You have the wellness program, the wellness committee, and even leadership support, but you still feel like you are spinning your wheels to see a healthy shift in culture at your organization. You are looking for ways to make wellness stick. Creating your organization’s wellness actions into wellness habits is the key to making the healthy shift. The extensive research and strategies on creating individual health habits can be applied to creating organizational habits. Here are some good places to start:
1. The Habit Loop
In the book, “The Power of Habit”, Charles Duhigg describes the process of habit forming: “First there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is a routine which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future."
Over time, this loop-cue, routine = reward, becomes more and more automatic.
What cues can you put in place to trigger healthy routines at your organization? A bell on the hour that cues employees to stand and stretch? A day of the week that signals no fast food?
To cement these actions into habits be sure to add a reward, which could be things like socially connecting during the stretch, or recognition to those choosing a healthy lunch.
2. Keystone Habits
It is tempting when creating a wellness program to try to tackle all health habits at once: nutrition, sleep, exercise, stress, financial, disease. However, there is an abundance of research that shows if you want the habits to form and stick it is important to tackle one at a time.
In deciding where to start, Charles Duhigg also shares information about a special type of habit that when started, triggers wide spread change. These are called “keystone habits.”
In the book, Duhigg shares information from James Prochaska, a University of Rhode Island researcher. Prochaska states, “Exercise spills over. There’s something about it that makes other good habits easier.”
It can be as infrequent as once per week but the evidence shows with this one little habit, people smoke less, show more patience with coworkers and family, use credit cards less, and report they feel less stress.
3. Tiny Habits
“When you know how to create tiny habits, you can change your life forever.”,- BJ Fogg, PhD from Stanford University.
Fogg explains in his Tiny Habits program that the health behaviors we want to create are really habits. The premise of the Tiny Habits program is simple. When you start with very tiny behavior change, that is easy to repeat, it will eventually turn into a habit.
He gives the example in his TED talk to do two pushups everytime you go to the bathroom, or start by flossing one tooth. When you do these simple tasks, it becomes easier not to give up.
You can promote this philosophy to your program by encouraging employees to accomplish small tasks like, walking 1,000 more steps today, or eating an apple instead of a donut.
4. Praise
Praise builds on top of the reward part of the habit loop discussed above. When it comes to healthy choices the reward is not always obvious or immediate. Think about taking a daily vitamin. You may have the cue in place such as eating breakfast that triggers the habit – take the vitamin, but where is the reward? This can be the same with your wellness initiatives.
Encouraging to take part in a Fruit Friday instead of a Doughnut Friday may not bring an immediate reward, but you can provide that through recognition and praise.
Some companies even encourage coworkers to deliver that praise through “Caught you being healthy” initiatives where employees can recognize coworkers for their healthy choices. These little rewards can be an important step to keeping the habit loop going.
5. Create Connectedness
Healthy habits are easier to create and maintain with a support system. There is no better place to capture a social network than the workplace where people spend up to 40 hours per week together. Some ideas for creating connectedness include onsite health events, team challenges, and walking groups at lunch.
6. FOMO
The phenomenon of Fear of Missing Out or rather FOMO can be a powerful motivator for people to jump into your wellness program. People naturally want to be part of something and therefore don’t want to miss out.
You may never get 100% of employees to join in but if you communicate to 100% of the employees about all the great things that are happening, new skills being learned, and prizes being won you’ll be sure to attract additional participants.
Attracting participants to you program is a key step to creating the new health habits. To be even more effective with this be sure to use the typical marketing techniques of setting deadlines to register or offering limited spots to create a sense of urgency to participate and the need to avoid that FOMO feeling.
7. Puppy Dog Sale
The concept is brilliant – bring a puppy home overnight with the option to return it the next day for a full refund. It is likely that most these new pet owners will keep the puppy once they have tried it out. You can do this in the workplace too.
There may already be all the right cues for habit formation, but if your participants are not comfortable with the routine they won’t engage. Help participants get comfortable with the routine by trying it out first. Whether that is a new food, new exercise, or meditation, providing a comfortable environment in the workplace to experiment will increase the chances of employees committing to the habit.
Applying the techniques for habit formation to your wellness program can be the key to creating the long-term behavior changes for your organization. Go outside the box of simply planning and implementing a wellness program and put into place the cues and rewards for the healthy routines you see growing to keep them sustained.