If you’re a regular on Linked In, I’m sure you have heard of or know Bob Merberg. Bob and I connected via Linked In and I’ve enjoyed his posts and point of view. For more than 20 years, he’s been helping people get healthier – primarily by promoting innovation and rigor in employee wellness.
As a leading advocate for new methods to support employee well-being through healthy work and psychosocial environments, Bob’s been featured numerous times in HR Executive magazine and other media outlets such as MarketWatch and Wellbeing Practitioner.
We start out with some breaking news (at least at the time of the initial release), move on to the challenges he faced in corporate wellness, we get into what he doesn’t believe in anymore and of course, what he does.
For full show notes, visit: https://redesigningwellness.com/
Do you offer health coaching at your worksite? Health coaching can be such a powerful tool to help employees progress towards their goals.
Some employers mistake having health professionals telling people what to eat, how to exercise or giving biometric results as coaching. And there’s nothing wrong with having those pieces but health coaches are expert facilitators of mindset and behavior change.
To learn more about the expertise of coaching, I today’s guest is Margaret Moore, AKA Coach Meg. In 2000, Meg founded Wellcoaches Corporation, in strategic partnership with the American College of Sports Medicine. They’ve trained more than 10,000 health professionals as health and wellness coaches in 49 countries.
In this interview, we discuss what she was doing before the formation of Wellcoaches, the coaching model they use at wellcoaches, why an employer should invest in coaching and what they should consider.
For full show notes, visit: www.redesigningwellness.com.
With my podcast, I’ve interviewed many wellness thought leaders and have learned so much from them. But as you know, I have a tactical side to me where I want to give you specifics on how to implement these great ideas. To do this, I set out to explore some real examples of companies who are redefining what wellness means, often stepping out of traditional wellness programming.
My conversation today is with Leslie Ritter, Wellness Leader at Eileen Fischer. Eileen Fischer is the fashion/retail brand and Eileen is the actual owner that is still at the helm.
Today Leslie and I talk about:
For full show notes, visit www.redesigningwellness.com
To learn more about Resilience training, visit my Corporate Resilience page.
Municipalities have unique wellness challenges. Even the smaller ones have many departments with a wide variety in the workforce. Think police and librarians....different needs right?
I'm continuing to interview wellness professionals who are on the frontline doing the work in a non-traditional way. Today I talk to Rana De Boer, Work Well Manager at the City of Sioux Falls. She has over 22 years of experience and is responsible for workers comp, safety and wellness. She started in wellness but her role has grown in scope over the years.
Rana tells us about her approach to wellness, how she overcomes challenges specific to municipalities, ROI and her advice for challenging the status quo.
For full show notes, visit https://redesigningwellness.com/
When I asked some of my local wellness colleagues who they want to hear on the podcast, today’s guest came up. Today I talk to Michelle Spehr, MA, M.Ed., MCHES, CWWPC, is the Director of Wellness Consulting with The Benefits Services Group (BSG).
In her role, she provides strategic direction and assistance with the planning, implementing, and evaluating of employer-sponsored health promotion and wellness initiatives.
Her approach involves expanding the wellness value proposition beyond reducing employee health risks to creating the conditions where employees can bring their best selves to work each day.
In today’s conversation, we talk about the wellness offerings she sees with employers, her approach to wellness, challenges she faces and her advice for other wellness pros.
For full show notes, visit: https://redesigningwellness.com
Today I talk with Stephanie Downs, WellBeing Coordinator at Iowa State University. Stephanie has been a health promotion practitioner for 25 years so has seen the evolution of worksite wellness.
Stephanie has always favored a non-traditional path to wellness and really likes to see the whole person. She tells us about her 5 Guiding Principles, challenges at a University and what she’s most excited about today. After this interview, I can see why Stephanie was recognized as one of WELCOA’s Top 50 Health Promotion Professionals for 2016.
