Introduction
Companies have programs that intend to promote healthy living at community and individual levels. These programs enable folks to adhere to a healthy lifestyle. Among the most vital programs is the worksite wellness program. This plan entails a collection of corporate initiatives to promote healthy lifestyles among workers and, sometimes, employees’ dependents and spouses. This essay describes Zappos.com’s worksite wellness program.
Overview
Zappos, com is an American online shoe and clothing retailer in Las Vegas, Nevada. This company has cultivated a corporate culture centered on workers’ well-being. Zappos’ comprehensive worksite wellness program concentrates on emotional, psychological, and physical health. The program provides fitness classes, financial counseling, and mindfulness training. It also offers on-site clinical support. Zappos has established a positive work culture through several recognition programs. This worksite wellness program further entails providing workers with gym memberships or on-site gyms, helping employees lose weight to avoid lifestyle illnesses, and incentivizing staff by rewarding them for participating in this plan and attaining desired outcomes.
Through this program, Zappos aims to ensure its workers remain healthy. The company uses this worksite wellness program to improve its employees’ productivity. This plan has helped Zappos drastically decrease the number of sick leaves, ensuring that workers work for prolonged hours compared to firms that never offer a worksite wellness program. Zappos’ wellness plan enables the company to incur low costs because it pays reduced medical expenditures.
Contributing to Healthy Living
Zappos’ worksite wellness program contributes to healthy living on mental and physical levels. For example, this program provides fitness and gym classes to employees. Therefore, it remains geared toward helping workers improve their physical well-being (Jones et al., 2019). Most initiatives resulting from Zappos’ worksite wellness program concentrate on assisting staff to attain measurable healthcare objectives. For example, the program enables Zappos’ employees to achieve the needed body mass index, cholesterol levels, and blood pressure. All these measures, when maintained, lead to workers evading physical diseases, including diabetes, hypertension, and heart conditions.
Although psychological health is never easily measured as people’s cholesterol levels, Zappos has sought to ensure that its worksite wellness program entails initiatives geared towards enhancing workers’ mental health. Generally, workstation stress can result in burnout, adverse effects on psychological well-being, and reduced productivity. As a result, this company’s wellness program provides stress decrease methods like relaxation and meditation techniques and mindfulness sessions (Zappos partners with Fender to help employees de-stress by learning music, n.d.). The program offers mental health benefits like workers’ help programs that provide referrals to psychological well-being professionals while following strict secrecy standards (Jones et al., 2019). This phenomenon encourages staff requiring mental healthcare to seek it out through the program. The company’s program offers counseling services and psychological health resources, creating a supportive setting where workers feel comfortable searching for assistance whenever required.
Contributing to the well-being of the Overall Community
Workers at Zappos serve not only this company but also the community. These employees associate with consumers who constitute the communities where Zappos is located, like Las Vegas, to vend this firm’s shoes. Thus, with every single staff interacting with a massive number of consumers daily, it implies that workers act as role models to members of society by keeping a healthy lifestyle (Jones et al., 2019). For example, most individuals will strive to become fit if those they associate with daily have achieved a certain degree of body fitness. Zappos’ worksite wellness program ensures that employees never contract infectious illnesses. For example, staff working with different chemicals in this firm adhere to initiatives preventing them from contracting infectious diseases. This phenomenon ensures that Zappos’ employees never transmit such illnesses to people in society.
Most workers at Zappos originate from communities neighboring this corporation. Thus, employees participating in this wellness program and enjoying its benefits will ensure their close friends and family members adopt the plan’s initiatives (Jones et al., 2019). This phenomenon will help the community to achieve the positive impacts of the worksite wellness program. For example, Zappos’ workers will motivate their families and close associates to maintain fitness and mindfulness because the company’s worksite wellness program concentrates on such issues. As a result, the community will avoid lifestyle and mental illnesses by engaging in fitness classes and mindfulness training.
Partnering with Other Programs
Most worksite wellness programs never achieve the intended outcomes because employers confine them within an organization’s premise. Thus, workers only follow the programs’ initiatives while at work. However, when employees leave their workstations, they go back to old behaviors that encourage unhealthy lifestyles and unwanted mental conditions (Kava et al., 2022). This situation shows the essence of worksite wellness plans partnering with other programs in the community, offering extra comprehensive interdisciplinary services.
The first approach Zappos’ worksite wellness program can partner with other plans in society is by cooperating with those that follow similar initiatives as its wellness program. This phenomenon will ensure that issues arising in the community can be solved jointly (Kava et al., 2022). In this case, parties in the partnership will engage one another periodically, cementing the association. The initiative benefits the whole community and Zappos’ workers by helping them maintain a healthy lifestyle both mentally and physically.
The second way to partner this company’s worksite wellness program with other plans in the community is by ensuring that they have a shared vision. Wellness community programs with long-term objectives similar to Zappos’ wellness plan will make it straightforward for this firm to support them as part of its corporate social responsibility. The corporation’s workers will also find participating in both worksite wellness programs easier because they will be geared towards attaining the same purposes. For example, Zappos has partnered with Fender on Strum for the Sole. This staff wellness plan provides employees with Fender music learning instruments and apps (Zappos partners with Fender to help employees de-stress by learning music, n.d.). These tools are available in a jam room on Zappos’ campus. The two companies believe in a shared vision that this program will motivate work-life balance by permitting workers to decrease stress and raise their creativity.
Conclusion
Zappos has executed the worksite wellness program to help its workers be highly productive. The program contributes to the healthy living of this company’s staff on mental and physical health levels. Still, this worksite wellness plan contributes to the well-being of the entire community because workers who undertake the program interact with society members who are family members, close friends, and those they serve. As a result, Zappos’ employees motivate community members to adopt the program’s initiatives, realizing a healthy lifestyle. This company can partner with other society programs whose ideas correspond with its worksite wellness plan. This phenomenon will enable Zappos to offer more comprehensive interdisciplinary services to the community and its workers.
References
Jones, D., Molitor, D., & Reif, J. (2019). What do workplace wellness programs do? Evidence from the Illinois workplace wellness study. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(4). https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjz023
Kava, C. M., Strait, M., Brown, M. C., Hammerback, K., Harris, J. R., Alongi, J., & Hannon, P. A. (2022). Partnerships to expand worksite wellness programs – A qualitative analysis of state and local health department perspectives. INQUIRY: The Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision, and Financing, p. 59, 004695802210928. https://doi.org/10.1177/00469580221092822
Zappos partners with Fender to help employees de-stress by learning music. (n.d.). HR Dive. Retrieved March 17, 2023, from https://www.hrdive.com/news/zappos-partners-with-fender-to-help-employees-de-stress-by-learning-music/562074/
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