Wellbeing is a state of being happy, healthy or successful. These three words have one thing in common, they radiate positivity. The key factors that contribute to this positivity range anywhere from being physically fit, to emotionally balanced to financially comfortable.

In the current scenario, wellness or what that means to an individual, has found its way into people's lives, primarily because of the awareness created by the government, employers, and healthcare professionals. This has considerably increased the participation of the population in wellness initiatives at workplaces, better nutrition, seeking help from health coaches etc. However, one area that still needs improvement is traditional prevention programs like annual physical, eye exam, dental care, age-specific immunization, colonoscopy, mammogram and so on.

Engaging employees and their families in Health Risk Assessments and Biometric Screenings is a good area to increase their awareness for proactively take part in other preventive care. While wellness no longer is a trend but something everyone accepts as a way of life, prevention needs to be emphasized when considering the rising stats of chronic conditions.

According to CDC (Center for Disease Control & Prevention), "Chronic diseases, such as heart disease, cancer, lung diseases, and type 2 diabetes, are responsible for 7 in 10 deaths among Americans each year and account for the vast majority of the nation's health spending. These chronic diseases can be largely preventable through close partnership with your health care team, or can be detected through appropriate screenings when treatment works best."

Employers by now, know that it may be easy to get employees excited in wellbeing programs, at least in the initial phase. Because most people see value in losing weight, following safety measures, focusing on wellbeing, etc. it is easy to roll out such programs. But when it comes to "prevention" in the form of annual physical or wellness screenings and Health Risk Assessments (HRAs), employees may be wary of taking a reality check for various reasons. Even more importantly, after such a check, making the necessary lifestyle changes requires a comprehensive program.

For a wellbeing program to succeed, making prevention an integral part is of foremost importance. Because this is the only way to get a complete picture of a person's health and have a personalized program defined for each person.

Here are some tips that HR strategists can follow to make prevention a part of the wellbeing culture in an organization:

• If available, start with historical data analysis
• Offer wellness assessment
• Offer wellness screening on-site and allow self-reporting of biometric data
• Communicate to employees more often on the entire spectrum of preventive care
• Leadership can encourage team members to participate in prevention programs, HRAs, wellness screenings, etc.
• Get employees to share their wellbeing stories
• Offer incentives for engaging in prevention as well as making lifestyle changes regardless of results.

Building a culture of wellbeing in the organization is a continuous process. Only proven way to realize better ROI from your wellness programs is to focus on preventive care that will bring early detection and better outcomes at lower healthcare costs.

Green Circle Health platform makes it easy to present all your HR benefits and services in a simple dashboard. With its communication gateway, you can promote prevention programs, distribute information, share success stories on bulletin board and engage more people. With the ability to schedule and manage events and tasks, you can make it easy for both HR staff and employees to get more done with less time and resources.

Now is a great time to get busy helping your employees and their families to take care of preventive tasks and deploy your new HR benefits and services app for them.