For full show notes, visit: https://redesigningwellness.com/category/podcast/
Today I talk to Mitch Martens, Employee Wellness Administrator at Cedars-Sinai Health System. I met Mitch at a HERO conference about 2 years ago and he’s one of those people I immediately connected with. Mitch has a background in psychology and got tapped by the hospital to start their wellness initiative in 2012.
Mitch provides some insight into how he became in charge of wellness at Cedars-Sinai, challenges with a population of healthcare workers and his thoughts on incentives and ROI. Also, he’s co-facilitating a workshop at the upcoming WELCOA summit called Youniversity, which he tells us more about.
Mitch provides some smart takeaways for any wellness professional who wants to change the status quo of wellness and/or influence leadership that employee wellbeing is worthy of a long term investment.
For full show notes, visit www.redesigningwellness.com
Today I talk to Mitch Martens, Employee Wellness Administrator at Cedars-Sinai Health System. I met Mitch at a HERO conference about 2 years ago and he’s one of those people I immediately connected with. Mitch has a background in psychology and got tapped by the hospital to start their wellness initiative in 2012.
Mitch provides some insight into how he became in charge of wellness at Cedars-Sinai, challenges with a population of healthcare workers and his thoughts on incentives and ROI. Also, he’s co-facilitating a workshop at the upcoming WELCOA summit called Youniversity, which he tells us more about.
Mitch provides some smart takeaways for any wellness professional who wants to change the status quo of wellness and/or influence leadership that employee wellbeing is worthy of a long term investment.
For full show notes, visit www.redesigningwellness.com
When you think about it, wellness is a bit of a caregiving field, where we strive to support people in advancing their health and wellness. For the typical wellness coordinator, the job can also be a bit frustrating as you battle office politics, limited budgets, and work environments that don't support health and wellness.
Today I talk to Angie Siebert, a former wellness coordinator who experienced burn out, and in her words, she was broken, angry and felt betrayed by the industry.
Angie left her corporate wellness job in September of 2016, where she had a good salary, a government pension, good benefits, a flexible work arrangement, and a supportive boss. All the things you want in a job. She left a job most people in this field wanted because she didn’t believe in what she was selling anymore.
In this episode, Angie shares her story. I didn't do my normal Q&A interview but instead just let her describe her thoughts, feelings and actions over the past 2 years with my follow up questions.
I want to thank Angie for sharing her story and being open, honest and vulnerable to the challenges she's faced and is facing as she starts a new career as a consultant, speaker and coach.
For full show notes visit https://redesigningwellness.com/category/podcast/
Behavior change…it’s what we are all trying to help our employees accomplish, right? If you’ve been in health promotion for awhile, you have probably heard of Prochaska’s stages of change (or theoretical model). Today’s guest, Sara Johnson, is Co-President & CEO of Pro-change behavior systems, which was founded on the stages of change.
In this conversation, Sara tells us more about pro-change behavior systems, the ways she’s collaborating with others both inside and outside of the wellness industry and her thoughts on the wellness industry.
Most importantly, Sara has a 2 year old chocolate lab named Cooper that makes his appearance on the podcast.
For full show notes, visit www.redesigningwellness.com
How would you feel if you could get 100% of your employees to be healthier at work with just some up front implementation? There’s a way! Today I talk to Dr. Whitney Gray, SVP at Delos, a real estate and technology firm. Whitney is responsible for the oversight of health research and the development of innovative design strategies and products that seek to improve human health and wellness through building design.
Today Whitney and talk about Delos and how it got started, how she paved her own path after getting her PhD in Public Health and the WELL building standard. Whitney offers a ton of reasons how the built environment can impact our health and what we can do about it.
For more info on Delos, visit: http://delos.com/
For more info on the Mindful Eating Workshop, visit: https://redesigningwellness.com/mindful-eating-trainings-individuals/
If you’re a regular listener to my podcast, you may know I have been interested in the Zappos culture since I read “Delivering Happiness” by Tony Heish a few years ago. I had the pleasure of talking to Kelly Maher, the wellness coordinator at Zappos.
