Just as we saw with the terms health and wellness, the definitions of wellbeing did not themselves yield an agreed upon, commonly accepted definition.
But you do want to know if your worksite wellness program should or should not adopt a model of wellbeing, correct? Since definitions didn't get me very far, I wondered if I would get better clarity by reviewing the available, published wellbeing models.
Here are a number of the models I located and reviewed: Wellbeing Models The Gallup - Healthways model has five essential elements: purpose, social, financial, community and physical.
The Gallup model is similar to the Gallup - Healthways wellbeing model.
The Rath/Harter model from their 2010 book, Wellbeing, has five essential elements: career, social, financial, physical and community.
Steelcase, a manufacturing company, has a wellbeing model consisting of six dimensions: optimism, mindfulness, authenticity, belonging, meaning and vitality.
When describing wellbeing, the U.
S.
CDC notes that researchers from different disciplines have examined different aspects of wellbeing that have included: physical, economic, social, development and activity, emotional, psychological, life satisfaction, domain specific satisfaction and engaging activities and work.
Lisa Jing's Diamond Model of Integrated Health and Well-being has 10 dimensions: nutrition, fitness, sleep, life balance, preventive care, relationships, finances, spirituality, interventions and responsibility.
The Grawitch, Gottschalk and Munz model of employee wellbeing includes eight dimensions: physical health, mental health, stress, motivation, commitment, job satisfaction, morale and climate.
The University of Minnesota's model includes: environment, community, purpose, health, relationships and security The Association of Ontario Health Centers uses a wellbeing model that includes: health equity, social justice, belonging and community vitality Wellbeing and Poverty Pathways, an international research partnership based in the UK, describes their wellbeing model as comprising both subjective and objective dimensions that are addressed through a layering approach which cross-cuts and complements eight domains of personal wellbeing through four different layers.
The four layers are: an enabling environment and reflections on it, objective wellbeing, a subjective reflection on the objective wellbeing and subjective wellbeing.
The eight domains of personal wellbeing are: economic resources, local environment, agency and participation, social connections, close relationships, competence and self-worth, physical and mental health and values and meaning.
The UK Government Office of Science's Foresight Program model consists of: external conditions, personal resources, good functioning and satisfaction of needs and good feelings day-to-day and overall.
In his 2011 book, Flourish, Martin Seligman, the originator of positive psychology, described the wellbeing model as PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, positive relationships, meaning and accomplishment/achievement.
Just as with the wellness construct, we see all the wellbeing models as being multi-dimensional.
The number and names of the individual dimensions also vary by model.
Each of the models also states that their individual dimensions are also inter-related.
In many of the wellbeing models, the different individual dimensions mirror very closely the dimensions we saw with the various models of wellness.
Based on these models, will a worksite wellness program gain that much more by adopting a wellbeing approach over a wellness approach, so long as each model's dimensions are fully implemented? Reference: Grawitch, Matthew.
Gottschalk, Melanie.
Munz, David.
The Path to a Healthy Workplace: A Critical Review Linking Healthy Workplace Practices, Employee Well-being and Organizational Improvements.
2006.
Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, Vol.
58, No.
3, pp.
129 - 147.