Small Business Tips: Increasing Your Financial Literacy

How is your company]s financial wellness? What is it anyways? For employers, financial wellness is a program or set of programs designed to improve your financial behaviors and your employees and outcomes towards a positive bottom line at work and at home. Financial wellness includes the holistic approach to the physical health of the employees as it impacts the financial management of the company.Keep reading .....  

Small Business Tips: Increasing your Financial Literacy 

Having a great idea and running with it is not enough to operate a successful business. A business owner must wear many hats when operating their company, but managing and understanding their finances doesn’t always come easily.

Relying on a business manager or an accountant is a beneficial way to verify that you are conducting your finances by the book, but many small business owners do not have the budgets to afford these specialists. In fact, “40 percent of small business owners say they are financially illiterate – yet 81 percent handle their business’ finances themselves,” according to an Intuit study as reported by one source.

Whether you will hire out or want to tackle your business finances yourself, it is necessary to have a basic understanding of your financial situation if you truly want to be in charge of your business. With a little effort, it is not difficult to increase your financial literacy with these tips:

Know What is Required to Run a Business

Bloomberg reported that 80 percent of businesses fail in the first 18 months, states a source. Much of that failure is due to the fact that business owners are not skilled in properly handling their finances. There is a lot of financial planning and management required to operate a company, such as “budget, accounting and taxes, calculating price points, and projecting revenues and success rates well into the future to ensure continued success.”

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Your partner in health, 

Cindy Cohen RN, BS BA

Certified Health Coach 

Workplace Wellness Consultant

C2 Your Health LLC 

Top 50 Health Promotion Professional 

WELCOA On the Move Company Challenge

WELCOA is happy to announce the 2017 national On the Move Challenge and C2 Your Health LLC is excited to offer a discount for the 2017 challenge!

WELCOA has created a solution to get all employees moving because they want to, not because they have to. Employees will assess their physical activity barriers and receive targeted coaching and next steps from fitness expert Sean Foy. They will learn to connect physical activity with what is truly important to them, like their families, careers and managing their stress. They will set goals for their health and well-being and share them with their coworkers, and they will get support from each other to begin to create a culture of health in your organization. Includes device-agnostic fitness tracking device integration.

Choose Between 

·         On the Move Company Challenge ·         On the Move Monthly

·         Or engage with them together!

On the Move – Monthly – Benefits

·         On the Move Monthly platform access at a monthly per participant rate. ·         Monthly curriculum of turn-key programming that teaches participants to focus on their purpose, their intention, their reason for moving more and sitting less. ·         Incorporates financial well-being, stress management, nutrition, social well-being and more into purpose-driven curriculum. ·         High-touch personalized assessments and coaching that will change your employees’ physical activity behaviors and attitudes.

·         Educational videos, tools and resources for helping employees move more and sit less. ·         Optional device integration at no additional cost. ·         Hands-on training for onsite coordinators on best practices that will enhance your program for years to come. ·         Optional training and certification for onsite coordinator. ·         Ongoing customer service and support for your onsite coordinator.

On the Move Company – 12 week challenge – Benefits

National Challenge Deadline April 3, 2017

·         On the Move Company Challenge platform access for all employees with educational, behavior change, physical activity tracking and social support functionality. ·         National designation as one of the Top Most Active Companies. ·         12 Weeks of turn-key programming that leverages the new science of behavior change to help your employees move more and sit less. ·         A customized outcomes reporting package. ·         Optional device integration at no additional cost.

·         Built-in pre/post culture audit and employee engagement measures. ·         Hands-on training for onsite coordinators on best practices that will enhance your program for years to come. ·         High-touch personalized assessments and coaching that will change your employees’ physical activity behaviors and attitudes. ·         Educational videos, tools and resources for helping employees move more and sit less.          ·         Ongoing customer service and support for your onsite coordinator.

“I love that the challenge has made people stop and consider the decisions they make, often choosing a healthier path.”

– NICOLE, WEST ALLIS-WEST MILWAUKEE SCHOOL DISTRICT 

Federal Standards for Workplace Wellness Programs

The majority of large employers that offer health benefits today also offer at least some wellness programs in an effort to promote employee health and productivity and reduce health related costs.  Workplace wellness programs vary in the services and activities they include, and about three-in-ten large employers use incentives to encourage employees to participate.  Depending on a program’s characteristics, different federal rules might apply.  Final regulations recently issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) would change standards applicable to certain workplace wellness programs that use incentives to encourage workers and their spouses to provide personal health information.  These new rules are intended to be more consistent with other standards implementing requirements in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that apply to certain workplace wellness programs.  Both rules seek to balance employer interest in incentivizing workers to participate in wellness programs against requirements that prohibit discrimination based on health status, disability, and genetic information. 

Federal Standards for Workplace Wellness Programs. 

Three federal laws directly address workplace wellness programs within the context of other broad rules that prohibit discrimination based on health status.  The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) prohibits discrimination by group health plans based on an individual’s health status.  ERISA makes exceptions for wellness programs to offer premium or cost sharing discounts based on an individual’s health status in certain circumstances.  The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) prohibits employment discrimination based on health status and generally forbids employers from inquiring about workers’ health status, but makes an exception for medical inquiries that are conducted as part of voluntary wellness programs.   Finally, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) prohibits employment discrimination based on genetic information and forbids employers from asking about individuals’ genetic information, including information about family members’ health status, or family history.  Like the ADA, GINA allows an exception for inquiries through voluntary wellness programs.

Source: Published May 2016 Workplace Wellness Programs Characteristics and Requirements