Kelly was such a fun guy to talk to and I really could have asked him a million more questions but spared him (and you) from a really long interview. Kelly and I talk about what it’s like to work at Zappos, his wellness efforts, incentives and the Holacracy deal that happened less than a year ago. And of course I ask him if he ever sees Tony, the CEO.
If you’re ever in Las Vegas, they do offer guided tours of the campus. Something I’ll check out the next time I’m in Vegas!
For full show notes visit: http://bit.ly/ZapposWellness
For more info on Mindful Eating workshops visit: https://redesigningwellness.com/mindful-eating-trainings-individuals/
Dr. Jessica Grossmeier is the vice president of research at HERO (Health Enhancement Research Organization), where she oversees the direction and execution of the HERO research agenda.
Jessica loves research and has a lot of publications to her name to prove it. In this conversation, Jessica and I talk about what drew her into research, the evolution of the wellness field, and a bit more about HERO.
With all the talk about throwing ROI out of the wellness conversation, Jessica makes some great points about it and what to consider when measuring ROI successfully. We talk VOI and something she said really stands out to me – identify your stakeholders and identify what they care about. What they want to see as a result of your wellness efforts.
Jessica also tells us what ½ of the companies who fill out the HERO scorecard are missing (and her advice for fixing it).
For full show notes, visit https://redesigningwellness.com/category/podcast/.
To learn more about Mindful Eating, visit https://redesigningwellness.com/.
The Motley Fool, a financial services company, is known for a non-traditional culture and that carries over to wellness. Sam Whiteside, their Chief Wellness Fool, has been there for over 3 years and in that time has expanded the approach outside of just the physical dimension of wellness.
In this conversation, Sam and I talk about the Motley Fool culture, her wellness approach, how she connects with employees and her advice to other wellness pros for engaging employees.
Here’s a few cool things about the Motley Fool – they call their employees fools, they give 1-week leave if you adopt a pet, they start their new hires on Fridays (Sam’s first day included a shopping cart and beer) and they have a sledgehammer workout weekly.
For full show notes, visit https://redesigningwellness.com/category/podcast/.
As I was thinking about people to interview on this podcast, I wanted to get the perspective of wellness professionals in the trenches who are challenging the status quo with their companies and clients. The ones who can positively impact the wellness industry from their everyday practices.
I had the pleasure of meeting today’s guest, Rachel Druckenmiller, at last year’s Wellness Underground Workshop.
In February 2015, Rachel was recognized by the Wellness Council of America (WELCOA) as the #1 Health Promotion Professional in the U.S. which is quite the testament to her dedication to the field of wellness. In today’s conversation, she tells us what that award meant to her, her approach to wellness, lessons learned as she’s grown professionally and a bit about her blog, Rachel’s Nourishing Kitchen.
A few things that impressed me about Rachel – even at an early age she reached out to people she admired, she aims to learn and grow from her interactions with employers and employees and she actively seeks to learn (reading books outside the profession).
We start out the conversation with Rachel telling us what it meant for her to win the WELCOA #1 wellness professional award in 2015. She tells us about the application process and how she was notified she was the winner.
Rachel talks about her approach to wellness and how it’s changed over the years. She started her career presenting the business case of wellness but found it didn’t work. Rachel learned to listen and be open…seeking first to understand. She now believes in getting curious instead of making assumptions.
Here’s a question her dad asks when working with companies:
“If it were just right (for you), what would it look like?”
I ask Rachel what happens now when someone pushes back on wellness. She feels it gives an opportunity to ask some questions and have them explain their viewpoint.
Rachel tells us about the wellness program at SIG (for internal employees) and how she busted her budget in year one. Three years later, she started doing more around wellness with her clients.
