Working Towards Wellness

Companies have a unique and vital role in improving the wellness, health and physical fitness of employees. Wellness programmes at the workplace have been proven to attract and retain talented and healthy employees, reduce health costs and improve productivity.

The Opportunity
Corporate engagement in the Working Towards Wellness project offers the following benefits:
• Action: Generate tangible results in employee wellness
• Networking: Engage with a range of business and non-business stakeholders to drive the agenda
• Visibility: Help lead a highly innovative effort with other top business and public leaders, highlighting the issue and the approach to foster global dialogue and media attention

A Unique Approach
Our guiding principles have been to:
• Generate expert insights and spread best practices on how to create and monitor an effective workplace health programme through the World Economic Forum’s experts network
• Understand the business rationale in different regional and cultural contexts through World Economic Forum’s regional meetings
• Catalyse high-level commitments to advance workplace wellness initiatives across sectors through the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting
• Facilitate collaboration between stakeholders in the battle against chronic disease through partnering with the World Health Organization

Deliverables in 2007 

• A joint report with the World Health Organization, outlining steps that stakeholders can take to develop, implement and monitor chronic disease prevention programmes in the workplace
• A report on the business rationale for workplace wellness, demonstrating the quantifiable potential economic savings at national and business level and the logic behind action
• A synthesis and evaluation of current  workplace wellness measurement tools, outlining examples of current systems used globally to meaasure  employee health and  systems used globally to measure employee health and proposing a best practice measurement framework
• A set of practical steps CEOs can take, laying out an example of “how to”, the lessons learned and subsequent proposals for a broader range of stakeholders
• A series of examples of wellness schemes from around the world, highlighting current examples of wellness programmes targeting key risk factors for chronic disease

Who is Involved

• The Working Towards Wellness initiative is managed by the World Economic Forum and led by a Project Board that includes Arcelor Mittal, BT, General Mills, Goldman Sachs, Humana, Manpower, PepsiCo, PricewaterhouseCoopers, The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever and the World Heart Federation.
• An Advisory Board of leading experts and global institutions, including the World Health Organization provides additional guidance

Upcoming Events

• New Delhi, India, 1 December 2007
• Davos, Switzerland, 26 January 2008
• Cancun, Mexico, 14 April 2008 (TBC)
• Cape Town, South Africa, 3 June 2008 (TBC)

Contacts

For more information on Working Towards Wellness, please contact us at workingtowardswellness@weforum.org
 
Interview with Xihong Ai, Wellness Initiative, The World Economic Forum