Today’s 21st century workforce is characterised by an ageing population, stress, mental health issues, and an increase in chronic disease. In fact, at least 80 percent of employees have one chronic condition, while 55 percent have more.

By now, most of us are aware that the primary culprits of poor health are a sedentary lifestyle and poor food choices, yet, the best of us have difficulty following through on making healthy lifestyle changes.

Workplaces, where we spend most of our time, are typically not conducive to making the right choice with regards to our health. Even when we have the best intentions, schedules make us choose a quick, unhealthy lunch or we stay at the office late and miss our exercise class.

To address this, more and more of the best companies are implementing worksite wellness strategies.

High-performing workforces demonstrate healthy behaviours, have few health risks, show low prevalence of chronic diseases and have low medical-related expenses. Additionally, employees are shown to have higher levels of productivity, morale and loyalty to their company.

Not all worksite wellness programmes are created equal. Those that are proven to deliver the best results are approached as an overall culture shift for the organisation. At the core of these programmes lie policy and environmental changes. A successful wellness culture will reach the hard to reach, maintain healthy behaviour and increase lifestyle change success.

The need to approach wellness from a cultural perspective is an essential aspect of workplace wellness programmes, which is consistent with behaviour change theory.

Any workplace that supports and encourages the adoption of healthy behaviours are facets of behaviour change referred to as “opportunity”. Opportunity is having access to the environment that makes choosing a healthy behaviour the easiest choice and, eventually, the norm. In a wellness culture, healthy lifestyles are “the way we do things here”.

Critical elements to embedding wellness into the fabric of your organisation include:

Leadership — Support from the top will ensure that wellness remains a priority in your organisation. The CEO’s active leadership will set the tone for the rest of the organisation. Other leaders, including department heads and supervisors, throughout the organisation should also endorse, participate and lead by example. Clear leadership will help deploy programmes and engage larger groups of people.

Supportive policies and environment — Supportive policies that make it easier to move more at work and eat healthy will be central to creating healthy norms in your organisation. The table includes some strategies for improving your work environment.

Peer support — In a wellness culture people support each other in achieving their health goals. For better or worse, health behaviours spread from individual to individual. It is necessary to engage co-workers, spouses, dependents and social networks to support healthy lifestyles.

Celebrate success — It is important to recognise staff that make an effort and achieve results from their positive lifestyle changes. Recognition through a programme finishing party, or rewards in the form of gifts and incentives, motivates and reinforces healthy behaviour.

Best practices in workplace wellness have established that one of the most effective ways to creating and sustaining long-term positive lifestyle behaviour change is through environmental factors. A wellness programme from this approach will ensure that the workplace makes healthy behaviour the easiest choice.

Jacqueline Perreault is The Colonial Group’s corporate wellness director.