Question

Case study.

You have been tasked to design an intervention for a local organization. Anna’s Cakes and Bakes is a local bakery with a small business design and 25 employees. The bakery is interested in implementing a wellness initiative for all its employees. Employees range in age from 22 to 35.

1.  What key components do you want to include in your wellness initiative (i.e. what aspects of health do you think are integral to overall wellness; this can include both physical and mental health)?

2. What type of intervention do you think would be most effective (primary, secondary, or tertiary)? Why? Describe how a cognitive-behavioral intervention would work for promoting wellness.

3. Which theory of health behavior will you base your initiative on? Explain your rationale.

4. What type of message do you want to send? How will you frame it?

5. Will you have any built-in incentives or reinforcements? Explain how you would reinforce your specific wellness behaviors and how you would prevent relapse into unhealthy behaviors?

Answer 1

Key components for a wellness initiative among employees could include sessions on stress management, wherein the participants are also made to engage in personal audits in order to discern how much do they undergo stress in their day to day lives. Other than that a spiritual wellness programme could be initiated along with making them re-visit the importance of creating a work-life balance. The different domains of life must be enhanced and worked upon at all times during one's personal and professional journey. And for this, it is crucial that one must hone all these skills and avoid focusing on one,while ignoring others. This may impact one's psychological as well as social well-being in very many ways.

2. Primary intervention is most suitable in this regard since a mind jog and a simple reminder for bringing participants back on track and re-visiting facts they already know should suffice for this purpose. Cognitive behavioral intervention could work in case of tertiary intervention if any participants are identified as having distorted thinking or irrational belief systems. Certain questionnaires and tools can be used to discern the same.

3. A Donna E Walker model can be used to design workshops so that each participant is able to make their way through the entire journey of understanding the theme, doing a personal audit & identify where they faulter along with making their own action plans as to how they would incorporate their new learnings into concrete actions.

4. The message is regarding the importance of work-life balance and why it is indispensable in order to lead a healthy & happy life. This could also include elements of mindfulness since it is now the need of the hour.

5. Built in incentives are a better bet to achieve this goal and in order to reinforce specific wellness behaviors, focus on maladaptive behaviors should be the aim while explaining how they tend to develop on a day to day basis. Also, focus on what it takes to inculcate change & why it is important can also be stressed.