Are you working in an innovative organization where leaders truly care about the health and well-being of employees? Do the leaders in your organization support others in maintaining a healthy lifestyle? Does your company or law firm offer stress management and wellness programs for management and employees?One of the most powerful questions one can ask is Is maintaining a healthy lifestyle one of my important values? Healthy business leaders have high levels of energy and support employees in staying healthy, happy and productive.

Are you a leader who models a healthy work/life style? Are you able to create a high performance workplace where employees are emotionally and physically healthy and fully engaged? Is your organizational culture supportive of healthy work-life balance for all of its employees? Do organizational leaders encourage stress prevention and wellness?Health and Well-Being.

A great many companies purchase the health plans they can afford and then hope to maintain costs. They fail to realize that corporate culture and individual responsibility have a dramatic impact on overall employee health and healthcare costs. Some CEOs take the attitude that employee health is none of their business. Other more enlightened leaders view health as something intrinsic to corporate values.

Reducing healthcare costs without the buy-in of employees is difficult. Many health issues are related to lifestyle. Obesity, smoking, lack of exercise, poor nutrition and an inability to manage stress are associated with 50 to 70 percent of all illness and medical problems.Wellness programs provide preventive efforts to improve employee lifestyles. Health screenings detect potential problems before the onset of disease. They enhance health and reduce costs. But less than 5 percent of the $1.8 trillion that Americans spend on healthcare goes toward prevention, and even progressive companies spend 80 times more on cure than prevention.

Some wellness programs consist of little more than posters and reminders in company newsletters. And since they are voluntary, wellness programs attract those who tend to be healthy and not the individuals who need the most help.

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