Happy Healthy Days: Maintaining a Wellness Program During the Holidays

By Rich Manning

We are in the thick of the holiday season.  If you work in an office, there is an excellent chance that its kitchen, break rooms, and lobbies managed to morph from respites from the workaday world to full-fledged dens of unhealthy horrors the moment the calendar flipped to October.  You’ve seen the pattern before, and you what to expect and when to expect them:  The cavalcade of plastic cauldrons filled to the brim with Halloween candy that didn’t quite make it into the hands of children; the Thanksgiving potluck that somehow manages to have very little food offerings traditionally associated with Turkey Day; the assortment of Christmas cookies, candies, and other confections that seem to regenerate themselves until after the New Year.   If you are an executive, you may not have paid much attention to all the sweet stuff flying around during this time of year for a long time.  Then a whole bunch of metrics came out relating to company wellness, lost production, and the importance of eating healthy.  Suddenly, the vast amount of chocolates and pies being wolfed down in the break room became a little disconcerting. 

To be sure, the greater emphasis on providing and maintaining a healthy work environment has added a bit of a wrinkle into how offices celebrate the 4^th quarter.  And considering the kind of goodies that are usually consumed in absurd quantities this time of year, it’s safe to conclude that said wrinkle is not a pleasant one.  The fact is that the last three months of the calendar year represent the final frontier of the health movement, and even if you have a wellness program that is popular and successful throughout the rest of the year, such a platform is quite liable to get met with resistance and mockery from the moment the first ghost wall-hanging is hung to the time the final stocking is removed. However, just because reluctance toward healthy behavior is stronger during the holidays does not mean that you should abandon all hope in promoting all things wellness throughout this stretch of time.  Indeed, you can still encourage people to hop on board the healthy train during this section of the calendar.  All it really requires is a solid plan.

The first thing you have to do is realize no matter what methods you will use to encourage holiday health, know that you will be fighting a losing battle.  Even though people complain about gaining weight during the holidays, one of the joys the season brings is the promise of eating poorly.  Knowing this is essential, because it will prevent you from deploying any rash decisions upon your workforce, such as banning sweets from the office or even disallowing people to share leftover candy in the break room.  In fact, doing anything that remotely looks like you are putting some sort of kibosh on treats will be resoundingly met with dirty glances, grumbling, and other classic earmarks of discouraged morale, which could affect your bottom line much more than someone filling their hands with Hershey’s Kisses.

The good news is you can most definitely implement ways to help combat the effects of sweets.  One of the best ways to do this is to take advantage of Orange County’s perpetually splendid weather and create a walking club.  It may sound like a bit of work to organize, but its core premise is really simple. Encourage people to use their break periods to step away from their cubicles or offices, go outside and take a stroll around the building or business complex.  That’s it.  Nobody has to come in early or stay late to participate.  They don’t have to change into workout clothes except for slipping on a comfortable pair of walking shoes.  And it will get them to actually take their break instead of plowing through the day without a morning or an afternoon breather, which is ultimately a very healthy practice in its own right.  Moreover, the process can become rather addictive; once people see how rejuvenated they feel when they return to their desk after a brisk walk, it may turn into something that they will greatly look forward to each day. 

Another way you can counter the consumption of bad foods in the office is to organize a healthy potluck lunch.  As you well know, potlucks are simply a fact of office life around the holidays, whether such a gathering hodgepodge of homemade food is contained to one department or spread out over the entire workforce.  So why not use this tradition to show how tasty food that is good for you can be?  Have people bring in their favorite low-cal soups or stews to help ward of the chill that is filling the air with greater prevalence.  Allow people the chance to turn the office kitchen in to a build your own baked-potato bar.  Put together an “Iron Chef” style potluck where people have to use one or two famously healthy ingredients in whatever dish they bring.  If you roll it out properly, people will look at it in a fun, exciting light instead of an agenda-driven activity.  Just be prepared for one or two people that will gum up the works by bringing in a dish that slightly borders on the wrong side of health.  When this happens, don’t fret, as long as you have plenty of other healthy options available to counterbalance the bad-for-you dishes, you’ll be okay. 

Finally, there’s always the classic, proven method of incentivizing healthy eating.  We’re talking something as simple as offering Starbucks gift cards to people to bring in healthy snacks.  While you may find this method of essential bribery to be slightly trivializing to the whole process, you can at least take solace in the fact that you will absolutely see results around the office that serve as its own justification.  Some people will do anything for a Starbucks gift card.

Above all else, what any combination of these ideas will do is that they will manage to keep your wellness program strong and vital throughout the holiday season.  As an added bonus, they will accomplish this without feeling like a detraction from the feasting that will inevitably occur in and outside of the office.  Considering that one of the holiday season’s culinary advancements over the past twenty-five years is the introduction of the turducken, that’s not all that bad.