Holiday wellness programming must ‘look different’ from rest of year
Holiday wellness programming must look different’ from rest of year
Focus on what’s important to employees during special season
While the holiday season is a time for many of us to take things a bit easier, it’s a time for health promotion directors to focus even harder on their programming.
That’s the consensus of a survey of wellness professionals conducted by Employee Health & Fitness to explore just what works — and doesn’t — during the most challenging time of the year.
It’s a time to not only work harder, but to work smarter, notes Sherry Faucher, regional director, MediFit Corporate Services, a work site health promotion fitness management company based in Florham Park, NJ.
"In order to be successful, your holiday programming has to look very different from your programming throughout the rest of the year," she says, and offers the following guidelines:
• Keep your programming very simple. Anything perceived as too complicated will be perceived as extra stress, and people just won’t get involved.
• Make your programming much more flexible than usual. If you typically run an eight-week program, success could be based on a five-week one. "If employees feel they will be negatively impacted by taking their week off at Thanksgiving, they won’t even start," Faucher observes.
• Be realistic. You can’t expect people to lose weight during the holiday season, or always make the right choices. "You need to provide education to help them either maintain or control their weight gain," she says.
• Give employees positive coaching. Let them know that if they go to party and eat three slices of cheesecake, it’s not the end of the world.
"Holiday programming needs to be relatively short in duration; people are very busy at this time of the year," adds Tom Crum, FAWHP, MS, human resource director at Chattanooga (TN) State Technical Community College. He is also a past president of the Association for Worksite Health Promotion. "It should also be tightly targeted at whatever particular change you are trying to make. Also, you need to have some sort of incentive built in."
George Pfeiffer, MSE, FAWHP of The WorkCare Group Inc., a health and productivity communications company in Charlottesville, VA, agrees that targeted programming is critical. "You should be targeting specific stressors that employees would identify with," he notes. "The first thing is weight gain. Second, and this takes on a broader definition, centers around financial issues. Third, around interpersonal relationships. The fourth is holiday depression."
Swimming against the tide
However, Pfeiffer does not necessarily agree that the programming should be handled differently. "To be successful, any program needs to have an element of fun and interactivity; holiday programs really shouldn’t differ in that respect."
However, he notes there is "a lot of creativity that can be open to the program manager within the organization to take advantage of seasonal themes." Anything from a marketing perspective that can draw people in — like a fun title — should be used and promoted in as many ways as possible, he says. This can include posters, internal newsletters, e-mail, Internet, and intranet. "Also, take advantage of community resources to do workshops."
Programming during the holiday season is not without its challenges. In fact, you’re swimming against a tide of national consciousness that is anti-work and anti-exercise.
"You not only see it in [some wellness] programming, but in terms of general business priorities," notes Lewis Schiffman, president of Atlanta Health Systems, a wellness consulting organization. "There’s almost an expectation that people are going to be worthless’ right before and right after Thanksgiving, and for about 10 days before Christmas and the first week of January.
"This time of year is often referred to as the national grace period, when most people’s expectation of the proper thing to do is to eat, drink, and be merry and put your healthy lifestyle habits on hold," Schiffman continues. "However, I don’t recall ever reading in any Judeo-Christian liturgy or African myth and legend [Kwanzaa] that the appropriate way to celebrate the holidays was to be gluttonous, self-indulgent, and go into debt."
Taking this "time off" from healthy habits can have far-reaching consequences, he warns. "It diminishes your effectiveness as an employee, puts you at greater risk for serious illness and injury [car crashes and other personal injuries]. And because of people’s unrealistic expectations and excessive ingestion of sugar and alcohol, it contributes to or causes depression."
And of course, you’re behind the eight ball when it comes time for those New Year’s resolutions. "Now in addition to a gain in weight, you have a sugar addiction, a general lethargy and malaise, and diminished your self-esteem because your don’t like the way you look," Schiffman notes. "Additionally, people interpret their behavior as evidence that they have no self-control, which is further proof in their mind that they can’t stick with a healthy lifestyle regimen."
What Schiffman has found most effective in combating those attitudes are programs that focus on making the most of the holidays. "Invite people to question the meaning they attach to the holidays and create observances and celebrations that are both spiritually uplifting and healthy," he advises.
Does this mean employees can’t eat chocolate or have a drink? "Of course not," says Schiffman. "By all means, they should enjoy these things, but they should do it in a reasonable way that doesn’t compromise their health, self-esteem, and well-being."
