We perform at our best when we are healthy, both inside of work and out. PGC’s robust wellness program focuses on educating employees about their health risk factors and providing resources and support to help make lifestyle changes to be healthier, feel better, and be better enabled to meet the challenges of both the work day and personal lives.
In 2016, PGC once again beat the national average score for wellness in our aggregate health risk assessment results!
The health risk assessment and blood draw, known at PGC as the HRA or HRAs, but more commonly known outside PGC as a biometrics screening, started at PGC in 2014 as part of our wellness education. Over the past three years, employees have received incentives for participating—anything from cold hard cash to PGC swag, to a PGC provided breakfast, to infusing water bottles, waterproof Mp3 players, FitBits, noise/relaxation/sleep machines, juicing appliances, gift cards to Whole Foods, personal training sessions, and more! Participants now also receive a discount on their medical insurance premiums for participating and PGC launched an outcome-based incentive in 2016, to set the stage for outcome-based incentives in 2017.
Our program includes a gym onsite, an employee-run Wellness Committee with participation from our consultant: Jon Howard of Training Edge Sports as our Wellness Coordinator, as well as our HRA program and annual flu shot clinic.
It looks like a short list, but PGC’s Wellness Committee is busy! Members are responsible for offering a wellness fridge stocked with healthy snack options that employees can use on donation basis, coordinating health based events such as healthy potlucks, walking contests/challenges, health fairs, fundraisers for research and cures for ailments such as Alzheimer’s and Cancer, as well as soliciting the general population for new ideas, interests, and areas where the committee can help make a difference. For example, based on self-reported information in our health risk assessment data, our committee is tackling financial wellness in November! The Wellness Committee is hosting a trainer from our Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for a 60-minute education session for employees on the financial wellness topics of living off your pay check and how to budget for the holidays.
Jon Howard plays no small role in our culture of healthy living either. Jon attends and supports our committee meetings, is available to employees for one on one coaching, provides weekly action challenges and communications on the 4 Pillars of Health: Nutrition, Sleep, Stress, and Exercise, and he leads group work-outs once a week while providing the group with new moves for their self-led second exercise session later the same week. (Learn more about Jon here: http://www.jonhoward.co/wellness.html)
Participation in all PGC Wellness Program initiatives is always voluntary, but with a 93.5% participation in the HRA, we’ve just begun to see how contagious a wellness culture can be!