Employer Wellness : Selecting a Provider
When staffing your wellness program you need to consider whether to hire a wellness employee or contract with wellness professionals from outside your business.
Small and medium size worksites do not usually have a wellness professional on employee. If your workplace is in this category, you will need to contract with providers outside your corporation.
Large organizations have several options. They can hire a employee solely for the wellness program, they can contract with outside wellness providers, or they can use a combination of internal employee and outside providers.
When selecting a provider some key questions in the areas of employee, program structure, process, and effectiveness need to be addressed. Each of these key questions is discussed in the following sections.
Staff
Health professionals become wellness professionals when they are trained in the full range of wellness activities. Wellness professionals are generalists who come from a wide variety of backgrounds and schooling. They may be nurses, dietitians, health educators, counselors, exercise physiologists, or have other backgrounds. But in addition to their primary training, they know something about all wellness topics, including smoking, stress, exercise, and nutrition. They also know how to engage and support people in making and sustaining health improvements and have good people skills.
Generally, wellness professionals at worksites fall into three broad categories, wellness screeners, wellness counselors, and wellness instructors.
• Wellness screeners introduce employees to the program, take health measurements, collect health-related information, provide initial counseling, and help employees define for themselves what they need and want in a wellness program.
• Wellness counselors work with employees after the evaluation to help them set up and carry out a plan to decrease their risks and better their health.
• Wellness instructors teach classes and minigroups on different health issues.
A wellness program in a small employer can be staffed by a single employee person who fills all three roles. Larger worksites will use different employees to fill these roles.
When choosing employee or choosing among vendors, ask the following questions:
• Do prospective employees have a range of health backgrounds that will offer appropriate expertise in the issues to be addressed?
• Have prospective staff members functioned well as wellness screeners, wellness counselors, and/or wellness instructors?
• Will this employee include employees from the racial and ethnic backgrounds found in your employee population?
• Is each employee member comfortable with the range of backgrounds found in your employee population, and able to communicate effectively with the various social and educational levels of your staff members?
• Do employees have a warm, but professional, counseling style when interacting with employees?