Hi, I'm Jen. My 16 years of experience building wellness programs (12 in corporate wellness), coupled with my nutrition knowledge and passion for helping employees live healthy lives makes me uniquely qualified to help your company be successful.
I can help you create a wellness movement that inspires employees from the start, recharges a stale program or engages employees in a specific initiative.
Every time I talk with Jennifer, I feel refreshed and excited. She brings so many new ideas to the table. If you’re looking for an innovative way to approach wellness, you need to start with her. I’ve worked with many wellness consultants and programs over the years, but she truly gets it. I would refer Jennifer to any colleague or company looking to seriously improve the health and well-being of their employees!
A custom Wellness Roadmap that fits your organization's needs.
A step by step operating plan that tells you how to enhance employee health and wellness based on YOUR culture.
Created from an onsite collection of 4 data points including:
A coaching program to help you build a successful wellness movement.
Expert guidance and virtual wellness support via regular calls.
Extra support when you need it. I can help you:
Helping you launch a wellness initiative or wellness vendor.
Creating an engagement plan to launch a wellness program or vendor
The support you need to successfully roll out a wellness initiative.
If you don't see something you like listed above, you can email me with your wellness needs. I encourage you to read further so you understand my approach to worksite wellness.
Just last year, Jen did a survey for us that clearly showed what we had planned would not be successful. We used the results of the survey to implement a different strategy and we are having phenomenal success. If you want to get serious about wellness, you need Jen on your team. Let her lead, and great results will follow.
Worksite wellness has gotten a bad rap recently and for good reason. Most employers aren't setting a wellness strategy, deploying the right resources and engaging employees. If you invest in wellness but don't invest wisely, you can spend a lot of your precious time, energy and money having a wellness program that doesn't produce results AND that employees don't even like.
If you take a strategic approach to building your worksite wellness program, great things CAN happen. You start shifting your culture into one of well-being. Your employees know you care about them and their health. Employees engage and make health changes. Health risks go down. Productivity and Presenteeism goes up. You can better recruit and retain employees. You see measurable results you can brag about to senior leadership and other employers. Sounds great, right?
But what does a strategic wellness program mean? It starts with understanding what you are trying to achieve from your wellness program. It can't be "to get employees healthy" (too vague) or "to get a quick ROI" (you'll be disappointed). In order for your employees to engage you need to create a wellness program that works for THEM and an environment that makes healthy behaviors EASY.
Worksite wellness should be treated just like any other business initiative in your company. Unfortunately, it rarely gets the attention it deserves. Often the responsibilities are thrown on an overworked HR person who already has too much on their plate. Wellness turns into haphazard activities, the same people participating and maybe the occasional Biggest Loser contest. Then you pray you'll find something in your annual healthcare claims that shows a positive ROI. That's not the way results happen!
I've consulted with hundreds of employers over the years and when I ask what they want to accomplish, I often get a wide variety of unmeasureable answers. They have what I call the "Alice in Wonderland" approach. Do your wellness efforts resemble the quotes below?
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
"I don't much care where-"
"Then it doesn't much matter which way you go."
- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Alice is asking the Chesire cat for directions when she really doesn't know (or care) where she wants to go. Asking for directions without having a destination just doesn't make sense. And neither does it that you are running a wellness program with a goal.
Let me let you in on a secret. Most brokers lacks the expertise to build a strategic wellness program. They may recite some common themes of wellness programs and maybe what other employers are doing. They may push you to use their approach, go outcomes based or start putting in penalties, just because they think that's the way people engage. Even if your broker has wellness experts on staff, chances are they have way too many clients to make you a priority. Use your broker for their expertise - insurance benefits!
Employees are adults that want to be treated like adults. No one likes to be told what to do by anyone, much less their employer. The minute you make your employees "do" wellness activities, they may comply but they certainly won't be engaged.
If your work culture doesn't support well-being, your wellness efforts will fall flat. This means if you are talking a good game but the actions aren't aligning, your employees won't buy in. Here's just a few examples - providing junk food to departments during stressful times, not allowing time away to take a walk and not asking your employees what they want.
You don't need to incent your employees to death to participate! Although some prizes and gift cards make wellness challenges more fun, incentivizing employees for everything means you have to bribe them to participate. Not to mention the money you are throwing away.
We know that incentives work for a task that is cut and dry, like taking a Health Assessment or getting a biometric screening. Incentives have not been proven effective for lasting behavior change, like weight loss or sustained physical activity.
