Employer Wellness

Gaining senior staff reinforcement is critical to the success of a physical exercise initiative.

Whether the changes you’d like to see involve the work environment, overall policies or specific programs, successfully implementing your ideas depends on management reinforcement.

Support from management is critical for three reasons:

• You need their support to involve workers in a workplace program.
• When management pays attention to and supports initiative, employees also see the initiative as worthwhile.
• Senior Management has the authority to give work time and money to support the program.

It’s valuable to keep upper management involved throughout a physical activity initiative, but at three points you’ll need backing for:

• An overriding concept, including a go-ahead to assess what workers want to do within the limitations of your workplace environment.
• A detailed plan (based on the assessment above) coupled with resources to carry out the plan.
• Analyzing the plan to better it along the way or to advocate for continuing or expanding the plan.

Approaching Upper Management

Prior to addressing management to gain initial reinforcement for promoting physical exercise during work, do your homework.

• Prepare a business case clearly outlining how the business will advance by promoting physical activity during the workday.
• List the individual, social and corporate benefits of physical activity and the benefits of being active during work.
• Present some cursory ideas about what the program might include. See the Success Stories and Ideas sections on this website to highlight what other workplaces have done.

Expect questions such as the following from upper management:

• How will this help our employer?
• How can we arouse staff members to participate?
• How much will it cost to run this program or bring about this change?
• How are we going to know a year from now whether or not this was a good use of time and resources?

Ask managers about the range of activities they would support. Often managers have ideas of their own they would like to see acted on to improve the workplace.

Remember to include middle managers when gaining support for your initiative. They can be very helpful when you need volunteers to lead teams in corporate physical exercise challenges.