PEO CANADA

Wellness is that quality that gives us the sense that everything is under control, which in turn allows us to focus fully on what we are doing without distraction from stress, disease, or conflict. We all know instituting a workplace wellness program improves the health of employees, decreases employee absenteeism and thus saves the company money. But how do you implement such a thing and how much money is the company going to have to spend to get it off the ground? Most wellness resources tell you that the success of a workplace wellness initiative is based on 3 to 5 basic elements and the strategy resulting from those key steps.

1.       Support from senior management – this means owners, managers and team leaders need to be on board with the plan.

2.       Create a Vision – should have both management and employee involvement in determining the goals of the wellness initiative. Example: improved general health, well-being & attitude, reduced turnover and competitive advantage in your industry.

3.       Select your wellness Representatives – depending on the size and culture of your environment select a committee or team to promote, support and administer the program.

4.       Engage Employees – find out what topics are of most interest, determine how information would best be distributed and who will participate.

5.       Manage the program – get started and determine how best to keep the plan going, how well it’s being received, continue to review the success of the program and whether it is meeting the goals of the initiative.

Now that we’ve established the ideas you can use to create the initiative, let’s discuss what kind of wellness promotions can be implemented with little or no cost involved.

Encourage Healthy Eating

• Provide healthy alternatives for snacks in the office kitchen by bringing in apples, oranges and bananas to supplement or replace the vending machines. This cost can be supported by employees or shared between management.
• Start a healthy recipe cookbook file on your companies shared drives.

Promote Active Living

• Encourage employees to walk to a team member’s office instead of calling or messaging with a question.
• Allow flexible working hours to provide time for interested employees to walk, run or climb stairs during or before their work day. 

Provide Resources & Education

• Get a subscription to a health magazine to keep in the break area or encourage employees to share the magazines and books they receive at home. 
• Have wellness reps send out weekly hints & tips to healthy lifestyles from free wellness newsletters and brochures.

Promoting wellness in your workplace can be as simple and inexpensive as you need it to be. The best part is that it can grow and develop as your company sees “fit”.

The dreaded words of “Business Planning” makes strong people shudder and the weak run in terror.  Yes, I may be exaggerating but not by much. A majority of people get themselves into routines and comfort zones and the thought of breaking that routine to conduct business planning is not what most of us want to do.

Why? Why do those two words cause us such dismay? It does, because it is a reality check. It is a time to put your thinking cap on and really explore where you are going. For some it is a scary thought. For others it is just too much out of our daily routines. Yet, if you do not plan you will not see the possibilities or the pitfalls.

So, if it is so unpleasant why do we need to conduct it? If business is good, stay the course. Why change anything. If business is not good, who has the time to stop conducting business to plan business? Just get down to it, right?

So why do it when there seems to be so little time and everything moves so quickly. The reasons are simple:

ü       To set a direction with targets. Life is full of distractions and you must keep focus on where you are going or the side roads will take you off course.

ü       To ensure you and your team make the right decisions for your day to day business. Everyday we are faced with decisions that may be small or large, but that slows us down as we decide which answer is right. With a plan, it makes the choices obvious. Are they congruent with the plan or not?

ü       To fully engage your best people, whether they are in management or in your mail room. If you include them in the business planning process, the people who will make a positive difference in your business will jump on board your business’ bus fully engaged and energized.

I have seen first hand what happens when you do not have a plan for your business. You continue to stay in that rut called the comfort zone and you eventually get passed by your competition. Business planning is not for the senior management alone. It is not for “big businesses” only. It is for anyone who wants to find success.

For a simple business planning process that includes your entire team and engages your best people, I recommend Results.com. They have put together a simplified business planning process that is not only easy to put together but easy for your team to understand and measure.

A clearance letter/certificate is possibly one of the most important documents regarding workers’ compensation coverage. The perceived time and effort required to obtain this document often makes this an overlooked process.

Many subcontractors can have workers’ compensation coverage and accounts. This does not mean that their account is in “good standing” and all premiums have been paid. Once a subcontractor or any employees of the subcontractor have been injured, you will be held liable for the injury/illness that has occurred if you did not obtain a clearance prior to work commencement. This document is too important to be considered a hindrance when an employer can be left exposed.

I am seeing that employers realize the importance of this document more and more as this becomes a requirement for bidding on projects or even admission on certain worksites. This is a promising outlook as this indicates that more employers are trying to do the right thing, not just to avoid liability issues.

Like many of you we have been looking at utilizing social networking to help increase the exposure of our company. I have been asking myself and “experts” about how well this really works and if there are successful case studies available for companies like ours. I found an interesting article posted on Entrepeneur.com earlier this month that looks at this very question and I wanted to share it with you.

http://blog.entrepreneur.com/2009/10/conflicting-reports-on-social-networking-for-business.php

Let us know if you have had any good or bad experiences with social networking for your business.