It’s Time to Clean up Our Work Meetings
It’s spring cleaning time: time to open the windows again and spruce everything up a bit. In addition to cleaning up our homes and workspaces, let’s clean up our meetings too.
It can be difficult to eat well in our junk food culture. One way to make healthy eating more possible is to change the food environment to make it more supportive. A great place to start is at work, where most of us spend a lot of time (and do a lot of eating). If work is not a supportive environment, it will make it that much harder to achieve healthy eating goals.
Studies show a strong relationship between the physical and social environments of the workplace and the health behaviors of employees. Nearly half of our waking hours are spent at work, and many of those hours are spent in meetings and conferences. By adopting healthy meeting practices, your organization can help to create a supportive environment that helps employees and members eat well and be physically active. Adopting healthy meeting practices sends the message that an organization or company cares about its employees and members. And, it’s a way to support health at little or no additional cost. Our Healthy Meeting Toolkit offers healthy and delicious food ideas, suggestions for free physical activity breaks, tips for tobacco-free environments, and sustainability practices.
This year, do a little spring cleaning of your work environment, pledge to have healthy meetings, conferences, and events. The National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity (NANA) has developed the Healthy Meeting Toolkit to help institutions make this pledge a reality. The toolkit contains helpful tips on how to serve healthier foods, work with hotels to contract for a healthy conference, talk to a caterer or chef about serving healthier options, integrate physical activity into meetings, and more.
Organizations, institutions, government agencies, or businesses that pledge to have healthy meetings can be recognized on our healthy meeting webpage.
If you already have a healthy meeting policy, please take the healthy meeting pledge now to show your organization’s support for providing a healthy work environment. You can take the healthy meeting pledge by emailing [email protected].
If you haven’t adopted healthy meeting practices, we hope you will find the Healthy Meeting Toolkit a useful resource to help you begin offering healthier food and beverage options, physical activity, a tobacco-free environment, and sustainability practices during your institution’s meetings and conferences. And if you need more information or help, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Posted by Katherine Bishop, M.S., M.P.H.
on April 15, 2014