December 27, 2021 — Our readers amaze us. First of all, it is amazing that more than 100,000 of you come to ConscienHealth in the span of a year. But more important, you teach us by what you read and share from our site and what you pass up. So here are the top ten stories you read most […]
June 19, 2021 — A special kind of wellness woo as taken root in HR departments all over the world. Corporate wellness is a $53 billion industry selling an appealing narrative. Acme Widgets can cut its health costs and boost productivity if it nudges employees to adopt healthy habits. Healthy lifestyles will save us from illness, right? So businesses […]
May 27, 2020 — It seemed like a good idea at the time. Build incentives for employees for wellness into health benefit packages. Employees “volunteer” to give up some health privacy in order to have their employers collect health data on them. They get a little financial incentive to participate and then more incentive if their health data improves. […]
May 6, 2019 — Workplace wellness sounds like such a benign concept – maybe even beneficent. So why does it sometimes spark such anger from employees? And why aren’t workplace wellness programs working to yield better health? A recent paper from Frontiers in Psychology offers important insights. Senior author Stuart Flint sums it up: Problems arise when these programs […]
December 23, 2017 — They’re dead for now. Those godawful coercive wellness programs will be illegal on January 1, 2019, thanks to a new court ruling this week. A judge finally threw out EEOC rules that allowed companies to impose big penalties on employees who don’t step on the scale and lose weight. Some employers called them incentives. But […]
March 18, 2017 — Workplace wellness has been creating headlines this week, due to legislation about genetic testing in these programs. In a guest blog today, our friend Al Lewis writes about his concerns with the industry. This week, Fortune published a generally very skeptical review of workplace wellness, highlighting one of the few major companies (Cummins) to be moving […]
