Sarah Szul
Health Solutions Manager

Workplace Wellness – What is a Health and Wellness Consistency Board?

In healthy behaviors , encouraging employees to incorporate healthy behaviors into their life requires consistency. What does “consistency” mean? Is it 100% success all of the time? If it is, employees are probably going to get frustrated and give up. A more realistic idea of consistency is the concept of “one step back, two steps forward”. This means that instead of feeling guilty about a misstep, you can still come out ahead if you put your head down and push forward.

You can use the idea of building up consistency in a workplace setting to create an environment for success. In the context of a wellness program, I believe that it’s the little things that a company can do that will add up to a big positive change. One main problem is that employees lose motivation. One idea is to implement a “Consistency Board” for the workplace.

With the Consistency Board, every couple of weeks you post a different “Healthy Challenge”. It could be to eat 5-9 servings of fruits & vegetables a day, exercise for 30 minutes 5 days a week, drink eight glasses of water, or sleep for at least 7 hours every night. This board will help motivate employees by seeing each other’s success. Award prizes through drawings, not just for the “winner,” but for everyone that is able to remain “consistent” for those couple of weeks. Rewards, no matter how small, help to keep participants engaged. This will motivate your employees to become healthier, which in turn means a healthier and more productive business.

Creating a consistency board allows everyone to have a healthy target to work towards, just make sure the healthy challenge is something that everyone can attain with effort. For example, having a healthy challenge of trying to run a marathon might discourage employees who are not fit. By having attainable challenges, allows everybody to become focused on that goal and they will encourage others to strive towards it. Keeping the momentum going, no matter what goal is set, conditions the body and the mind to do positive things on a regular basis. When missteps do happen, a better strategy is to simply take two steps forward. You’re still ahead of where you were before, far beyond the starting line.