For example, he says, employees can learn to spend in moderation, "and realize that going into debt to buy people things that they often don’t need or don’t want does not make you a better person — nor does it make them appreciate you more."
Employees can make modifications to traditional holiday recipes and turn them into good food that also tastes good. "For example, you can use applesauce instead of oil in baking, or Stevia as a sweetener instead of sugar," he suggests. (Stevia, found in any health food store, is made from a root, and is 300 times sweeter than sugar without any of adverse side effects, according to Schiffman.)
Employees must also remember to drink water and take extra vitamins when drinking alcohol." (For more suggestions on a realistic approach to the holidays, see box, right.)
Get an early start
Another key to successful holiday program is to start early, say wellness professionals. MediFit has implemented two successful Halloween programs at client sites — a "Pumpkin Roll" fun walk/run, and "How Well Do You Know Mr. Boo?" an incentive-based program that has employees correctly identify "bones" they pick out of a grab bag. This is a unique method of teach employees about human anatomy. (For more information about successful MediFit holiday programming, see box on p. 112.)
Why begin at Halloween? "It makes your programming much more effective," says Faucher. "If you start Nov. 1, you’ve already lost some folks. Even if you’re not going to have a program in October, you should be promoting your holiday programming in October. The whole fall is about keeping them there [employees in your program]."
Financial wellness programming for the holidays "should be done months ahead of time; by the time the holidays come, people have already gone through their money. You should literally start programming in September," Pfeiffer advises. "Money is one of the leading household stressors." In fact, he adds, at the same time you program for this year’s holidays, you can teach employees to pro-actively plan for next year as well.
Experts contacted by EHF cited a number of successful holiday programs.
"One successful program was a series of Healthy Achievers’ videos," recalls Crum. "Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we did a series of four — one each week." The videos covered topics like healthy snacks and nutritional guidelines for the holidays. They were about 15-20 minutes long, with brief, succinct educational information. Then, employees were given the opportunity to ask questions about the videos’ content. "These discussion groups were really well-received, and we had a nice response to the program."
The key to the program’s success was that the presentations were short in duration, and held during a brown bag lunch. "We got some positive feedback on how people did during the holidays," he notes.
Preventing overindulgence
Another successful program at the school was sponsored by the Tennessee Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for state employees. Also held during lunch, the one-hour seminar was called "Surviving Holiday Eating." The program, offered during the first week in December, was aimed at preventing overindulgence during the holidays. "It included strategies for healthy options at parties, such as soft drinks and alternative beverages instead of liquor," Crum recalls. "It was pretty well-attended."
One year, prior to Thanksgiving, a local dietitian came and talked for an hour about healthy alternatives. "She brought all the ingredients for a turkey stir-fry," says Crum. "We probably had 50 employees there. She gave each of them a little sample. People said they really enjoyed the seminar, and that they actually cooked the recipe over the holidays and enjoyed it very much."
The key to food-related programs, he adds, is that the samples "need to be healthy and tasty."
The facilitator is also an important factor, Crum says. "You do not want an absolute string bean," he says. "Employees need to see other body types as well."
Pfeiffer is also a proponent of the "lunch & learn" strategy. "The format is very popular," he says, "but the challenge is to keep things succinct and on time. So, if you do something around holiday cooking, like healthy meals, it should be very specific, like How to Prepare a No-Stress Buffet.’"
Positioning of your programs is also critical, adds Pfeiffer, especially when addressing a sensitive issue as depression. "It could be cloaked under the banner of stress management," he suggests. "You might call it Getting Through the Holidays Without Stress.’"
There are standardized questionnaires that can identify employees at risk for depression, says Pfeiffer. "You could offer names and phone numbers of resources for employees who answered yes’ to any of the questions," he advises. Depression is the most underdiagnosed and undertreated condition in the entire spectrum of employee health, he notes. "And depression is a leading predictor of health care costs."
So, if you follow all of these recommendations, and pull off a number of successful holiday programs, can you expect a positive carryover into the next year? Not really, answers Faucher.
"To be honest, they come on Jan. 1st no matter what, and they stay until March 1. But if you surveyed employees who had kept up their wellness efforts during the holidays, they would absolutely say it made things easier after New Year’s."
Besides, she says, if you didn’t program during the holidays, you’d be sending the message that’s it’s okay for employees to totally backslide. "And they would be starting off in January at a much lower level of fitness," Faucher concludes.
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