GiftCard Partners Blog

Workplace wellness is a $6 billion industry. In today's age of technology, millions of American employees are sitting at their desks for hours on end. Behaviors like these have led to a growing rate of chronic diseases like obesity, high blood pressure, stress, exhaustion, and absenteeism, just to name a few. Implementing workplace wellness programs has become a vital piece in both maintaining and improving employee health. The Society for Human Resource Management (commonly known as SHRM) released a 2015 Employee Benefits Report that discussed the uphill trend in implementing workplace wellness programs, addressing preventable and chronic disease programs in particular. RAND Corporation also released a brief on wellness programs, titled  "Do Workplace Wellness Programs Save Employers Money." It took a closer look at the two most common components of a wellness program:

How well do you know your neighbor? With the hustle and bustle of everyday life many are finding themselves more and more dettached from their neighbors and the community as a whole can end up suffering.
Using small rewards to incentivize community engagement can help not only accomplish community goals, but engage a certain subset of your community to slow down and get involved. Whether you need to clean up the neighborhood playground, seed the community garden or encourage young adults in your community to get in the habit of giving blood, a small incentive could do the trick. Offering a $5 gift card to retailers like
Subway or
Speedway to incentivize either your whole community or a specific group, like young adults or seniors (or both to get cross-generational volunteerism going!) can provide a small boost to get community members active. Whether your goal is to make a positive impact on a small budget or to bring the community together as a whole, gift cards are a great motivational tool and something everyone can appreciate. How is your community incentivizing community engagement? As the summer comes to an end and fall is quickly approaching, what are you doing  to bring your town, city or community together in a unified effort to make your community a better place? Leave us a comment with your ideas!

In a world now dominated by technology and nationwide services, companies have a tendency to lose touch with their social roots. As 1-800-FLOWERS.COM's CEO Jim McCann discusses, gone are the days of word-of-mouth advertising and, with it, a sense of community for many companies on the rise. McCann makes an effort to avoid this through what he describes as social consciousness. McCann works to keep the community conversation open in his own company, even as he sees an increase in success and his business gets bigger and busier. 
"We face a host of enormous challenges in the world today--everything from climate change to hunger to economic turmoil. It’s not possible for any one entity to solve problems when they reach this scale, but it is still our responsibility to participate in the solutions--particularly in the discussions around new and better solutions that might be developed," said McCann. For 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, it's not enough to simply contribute money to good causes. They strive to participate in the conversation. They not only hunt for opportunities to connect with customers, but also for opportunities to connect their customers to one another and with their own community. Other growing companies can follow suit by ingraining a similar mentality of social consciousness into their own business practices.
Read the full article here.