes visit: http://bit.ly/ZapposWellness

For more info on Mindful Eating workshops visit: https://redesigningwellness.com/mindful-eating-trainings-individuals/

Dr. Jessica Grossmeier is the vice president of research at HERO (Health Enhancement Research Organization), where she oversees the direction and execution of the HERO research agenda.

Jessica loves research and has a lot of publications to her name to prove it. In this conversation, Jessica and I talk about what drew her into research, the evolution of the wellness field, and a bit more about HERO.

With all the talk about throwing ROI out of the wellness conversation, Jessica makes some great points about it and what to consider when measuring ROI successfully. We talk VOI and something she said really stands out to me – identify your stakeholders and identify what they care about. What they want to see as a result of your wellness efforts.

Jessica also tells us what ½ of the companies who fill out the HERO scorecard are missing (and her advice for fixing it).

For full show notes, visit https://redesigningwellness.com/category/podcast/.

To learn more about Mindful Eating, visit https://redesigningwellness.com/.

The Motley Fool, a financial services company, is known for a non-traditional culture and that carries over to wellness. Sam Whiteside, their Chief Wellness Fool, has been there for over 3 years and in that time has expanded the approach outside of just the physical dimension of wellness.

In this conversation, Sam and I talk about the Motley Fool culture, her wellness approach, how she connects with employees and her advice to other wellness pros for engaging employees.

Here’s a few cool things about the Motley Fool – they call their employees fools, they give 1-week leave if you adopt a pet, they start their new hires on Fridays (Sam’s first day included a shopping cart and beer) and they have a sledgehammer workout weekly.

For full show notes, visit https://redesigningwellness.com/category/podcast/.

As I was thinking about people to interview on this podcast, I wanted to get the perspective of wellness professionals in the trenches who are challenging the status quo with their companies and clients. The ones who can positively impact the wellness industry from their everyday practices.

I had the pleasure of meeting today’s guest, Rachel Druckenmiller, at last year’s Wellness Underground Workshop.

In February 2015, Rachel was recognized by the Wellness Council of America (WELCOA) as the #1 Health Promotion Professional in the U.S. which is quite the testament to her dedication to the field of wellness. In today’s conversation, she tells us what that award meant to her, her approach to wellness, lessons learned as she’s grown professionally and a bit about her blog, Rachel’s Nourishing Kitchen.

A few things that impressed me about Rachel – even at an early age she reached out to people she admired, she aims to learn and grow from her interactions with employers and employees and she actively seeks to learn (reading books outside the profession).

We start out the conversation with Rachel telling us what it meant for her to win the WELCOA #1 wellness professional award in 2015. She tells us about the application process and how she was notified she was the winner.

Rachel talks about her approach to wellness and how it’s changed over the years. She started her career presenting the business case of wellness but found it didn’t work. Rachel learned to listen and be open…seeking first to understand. She now believes in getting curious instead of making assumptions.

Here’s a question her dad asks when working with companies:

“If it were just right (for you), what would it look like?”

I ask Rachel what happens now when someone pushes back on wellness. She feels it gives an opportunity to ask some questions and have them explain their viewpoint.

Rachel tells us about the wellness program at SIG (for internal employees) and how she busted her budget in year one. Three years later, she started doing more around wellness with her clients.

Rachel walks us through the challenges she faces with clients. She believes employees want more than just a paycheck, especially with the millennials. She has started approaching how wellbeing efforts can help a company become an employer of choice.

Rachel tells her story about chronic health issues with allergies and acid reflux. She started making changes to her diet but ended up being underweight. After she started aligning with functional medicine doctors, she got healthy and gained some weight back. As the wellness person, she felt judged after gaining the weight back.

She offers her thoughts on the divide in the wellness industry and how it’s brought negativity, especially to those looking from the outside of our profession. It seems we can’t disagree without being disagreeable. We need to recognize people have a different view of the world and that’s ok. There’s no room for dogma in wellness.

Rachel feels the future of worksite wellness involves optimizing the employee experience. Wellness professionals have a lot of opportunities to expand their role.

Wellness is not just about yoga mats and apples.

Rachel has an active blog she started in January 2014 as an outlet to offer a refreshing approach to food. She focuses on whole body nourishment instead of just healthy eating.

She leaves us with her tips for wellness pros wanting to change the status quo:

• Get curious instead of making assumptions
• Share your struggles and be approachable,
• Reach out to people you admire (it’s how she met David Katz).
• Be kind. Most people are really hurting in some way.

Links Mentioned:

The Fire Starter Sessions by Danielle LaPorte

Rachel’s Linked In profile

rachelsnourishingkitchen.com

Anytime I work with employees or employers, there are often complaints or requests about the physical environment. Whether it’s the air temp, air quality or noise level, the buildings where we work can either enhance or detract from our well-being. It isn’t until recently that there has been some attention to the impact of the built environment on employee health and wellness.

One of the people to credit for this spotlight on the built environment is Leigh Stringer. Leigh is a workplace strategy expert and author of the Healthy Workplace. Leigh and I talk about the impact of physical space on employee health, easy ways to create a healthy workplace and the inspiration for her most recent book, the Healthy Workplace.

I also want to thank Leigh for opening up about her experience when she was seriously drained at her job. She talks about what caused the burn out and what she did about it.

Links Mentioned:

Center for the Advancement of Well-Being

FitWel

Human Performance Institute

The Healthy Workplace (Leigh's book)

Global Women 4 Wellbeing

Apps - Brain FM and Buddhify