7 a.m.

A Monday morning.

About 10 tired employees of Frett/Barrington Limited, a small insurance company in Waukesha, filter into a meeting room. Suddenly, the room goes black, and a few glowing streaks light up around the room. They dash back and forth with no apparent pattern.

After a few minutes, the fluorescent lights return revealing the same group of employees, smiles adorning their faces. A few hold glow-in-the-dark balls.

What may seem odd to many is just another Monday morning physical activity performed before the company’s weekly meeting.

Patty Frett, account executive at Frett/Barrington, says it was a company goal for 2008 to start each Monday morning meeting with some type of physical activity. This initiative is part of Frett/Barrington’s “Employee Wellness Program.”

As Americans seem to become unhealthier – a United Health Foundation study revealed a 116 percent increase in the prevalence of obesity from 11.6 percent of the population in 1990 to 25.1 percent in 2007 – Wisconsin companies seem increasingly interested in employee wellness programs.

The programs encourage employees and their families to adopt healthier lifestyles by adding more exercise to the workplace, offering better eating options and, consequently, will hopefully keep lower health-risk employees – with cheaper health insurance – on staff.

According to Jessica Raddemann, executive director of the Wellness Council of Wisconsin, employers come to the nonprofit organization dedicated to helping employers design programs for assistance in creating a company wellness program to “reduce major health expenditures, improve productivity, reduce sick leave, reduce workers’ compensation and improve employee morale.”

Raddemann says more businesses now embrace employee wellness as a key business strategy. She added wellness programs are becoming more sophisticated. They are planned more thoroughly and are more comprehensive, including online services and counseling. Programs also contain a greater focus on and more awareness of lifestyle factors as opposed to just physical fitness.

The Aurora Sinai Medical Center, located in Milwaukee, bases its lifestyle program around seven areas of wellness: physical, emotional, vocational, intellectual, spiritual, social and environmental, according to Janine Bamberger, manager of nutrition services and wellness programs for Aurora Sinai.

“For two years in a row now, every employee has been offered the opportunity for a health risk appraisal,” Bamberger says, touting this as a huge first step in an individual’s health journey. The health-risk appraisals consist of questions related to the individual’s health history and lifestyle and then provide recommendations on how to reduce an individual’s health-risk factors.

Aurora Sinai also encourages physical activity at work. It added speakers in its stairwells to play music and painted murals in them to encourage employees to take the stairs rather than the elevator. Aurora Sinai promotes better nutrition through educational materials and healthier food options at work. For spiritual wellness, Aurora Sinai provides stress reduction techniques, including meditation classes, according to Bamberger.

“We wanted to make [Aurora Sinai] a better place for our employees. We wanted to make it a place where people wanted to come to work. We also feel strongly that if we take better care of ourselves, we will take better care of our patients,” Bamberger adds.

Frett says because Frett/Barrington works with developing employee benefit packages for organizations, the company “sees the value in having healthy employees.”

Frett says their wellness program is designed based on results of employee health risk assessments and interest surveys conducted every year. “Our program is a blend from the health risk assessment and the interest survey which help form our goals and decide on our activities,” Frett adds.

“We have two different goals that we are working on this year. One is to continue our focus on nutrition and eating well, and the other one that is new for us this year is to increase physical activity,” Frett says.