Corporate Fitness and Active Aging

If you missed the first blogs of this series featuring insights on developing a robust wellness-based lifestyle at your community, start here. Some content will cover practical tips and some will identify barriers to achieving success meant to spark conversation within your community. Read on for the final piece of the series.

All personnel working in a senior living community have a stake in supporting resident well-being from your concierge to your bus drivers to your service staff in the dining room. The daily interactions your team have with residents and the work culture at a community all directly impacts the quality of life of residents. As communities pursue opportunities to both evaluate resident care needs and broader program and service needs under the banner of enrichment, forming a wellness committee of your key stakeholders can be an integral step. Finding the right balance of personnel to represent different arms of the community as well as getting their buy-in with already full workloads can be a tricky step.

A few considerations in forming a wellness committee include:

• Establishing balanced representation from key departments that impact resident well-being. Your wellness committee members shouldn’t be strictly clinicians and it shouldn’t be strictly activities personnel. It should be a healthy blend of both areas plus fitness, dining, chaplain services, etc...
• Establishing balanced representation from staff who are connected with leadership’s vision for the lifestyle you want to foster (i.e., perhaps your marketing director) as well as representation from staff who are interacting daily with residents hearing directly about their interests (perhaps your activities coordinator). Make sure the personnel encompass both ends of the spectrum from your administrative staff to your line staff to best meet the needs of current residents while also modeling for future residents.
• Establishing goals for the group to help keep all of the personnel with different daily job duties and focus areas working on the same track. Your Wellness Champion from part II of this blog series is integral in supporting this step but allowing your team to come together to talk about the challenges they are experiencing in their departments, the feedback they are hearing from residents, etc., can help them identify their goals as a team and establish a work plan to move forward together.

As your wellness team comes together and begins having a strong team dialogue, identifying challenges and problem solving together, you might also consider the formation of a resident wellness committee or including a resident on your staff committee. Once again, the same level of thoughtful diversity in your resident representation should be considered. Many communities will invite their most active and fitness-oriented residents to join such a committee but you also want voices that have strong connections to spiritual well-being, volunteering, etc…

In establishing your wellness team, having them form goals, and collaborating regularly, your community will uncover ways to bridge resources and support one another as a collective front. In turn, your community will make more of an impact on residents’ lives and will have more positive stories to tell about your culture.

Looking to do wellness better in your community?  Connect with NIFS on how you can better evaluate your wellness offerings for residents in your community, schedule your free 30 minute consultation today!