Entrepreneurs, whether in the early stages of startup or driving the ongoing momentum of longer term growth, know that one important factor for success is true – keeping employees’ spark alive so they can be healthy and engaged in the often high-pressure workplace.
Businesses that can maintain a healthy workplace in a consistent and sustainable manner, often avoid burnout of staff and support people that grow great companies.
The Transformation from Junk Food to Health Food:
While many entrepreneurs today believe in helping to create healthy work environments for employees, this was not always the case. In the early to mid-2000’s, the obesity epidemic became a national concern as obesity rates among U.S. adults rose to 35.7 percent in 2010 – up from 30.5 percent in 2000. Larger companies started to realize their impact on the issue and stepped in to take proactive measures to keep their employees active and healthy. Beyond the socially responsible reasons for wanting to help employees make better lifestyle decisions, organizations that provided health insurance recognized that managing health care costs meant helping employees manage factors like blood pressure, heart disease and other chronic conditions.
Smoking cessation programs along with healthy eating and exercise opportunities were established to create environments in which companies helped individuals develop behavior changes that improved health and reduced health care costs. But workplace wellness programs were in a transformation. Chris Mittelstaedt, Founder and CEO of The FruitGuys, a company that delivers wellness to workplaces across America through boxes of farm-fresh fruit in an effort to replace break room junk food and promote healthy snacking, remembers being part of the 21st century change of worksite wellness initiatives.
“The late 90’s and early 2000’s was a wild time for employee wellness,” says Mittelstaedt. “In 1998, our concept of delivering fresh fruit to offices as a healthy snack was just getting off the ground and corporate executives thought it was pretty radical. At the time, the landscape for what was healthy at work was vastly different than what it is today.”
Mittelstaedt says he remembers people drinking cans of Jolt Cola and eating chocolate- covered espresso beans just to get through the long days and nights. People were fueling themselves with anything that was convenient, he says.
“Keeping people at work – regardless of the consequences to their bodies – was a real part of the approach at the time. That’s when we thought we’d make fruit at work in the break room something that was easy for folks to grab and healthy for the body.”
Mittelstaedt believes the first dot com wave that started in the San Francisco Bay Area was the beginning of a shift towards transforming workplace health.
I talked to HR expert and founder of Deputy Steve Shelley about his thoughts on the early dot com wave. “Back then, workplace wellness programs were often focused on OSHA issues around avoiding workplace injury or helping people stop smoking,” Shelley noted. “It was really the obesity epidemic that helped companies realize their employees were getting sick because of their lifestyle and it was actually in the company’s best interest to create a work environment that not only kept morale and energy high, but also allowed employees to be healthier people.”
From: Forbes