Redesigning Wellness Podcast

Have you ever thought about your approach to challenges? I’m not talking about those 8 week health challenges we love to run. But the challenge of trying to engage employees in their health at work, where they have a million other things to do. Not to mention, the many things we should consider…location, demographics, remote work, job function, etc.

Today’s guest has such a great approach to challenges and life in general. Today I talk with Patty Purpur de Vries. Here’s a quick bio on Patty. She went to the Olympic trials, started and sold a company, started a strong network of Health Promotion professionals, and found ways to engage a hospital staff of 10,000. She now has a new challenge of engaging physicians in their health and professional fulfillment.

I learned so much from Patty. In this episode, we talk about the company she created from $40 in business cards and how she’s engaged employees in her different wellness roles. Patty tells an impactful story about how she approached union nurses and got them to buy in to her wellness efforts. She also tells us about how she plans to tackle physician health and wellness in her new role as Director of Strategic Project for the Stanford Medicine WellMD Center.

Today, I talk with Mim Senft, co-founder of Global Women 4 Wellbeing and President and CEO of Motivity Partnerships, Inc. Mim is a positive force in our wellness industry, calling for collaboration to move our profession forward and often looking to bring in perspectives outside of our industry.

She's also a “get it doner” and you’ll hear how after a conversation at a conference, she co-founded Global Women 4 Wellbeing.

In this conversation, Mim and I discuss:

• Global Women 4 Wellbeing
• Her approach to building thriving cultures
• Her thoughts on common wellness practices, like participation rates and incentives
• The future of worksite wellness

We start off with Mim telling us about how Global Women 4 Wellbeing (GW4W) started. Younger women were asking seasoned professionals why men were all at the front of the room leading the conversations. Then, a dinner at the SHINE conference sealed the deal.

It's important to focus on women's health because most research on health issues has been done on men, although women may have different symptoms (as in the case of a heart attack). GW4W also aims to support the next generation of women.

Mim believes none of us know everything and we need to strategically collaborate. She sincerely hopes that the forward thinking group gets louder and louder.

Mim tells us when she first realized the common approach to wellness was broken. She often sees the absence of a wellness strategy despite the importance of having one. I loved Mim's comparison of how a company treats wellness to how a company treats an IT security issue. Wellness is typically given to a lower level person and that would never happen with a security issue.

We discuss ROI and how spend in wellness is 1-2% of healthcare costs (if that much). Mim addresses two areas where companies can see an ROI. Putting in a bare bones wellness program won't give you a return. I like how Mim called that "magical thinking".

Mim and I talk about participation numbers and why participation doesn't equal change. She gives us a great example from a CEO and how his well intentioned perspective wasn't hitting the target with his population.

She tells us why a sense of delight is important and her thoughts on incentives in wellness. Mim believes they can be a strategic tool as part of a bigger strategy. They can be good for one time thing if they are culture specific. Again, Mim gives a great example that shows how important culturally relevancy is for incentives.

Those blasted emails! We get 140 emails a day every day (work only, not personal) and on average we check our email on average 36 times an hour. It takes your brain 20-30 seconds to refocus after checking email. Mim tells us what you can do instead.

Mim wants more of us in the wellness world to join together. We need to get louder if we want to address the problems. She believes the future of worksite wellness will bring more of a collaboration with other industries like the built environment. Also, a growing voice of people leadership that wants better answers.

Mim leaves us with a tip for the wellness professional who wants to challenge the status quo and for the employer who wants to build a thriving workplace culture.

Links mentioned:

Global Women 4 Wellbeing 

Motivitypartnerships.com

Book Mention: Delivering Happiness byTony Hsieh.

I regularly ask my guests their thoughts on wellness incentives. I decided to focus today’s episode on incentives and what works to engage employees. Today's guest is Dr. Paul Marciano.

Dr. Paul is a leading authority on employee engagement and retention and author of “Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work: Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles of RESPECT”.

Dr. Paul and I discuss:

• The difference between motivation and engagement
• His RESPECT model
• The simple step a manager can take to engage their employees AND
• What we should be doing differently to engage new employees

Paul talks about when incentives programs are really helpful and when they're not. He gives a great example of an employee of the month story and how it was a demotivator for an employee.

Paul walks us through his RESPECT model, both the definition and examples, and tells us about the impact pf praise on employees.

Dr. Paul leaves us with his book recommendation and a tangible tip.

We know how hard it is to change health behavior. Yet we spend our lives educating employees on the long term benefits of rational solutions, like eating healthier and exercising.

Today's guest, Dr. Shahram Heshmat studies how people make decisions over time and how we ignore future consequences. Shahram specializes in the behavioral economics of Addiction & Self Control.

In this episode we talk about:

• What exactly is behavioral economics
• Why promoting the long term benefits of health may not be impactful
• Some motivational factors that influence our vulnerability for impulsive behavior. There’s one he calls the “what the hell” effect? That I can totally relate to.
• How we can education the impulsive mind.

