‘Well-Being Is in Everything’: Inside One Company’s Wellness Approach

When Atlantic Packaging began its workplace wellness program in 2012, the company wasn’t starting with a question about how to get employees to take more steps or eat better. It was starting with a more basic problem: Some employees weren’t seeing a doctor at all.

Most of the 1,260 U.S. employees at Atlantic Packaging — a manufacturing company with employees spread across roughly 25 locations — work in a warehouse, on a manufacturing floor, or on a truck. At one of its largest North Carolina locations, employees had to travel about 30 minutes to see a primary-care provider.

“We knew our people just weren’t seeing a doctor,” said Becca Schusler, Atlantic Packaging’s director of wellness. “They didn’t even know their numbers.”

So the company started bringing care to them. One of its first initiatives was onsite biometric screening. In 2012, Atlantic also established an onsite health center at its Tabor City, N.C., location, with the goal of making primary care more accessible to employees who otherwise might turn to urgent care or the emergency room. The visits are at no cost to employees. 

Having that in place allows the company to go beyond asking employees to make healthier choices and instead focus on “trying to remove barriers to care,” she said. Today, Schusler said, 84% of employees at that location have used the health center.

The company’s wellness strategy has since expanded well beyond traditional workplace wellness. Employees have access to annual physicals, preventive screenings, health coaching, diabetes-management programs — as well as mental and behavioral health resources and financial coaching. The company even encourages employees to spend time outdoors through what it calls its “Nature Challenge.”

“It’s the throughline by which we make decisions,” said Schusler, who began working with Atlantic in 2012 as a population-health consultant, helping the company develop its wellness strategy, before joining Atlantic full time as its wellness director in 2023. “Well-being is in everything. It’s in the way that we work.”

SHRM recently spoke to Schusler about the impact of the company’s wellness program, why nature plays a role, and her advice for other HR leaders.  

SHRM: What impact has the focus on wellness had on your employees?

Schusler: When I first started at Atlantic, I remember going down to our location in North Carolina, and I was walking through the hallway, and I had a man stop me and say, “Atlantic saved my life twice.”

He had his onsite biometric and found out that his sugar and A1C, his glucose levels, were elevated. When he went to his doctor, he found that he had Type 2 diabetes and that it was uncontrolled at the time.

The second time we saved his life is that we require a preventive screening for our incentive program, and he had his PSA done and found that he had prostate cancer. He found it so early that he was able to treat it with radiation. He never missed a day of work, and he attributes those two things, part of our wellness program, to saving his life. 

And we’ve had numerous stories like that. I just had someone call me [recently]. They had their mammogram for our preventive exam, and they found out they had breast cancer. They attribute the wellness program to finding it early.

SHRM: You mentioned incentives to encourage preventive care. What does that look like?

Schusler: Our employees have to do their onsite biometric and annual physical, a preventive exam, and one health coaching visit. We offer free health coaching for all of our employees. The health coaches are registered dietitians, personal trainers, and certified health coaches.

If they do those four things, then they get a reduction on their premiums or their rates. We’re able to use a 30% differential. 

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SHRM: Once a health condition is identified, how do you help employees manage it?

Schusler: We do a lot of education. We have a diabetes self-management education and a Spark metabolic health program.

For the diabetes self-management education program, members can get a continuous glucose monitor at no cost to them, and they can learn how to use that and how that has a big effect on managing their Type 2 diabetes. 

Seventy-five percent of our people with Type 2 diabetes are making progress on their A1C. As a population, we’ve actually improved 1.2 points in A1C, which is really great.

SHRM: Mental and behavioral health has also become a significant part of your wellness program. What prompted that expansion and how is it going?

Schusler: We know that mental and behavioral health is a big risk and issue in our population.

We have partnered with a mental and emotional health provider that offers six free coaching and six free counseling visits to all our employees each year. They also have an app with self-guided exercises. 

We started it last year in May, and we already had 12.5% participation or engagement. EAPs [employee assistance programs] usually only see about 3% engagement.

SHRM: Another unique part of Atlantic’s program is the Nature Challenge. How did that become part of workplace wellness?

Schusler: I was reading a book three years ago called The Nature Fix [Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative], and it has a prescription for nature, where you’re supposed to be in nature something like 20 minutes a day, three hours a month, and three days a year.

Looking into the science behind that, there’s just so many ways in which nature reduces our stress, helps us to feel less anxiety, and be more creative. We actually move more when we spend time in nature. 

So we started this Nature Challenge [that encourages employees to track and increase the time they spend outdoors], and people love it. We have a [Slack] channel with about 200 people on it, and during the “Get Outside Challenge,” every day is just flooded with beautiful pictures of nature: People waking up with sunrises, posting their sunsets. They’re posting hikes and bikes and being on the water because we have our headquarters in Wilmington, North Carolina, so we’re on the beach there.

It just is so wonderful to see our people out and about. People reported moving more throughout the challenge. They reported feeling more in control of their stress during the challenge.

SHRM: What are you hoping to accomplish by prioritizing all these different types of wellness?

Schusler: We realize that everyone’s wellness journey is different, and they enter into that journey in different places. 

A huge goal of our program is to offer different entry points. You might be someone who’s in charge of your health. You know your numbers, and that’s not a big deal for you. But maybe you’re having a hard time managing stress because you have young ones at home. Maybe your mom or dad is having trouble, and you’re working full-time, and life just gets tough.

So we try to have resources and fun ways to engage wherever someone might enter. You never know how that challenge might fold into someone caring more about what they’re eating, and then that might fold into them caring more about what’s going on underneath the hood.

You just never know what’s going to be the impetus to help someone start their well-being journey.

SHRM: What does workplace wellness mean for you? 

Schusler: For me, and what's been a main focus over my time at Atlantic, is when our people walk into the building, they feel that they can be well in that building.

It means that your computer works. It means that your machine works, so that you don’t have added stress. It means that your manager is meeting with you on a regular basis to tell you how you’re doing. It means that you can take a break and take a walk. It means that you’ve got healthy food at your location that’s going to support you for the rest of the day.

In [our] Charlotte [location], we added greenery inside. So when you walk into the building, you are presented with these beautiful fig trees and beautiful plants. Last year we made sure every location had nature photography. In our warehouses, we’re putting in nature murals. If you can't get outside, bringing that feature inside can help.

It really just means that well-being is kind of embedded into every aspect of the day. 

SHRM: What do you want other HR leaders to know when thinking about workplace wellness?

Schusler: Wellness is in everything. A lot of times we think, ‘Well, we’ve got to do these really big initiatives to change people’s well-being,’ but it could just be an HR policy. It could be implementing manager training.

You have got to think about your people and what will make their life easier, what will help them come to work happier and healthier.