Abstract Employees experience workplace stress that can affect their health resulting in chronic diseases such as diabetes, stress, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases. Stress also contributes to staff presentism, absenteeism, and high turnover rate. The employee wellness program (EWP) yoga class at a metropolitan teaching hospital has not been evaluated for its effectiveness in employee stress reduction and improvement in employee health. The practice focus question for this project explored employees' perception of the impact of a metropolitan teaching hospital's EWP yoga class on their stress reduction and health promotion activities. The theoretical framework for this project is Lazarus' transactional model of stress and coping. This model suggests that individuals assess the stressor and find strategies for coping with the stress as it relates to them and their environment. The evidence that guided this project included a comprehensive literature review and the analysis of data retrieved from semi structured interviews with 20 participants in the yoga class who responded to an open invitation. Audiotaped interviews with the participants were analyzed and coded for common themes and revealed that participating in the EWP yoga program helped to reduce their perceived stress and improve their mental and physical well-being. The findings of this project were used to inform organizational leadership and may provide opportunities to evaluate the current yoga program regarding employee stress reduction, improving healthy activities, expansion of the program to other work sites within the organization, maintaining a healthy workforce, and reducing health care costs.

Workplace wellness programs (WWP) were developed to support employees’ health behaviors and well-being. Although physical activity is incorporated into the definition of wellness and is a modifiable behavior that can both reduce the risk for chronic disease and lifestyle-related diseases and enhance health and well-being, performance of physical activity is often overlooked within WWP and the workplace in general. Rather than investigating organizational aspects of the WWP, this grounded theory-based study explored employees’ perceptions concerning how their organization facilitated their participation in physical activity within WWP. To provide a theoretical framework, Self-Determination Theory (SDT) from Ryan and Deci (2000) offered the lens to understand the employees’ motivation to participate in physical activity and Social Ecological Model (SEM) by Bronfenbrenner (1977) described the multiple levels of interaction between the employee and their organizational environment. The employees’ perceptions elucidated their decision-making process. The emergent themes were time management, advantageousness, need for movement, supervisor ambivalence, social / “gregarious” connection, messages from leadership, limited awareness, culture of health, and incentives and reimbursements. Three levels (individual, relational, and organizational) and three facets (barriers, bolsters, and facilitators) illustrated the relationships among these themes. These themes, levels, and facets are exemplified in the grounded theory model. Consequently, six implications for practice were illuminated for organizations to employ for encouraging their employees to join and actively participate in physical activity in the WWP and in the workplace in general, providing better health outcomes for employees and improving the organizations’ bottom line. / Kinesiology