I ask Shahram what can we do as wellness professionals to apply these learnings and he leaves us with great parting thoughts with some clear examples. 

It’s the start of the year, which means a few people may still be hanging on to their New Year’s resolutions. You may know that the top resolution for Americans is to lose weight. But as we know most people aren’t successful with this one (or any others really). That’s why I brought on today’s guest, Byron Morrison.

Byron Morrison is the Author of the book 'Become a Better You', and the founder of Tailored Lifestyles Coaching. His work is all about helping as many people as possible live healthier and happier lives, by taking a holistic approach to losing weight, becoming more active, managing stress, and improving their wellbeing.

He was a hardworking professional in the Marketing/business field who was 50 pounds overweight, out of shape and unhappy. A life event caused him to completely turn around his lifestyle and start a career in health coaching.

Byron’s story is impactful because it’s from someone who was at the beginner level and can talk about the challenges he faced. His story can help us have more empathy for the struggles people face when overcoming barriers to lifestyle changes. It’s not as easy as telling them to exercise more and eat less!

As I was reflecting on 2016, it’s been full of self-imposed changes. Starting this podcast has enabled me to connect with amazing wellness experts that helped me expand my thinking around wellness.

With this podcast, I set out to talk with both wellness experts and those that are experts in different areas that complement the field of health promotion. This podcast is my small way of challenging the status quo wellness programming and trying to move the wellness field forward. I have learned a ton and been inspired by many.

Although this is a year end, wrap up episode, I thought it was a good way to kick off 2017. This episode will be clips from 10 episodes that impacted either my listeners or me. Hopefully you can get inspired by some of these messages to challenge the status quo in 2017.

You may have heard the word “corporate social responsibility” being thrown around but not really connected it to employee wellness. Corporate social responsibility, often abbreviated "CSR," is a corporation's  initiatives to assess and take responsibility for the company's effects on environmental and social wellbeing.

So you may be thinking “what does corporate social responsibility have to do with wellness”? Hopefully you are looking at wellness or well-being as moving beyond just the physical, and are thinking or have thought about ways to weave volunteering into your wellness strategy.

If you need more evidence than that, I’m a big fan of the Gallup-Healthways Wellbeing model that includes community as one of their 5 dimensions.

That's why I brought on today's guest, Isa Watson, founder and CEO of Envested, the next generation giving platform that makes it easy to inspire and engage employees.

In this episode we talk about:

- how she got from chemistry degree to a company founder

- what is Envested and what are the capabilities for both employers and employees

- how corporate social responsibility and wellness are connected

- common challenges employers face when it comes to corporate social responsibility

Finally, she leave us with not one but two tangible tips on how companies can increase their corporate social responsibility. 

Have you ever thought about how to sneak health and well-being to your employees? What about how to get your Managers to create engaged teams?

Today's guest, Laura Putnam offers guidance on both of these topics along with her thoughts on incentives, all the infighting within the wellness industry and her advice to wellness professionals.

Not to mention, we get a sample of what it's like to live in San Fransisco and we meet Laura's cat Minky.

Laura Putnam is author of Workplace Wellness That Works and CEO and founder of Motion Infusion. A leading authority on how organizations can promote well-being at work and how leaders and managers can inspire employees to adopt healthier behaviors, Laura is a sought-after speaker and consultant.

Laura is leading a pre-conference intensive workshop at the 2017 Art & Science of Health Promotion called Workplace Wellness that Works: A Smarter Framework for Designing More Effective Workplace Wellness Programs. For more information, visit this site.

Wellness initiatives are commonly known as "programs" which implies a start and an end, exactly what we don't want wellness to be. So, how can we pull away from pushing programs to influencing organizational culture?

Today's guest, Dr. Rosie Ward, is a thought leader who challenges the status quo, pushes boundaries, and engages people and organizations to find success through shifting old, ineffective thinking habits.

In this episode we discuss, how she got into organization management from fitness and public health, her advice for wellness pros to stay relevant, how there’s a missed opportunity in leadership development and we discuss those damn incentives!

Could you infuse more positivity into your workplace? I would venture a guess that we could amp up the positivity and optimism not only in our organization but also in our health and wellness programs. That's why I wanted to bring on MJ Shaar.

MJ Shaar was one of the first 50 people to graduate with a Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology from University of Pennsylvania. She has spent over 15 years studying, researching, coaching, and designing Applied Positive Psychology-based workshops for wellness professionals and organizations of all kinds.

MJ is a fun person to talk to and has a lot of great advice for integrating positive psychology into health and wellness promotions within organizations. In this episode, MJ walks us through the 5 pillars of positive psych, how we can apply it to health and wellness, gives us advice on moving the wellness industry past the traditional biomedical model and leaves us with a tangible tip.