5 wellness engagement strategies that work

Published April 29, 2019 12:14 PM EDT Updated June 10, 2019 1:38 PM EDT 1 Min Read

You’ve already done your data analysis and identified some health habits that need to be changed in your population. Now you are tasked with engaging them in wellness. How do you get individuals to engage in behavior change?

Although a company might be ready to change the health of their workforce, change isn’t always quick. A health plan might want members to adopt a healthy lifestyle right away, but it takes time and effort.

You’re ready to change the culture and make the population healthier. But how do you know if they are ready? And, perhaps more importantly, do you know what they are ready to change?

When it comes to behavior change, you can be sure that not everyone will be ready, especially not to change everything at once. One way to understand where individuals in your population stand is through change readiness assessment. If you want to know whether someone is ready to make a needed change, ask. An individual may or may not be ready to change one certain behavior, but will be willing to change another. But by identifying the stage of change they are in, you can target messaging to help move them through the change process by individual, personalized motivation.

Brittany Carter

director of health and research

Brittany Carter, DHSc, MPH, is director of health and research at Wellsource, a provider of health risk assessment and health education products.

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