Last Updated on September 24, 2026 by Fly High Coaching
Employee wellness has become a bigger conversation in the workplace over the last few years, but many organizations still treat it as a box to check rather than a culture to build. Programs get rolled out, participation stays low, and leadership wonders why nothing changed. Do you know the difference between a wellness initiative that looks good on paper and one that actually moves the needle for your people?
In this episode, you will learn more about understanding employee wellness and what it really takes to build something that lasts. Our host Porschia, alongside guest Danielle Dinkelman, share their insight on why the most effective wellness programs start with leadership modeling the behavior, not just approving the budget.
They will also discuss the 3 biggest challenges companies face with their wellness initiatives, including low engagement, unrealistic expectations from leadership, and not knowing what employees actually need. The conversation also covers why Danielle rejects incentive-based wellness programs entirely, and what she’s seen work instead when organizations take a purely altruistic and symbiotic approach to employee wellbeing.
Danielle Dinkelman is the co-founder and CEO of Advanced Corporate Wellness, a board-certified health and wellness coach, author, and speaker. She brings employee wellness coaching to small and midsize businesses in professional and social services, with a focus on preventing burnout and building sustainable wellness culture from leadership down.
What you’ll learn:
- What employee wellness actually means and why it is a social responsibility for employers
- Why the most effective employee wellness programs start with leadership, not HR
- The 3 biggest challenges companies face when rolling out wellness initiatives
- How employee wellness directly shapes company culture in both directions
- Why for every dollar spent on wellness, research shows a return of six dollars back
Resources:
- Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Today, we are talking about understanding employee wellness with Danielle Dinkelman. Danielle is an employee wellness strategist and entrepreneur who’s passionate about helping people thrive in their work and their life. She is the co-founder and CEO of Advanced Corporate Wellness, which brings employee wellness coaching to small and midsize businesses in professional and social services.
Porschia: Danielle is a board-certified health and wellness coach, author, and speaker. She is well-known for her [00:01:00] expertise on preventing burnout, creating healthy habits, and supporting wellness culture inside of organizations. Danielle lives in Oregon City, Oregon with her husband and four children. She is a trained classical musician, loves the outdoors, and enjoys rock climbing at ho- her local bouldering gym as often as she can.
Wow, it sounds like we all need to go spend some time with Danielle. That’s what I’m getting from this.
Danielle: Come play with me, yes.
Porschia: Yes. How are you today, Danielle?
Danielle: I’m so good. I’m so excited for this conversation, Portia. Thanks for having me.
Porschia: Absolutely. I’m excited to discuss understanding employee wellness, but first we wanna know a little more about you.
So tell me about seven-year-old Danielle
Danielle: I can’t tell you how much I love this question. I’ve done a lot of podcast interviews, and I’ve never been asked this question on a podcast before, so I love it. And that just tells me the coach that you are, right? It’s the, it’s that [00:02:00] holistic approach because our childhood really tells us so much about who we actually are in our essence as human beings.
The f- there’s two things that come to my mind when I think about seven-year-old Danielle. Number one is climbing trees. Number two is drawing. I would go to the library at the elementary school and I would check out multiple books on, this is so silly, but spiders. Eventually I graduated to birds of prey, but I would just any animal that fascinated me and I would just sit and I would draw.
I would just copy the pictures out of these books. And that’s where I lived. I lived in my body, and I lived in my imagination, and I loved to create and appreciate beautiful things. And thank you so much for that question because that just feels so good to remember those things. Thank you.
Porschia: Absolutely, and thank you for sharing.
And yes I, and I remember you are as well. The audience knows I’m a psychology nerd, and [00:03:00] part of the rationale behind that question is, to your point they’ve done a lot of research and they generally say that a lot of people your personality and a lot of aspects about you are kinda cemented around age seven.
So wanting to know about that time, I think kinda gets to the essence of who people are.
Danielle: Yeah. I love it so much. I’m gonna, I’m gonna borrow that and I’m gonna use that. Thank you.
Porschia: Go for it. Go for it. So tell us about some highlights or pivotal moments in your career before you started your business.
Danielle: Absolutely. So yeah, right now I’m in the employee wellness space, the corporate wellness space, and that is not what 17-year-old or even 27-year-old Danielle would’ve thought that she would be doing. So yeah, there’s been many pivots along the way. I started out in college studying music.
I was a music major studying trombone performance of all things, and yes, the instrument is just about as big as I am. I stand at five foot two, and I’ve maybe [00:04:00] only got a couple inches on it when it stands up on end. But I loved my time as a music major, and after graduation I started raising a family.
Had, I’ve had four children over the last while, and pretty much started raising my family pretty quickly after college. And meanwhile, I taught music lessons out of my home. So for years and years, I worked with, middle school and high school aged musicians one by one coming into my home for their weekly music lesson.
And that was really the birthplace of my love affair with human development and psychology. I’d always been fascinated of kind of what makes people tick and why are certain things natural to some and not to others. And if, if you’ve ever had to learn a new skill like music or like any kind of sport or anything it reveals a lot about who you [00:05:00] are as a human and how you learn and how you process and what your roadblocks are.
And I found that more than teaching this instrument or teaching these pieces of music to my students, I loved helping them understand themselves, and music was just the vehicle for that. So that was really rewarding work for over a decade being a mentor in the lives of these young people.