Employees engage when you ask them what they want and actually listen to them. Providing wellness topics they have interest in and creating the environment for them to be healthier is the base of wellness that doesn't often happen.
Seeing results from your wellness program takes a focused effort. It all comes down to understanding where you are, where you want to go, engaging your employees and measuring results.
Understand
Engage
Measure
I've seen various perspectives of worksite wellness. I've managed wellness programs at three different employers, which gave me the experience and understanding of what it takes to build a successful wellness program. I've been through challenges with senior leadership, organized health fairs and walking programs. I've had programs that were a hit with employees and those that I had to cancel because no one attended. Through these experiences I learned a lot because I had to. There was no one guiding me, so everything was a built from scratch experiment.
In my 8 plus years in the employer insurance market, I've consulted hundreds of employers in various industries. Many employers seemed interested in wellness. They would ask for a 3-year wellness strategy and I would get excited thinking I could really help them get their employees healthy.
I'd hand them over a strategy based on what I knew about the group, the wellness industry and best practices. Then I'd check in with them after 6 months and guess what happened?
Nothing! Many times all of my hard work would sit unused and the group's priority seemed to shift to something else.
Wait....these employers seemed really excited about having a successful wellness program yet nothing happened when I wasn't either doing it for them or checking in with them frequently. That got me thinking....what was the problem? Here's what I found:
As employees, we spend more time at work than with our families. Although we get up each day to earn a paycheck, most people want to believe their employers care about them and their well-being. An investment in your employees' health and happiness can return itself through employer loyalty and productivity.
Think about it....aren't you more likely to go above and beyond for someone who has invested time and energy in you?
A wellness program doesn't have to be something employees dread or feel they have to do. It can be a user designed experience that promotes self leadership and positive personal motivation.
Your Custom Wellness Roadmap
I want to help you build a successful wellness program that changes your employees' lives and positively impacts your business. To do this and have the most impact, we need to get to know you and your culture. That's why we have a 5 step process to build a tailored wellness strategy unique to your culture.
The Wellness Roadmap is a step by step guide to building a wellness program that gets the results YOU want. It's created from collecting four types of data - leadership interviews, employee input, environmental reviews and available healthcare data.
We start with a conversation with the main HR and/or wellness contact to understand the company, current state of wellness and any history of wellness programming. Below is a breakdown of our step-by-step Roadmap process.
Step 1: Interview leadership to understand wellness goals, perspectives and beliefs.
Step 2: Conduct an environmental assessment of employee workspaces to determine how easy or how difficult it is to be healthy.
Step 3: Conduct an employee needs assessment to understand what employees want from health and wellness at their workplace and perceptions of the current wellness culture.
Step 4: Gather existing data to tailor the strategic operating plan to relevant health metrics.
Step 5: Present the Wellness Roadmap to leadership and deliver a detailed operating plan for you to reach your wellness goals.
“Jen has a passion for worksite wellness and for working with employers to implement programs that are effective for them. She has worked with a variety of employer groups, so she understands that each group is different and that works for one group doesn't work for the other.
She takes the time to understand the employer and to ensure that the worksite wellness program fits their culture and with their overall benefit strategy. As importantly, she focuses not only what works for the employer, but also on what works for and successfully engage their employees. As a result, Jen has a track record of success."
“For nearly 10 years, I've had the distinct pleasure of knowing the consistent compassion and commitment that Jen exhibits as a health promotion professional. She is genuinely committed to the cause of not only improving employee health among her clients, but connecting with individuals and inspiring them to find a life of purpose and happiness."
Corporate wellness is and has been my profession for the past 12 years. I’ve seen the good, bad and ugly of corporate wellness programs. There’s no shortage of HR professionals that have their employees’ best interests in mind but aren’t exactly sure how to engage their employees in their health.
I want to help companies who are trying to figure out where they should be investing their time, energy and money and find new ways to improve health at the worksite. We spend at least 40 hours of our precious time at work, so why not make it a place to thrive?
If nothing changes, then nothing changes. If you do nothing, you'll continue to see the same results you already have. You'll invest money in activities best practices tell you to do but you're not sure of the benefit or really what you'll get out of it. Besides, if you have a steady workforce, your employees aren't getting any younger.
Sure, you can continue to invest time in health fairs where everyone grabs free giveaways then goes back to their unhealthy habits. Or perhaps invest money (and a lot of it) in biometric screenings without getting the bang for your buck.
And what are you going to tell them? Can you tell them how many people are truly engaged (and not just participating)? What about your strategy for next year or your vision for the future?