Rachel walks us through the challenges she faces with clients. She believes employees want more than just a paycheck, especially with the millennials. She has started approaching how wellbeing efforts can help a company become an employer of choice.
Rachel tells her story about chronic health issues with allergies and acid reflux. She started making changes to her diet but ended up being underweight. After she started aligning with functional medicine doctors, she got healthy and gained some weight back. As the wellness person, she felt judged after gaining the weight back.
She offers her thoughts on the divide in the wellness industry and how it’s brought negativity, especially to those looking from the outside of our profession. It seems we can’t disagree without being disagreeable. We need to recognize people have a different view of the world and that’s ok. There’s no room for dogma in wellness.
Rachel feels the future of worksite wellness involves optimizing the employee experience. Wellness professionals have a lot of opportunities to expand their role.
Wellness is not just about yoga mats and apples.
Rachel has an active blog she started in January 2014 as an outlet to offer a refreshing approach to food. She focuses on whole body nourishment instead of just healthy eating.
She leaves us with her tips for wellness pros wanting to change the status quo:
Links Mentioned:
Anytime I work with employees or employers, there are often complaints or requests about the physical environment. Whether it’s the air temp, air quality or noise level, the buildings where we work can either enhance or detract from our well-being. It isn’t until recently that there has been some attention to the impact of the built environment on employee health and wellness.
One of the people to credit for this spotlight on the built environment is Leigh Stringer. Leigh is a workplace strategy expert and author of the Healthy Workplace. Leigh and I talk about the impact of physical space on employee health, easy ways to create a healthy workplace and the inspiration for her most recent book, the Healthy Workplace.
I also want to thank Leigh for opening up about her experience when she was seriously drained at her job. She talks about what caused the burn out and what she did about it.
Links Mentioned:
Center for the Advancement of Well-Being
The Healthy Workplace (Leigh's book)
Have you ever thought about your approach to challenges? I’m not talking about those 8 week health challenges we love to run. But the challenge of trying to engage employees in their health at work, where they have a million other things to do. Not to mention, the many things we should consider…location, demographics, remote work, job function, etc.
Today’s guest has such a great approach to challenges and life in general. Today I talk with Patty Purpur de Vries. Here’s a quick bio on Patty. She went to the Olympic trials, started and sold a company, started a strong network of Health Promotion professionals, and found ways to engage a hospital staff of 10,000. She now has a new challenge of engaging physicians in their health and professional fulfillment.
I learned so much from Patty. In this episode, we talk about the company she created from $40 in business cards and how she’s engaged employees in her different wellness roles. Patty tells an impactful story about how she approached union nurses and got them to buy in to her wellness efforts. She also tells us about how she plans to tackle physician health and wellness in her new role as Director of Strategic Project for the Stanford Medicine WellMD Center.
Today, I talk with Mim Senft, co-founder of Global Women 4 Wellbeing and President and CEO of Motivity Partnerships, Inc. Mim is a positive force in our wellness industry, calling for collaboration to move our profession forward and often looking to bring in perspectives outside of our industry.
She's also a “get it doner” and you’ll hear how after a conversation at a conference, she co-founded Global Women 4 Wellbeing.
In this conversation, Mim and I discuss:
We start off with Mim telling us about how Global Women 4 Wellbeing (GW4W) started. Younger women were asking seasoned professionals why men were all at the front of the room leading the conversations. Then, a dinner at the SHINE conference sealed the deal.
It's important to focus on women's health because most research on health issues has been done on men, although women may have different symptoms (as in the case of a heart attack). GW4W also aims to support the next generation of women.
Mim believes none of us know everything and we need to strategically collaborate. She sincerely hopes that the forward thinking group gets louder and louder.
Mim tells us when she first realized the common approach to wellness was broken. She often sees the absence of a wellness strategy despite the importance of having one. I loved Mim's comparison of how a company treats wellness to how a company treats an IT security issue. Wellness is typically given to a lower level person and that would never happen with a security issue.
We discuss ROI and how spend in wellness is 1-2% of healthcare costs (if that much). Mim addresses two areas where companies can see an ROI. Putting in a bare bones wellness program won't give you a return. I like how Mim called that "magical thinking".
Mim and I talk about participation numbers and why participation doesn't equal change. She gives us a great example from a CEO and how his well intentioned perspective wasn't hitting the target with his population.
She tells us why a sense of delight is important and her thoughts on incentives in wellness. Mim believes they can be a strategic tool as part of a bigger strategy. They can be good for one time thing if they are culture specific. Again, Mim gives a great example that shows how important culturally relevancy is for incentives.
Those blasted emails! We get 140 emails a day every day (work only, not personal) and on average we check our email on average 36 times an hour. It takes your brain 20-30 seconds to refocus after checking email. Mim tells us what you can do instead.
Mim wants more of us in the wellness world to join together. We need to get louder if we want to address the problems. She believes the future of worksite wellness will bring more of a collaboration with other industries like the built environment. Also, a growing voice of people leadership that wants better answers.
Mim leaves us with a tip for the wellness professional who wants to challenge the status quo and for the employer who wants to build a thriving workplace culture.
Links mentioned:
Book Mention: Delivering Happiness byTony Hsieh.
I regularly ask my guests their thoughts on wellness incentives. I decided to focus today’s episode on incentives and what works to engage employees. Today's guest is Dr. Paul Marciano.
Dr. Paul is a leading authority on employee engagement and retention and author of “Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work: Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles of RESPECT”.
Dr. Paul and I discuss:
Paul talks about when incentives programs are really helpful and when they're not. He gives a great example of an employee of the month story and how it was a demotivator for an employee.
Paul walks us through his RESPECT model, both the definition and examples, and tells us about the impact pf praise on employees.
Dr. Paul leaves us with his book recommendation and a tangible tip.
We know how hard it is to change health behavior. Yet we spend our lives educating employees on the long term benefits of rational solutions, like eating healthier and exercising.
Today's guest, Dr. Shahram Heshmat studies how people make decisions over time and how we ignore future consequences. Shahram specializes in the behavioral economics of Addiction & Self Control.
In this episode we talk about:
I ask Shahram what can we do as wellness professionals to apply these learnings and he leaves us with great parting thoughts with some clear examples.
It’s the start of the year, which means a few people may still be hanging on to their New Year’s resolutions. You may know that the top resolution for Americans is to lose weight. But as we know most people aren’t successful with this one (or any others really). That’s why I brought on today’s guest, Byron Morrison.
Byron Morrison is the Author of the book 'Become a Better You', and the founder of Tailored Lifestyles Coaching. His work is all about helping as many people as possible live healthier and happier lives, by taking a holistic approach to losing weight, becoming more active, managing stress, and improving their wellbeing.
He was a hardworking professional in the Marketing/business field who was 50 pounds overweight, out of shape and unhappy. A life event caused him to completely turn around his lifestyle and start a career in health coaching.
Byron’s story is impactful because it’s from someone who was at the beginner level and can talk about the challenges he faced. His story can help us have more empathy for the struggles people face when overcoming barriers to lifestyle changes. It’s not as easy as telling them to exercise more and eat less!
As I was reflecting on 2016, it’s been full of self-imposed changes. Starting this podcast has enabled me to connect with amazing wellness experts that helped me expand my thinking around wellness.
With this podcast, I set out to talk with both wellness experts and those that are experts in different areas that complement the field of health promotion. This podcast is my small way of challenging the status quo wellness programming and trying to move the wellness field forward. I have learned a ton and been inspired by many.
Although this is a year end, wrap up episode, I thought it was a good way to kick off 2017. This episode will be clips from 10 episodes that impacted either my listeners or me. Hopefully you can get inspired by some of these messages to challenge the status quo in 2017.