So that was beautiful. It started to come to a close in 2020. That was a big pivot point for me because just a few years before that, I had felt called really and really just fascinated by a couple things. Nutrition but also like fitness and exercise as well as mindset and mindfulness as well as energy work, just like this very holistic multifaceted interest in wellbeing.
And so in 2018, I got certified as a health and wellness coach. And amidst that I got to learn about [00:06:00] the science of change, of behavior change and the psychology of that, and got some amazing skills in that training process. So from 2018 to 2020, I was doing both. I was continuing my music studio work and I was becoming a health and wellness coach, and I was working with individuals over the phone on their health goals.
2021 was a highlight. I published a book. So if you Google my name on Amazon you’ll find it. If Diets Don’t Work, What Does? And it’s just a lifestyle approach to Feeling better in your body taking, taking care of yourself in a way that doesn’t take a dieting approach.
So that was a really rewarding project that was a culmination of the work that I’d done for, the three or four years leading up to that of what I saw really working for people, unlocking kind of some old diet habits and embracing more of a lifestyle approach. [00:07:00] And then the final pivot has been it was actually the fall of 2021 that we launched our corporate wellness company, my husband and I, and we’ve been running that ever since.
And that’s been bringing this what I really think of as a gift of health and wellness coaching to a wider audience through, organizations and businesses that, that see a need and a value in, in providing that to their employees. So as you said in the intro, mostly for folks that are facing kind of intrinsically stressful or intrinsically even traumatic work that those are the folks that need to even more so be prioritizing self-care and personal wellbeing so that they can continue and sustain the nature of the work that they are doing.
So those are the highlights. That’s the topography of where I’ve been over the last couple decades.
Porschia: Yeah. I heard you mention the nutrition and the health and [00:08:00] wellness coaching to lead up to your business, but how did you decide to focus on employee wellness as one of your areas of expertise?
Danielle: Oh, great question. That was totally born from personal experience of my husband and I. So as I said, I was, in the early years of our marriage, we were focused on, raising our family, and I was enjoying my side hustle of music studio work. And Blaze, my husband, was just diving into the corporate world, and I was his cheerleader and his support person through that time.
And in 12 years of his career in executive leadership, he burned out four times. And at each of those junctures, we left the current company and went to a new one in hopes of a better experience, right? And there was a [00:09:00] lot of learning that happened for both of us in that. And for me, as an observer, you learn different things when you’re the outsider.
And there was just so much about that dynamic of showing up to a job, being given responsibilities and expectations, and then navigating how to balance what you as an individual needs, what your family and friends need and what this job needs from you. And that at times felt like an impossible puzzle, and I really like puzzles.
So that was a puzzle that fascinated me, and that I felt that I had a few things to offer by way of that. And in my private practice I had worked with many professional people in their wellness goals, and it was so interesting to me to help them navigate some of the professional [00:10:00] challenges that were impacting their personal wellbeing.
So just that, that intersection of personal and professional wellbeing really fascinated me.
Porschia: Love it. So for anyone who doesn’t know, what is employee wellness?
Danielle: Oh, man. I do not pretend to be the authority on giving that definition, but I’ll give you my best shot. My understanding what it, what employee wellness means, I could give you the history lesson.
I have studied that a bit and there’s some great work out there that, that kind of lays that out. But it’s the idea that as an employer, you are working with human beings that are not robots. They have very human, very physiological as well as mental and emotional needs in order to be able to perform the work that they want to perform, [00:11:00] right?
And so as an employer it may behoove you to consider are we creating an environment in which these human beings can and do take good care of themselves so that they can bring their best to not only this work, but also the, the things in their larger life that are important to them, like their family and their community.
That might be a little bit of a long-winded definition, but that, that’s how I think of it. It’s kind of that… it’s a social responsibility of an employer. And I very much think of it as a symbiotic relationship between employer and employee. There’s, of course, there’s an exchange of time and work and money, right?
And I really believe that, we should be functioning under this, this assumption of do no harm. At the very least a, a job and employment should do no harm. That, gosh, we could have a whole conversation just about that, [00:12:00] right? Yeah. I’ll pause there.
Porschia: Oh, I love you bringing up the symbiotic relationship between the employee and the employer.
I think that’s so important for people to think about. We’ve discussed employee wellbeing on the podcast before back in episode 32, and we talked about the importance of discussing employee wellbeing in the workplace. So from your perspective, why is employee wellbeing and employee wellness important?
Danielle: Anecdotally, seeing my husband go through his corporate experience, there wasn’t a discussion, there wasn’t a conversation, there were not values around employee wellbeing that were being communicated. And what that does, the silence sometimes speaks louder than words. It can speak volumes.
And in that silence what an employee is [00:13:00] hearing is what’s expected of them, what’s being asked of them, and there’s always a back pressure. There’s always a backlog of w- deadlines and projects and things that need doing, and there’s a constant question in employee’s mind, and it shouldn’t be this way, but it often is, of how important is this?
How should I prioritize this compared to the o- all the other things on my plate? What is the actual deadline of this? How urgent is it? Does this trump me sitting down to a healthy dinner tonight with my family? Does this take higher priority than me taking a break and taking a walk and resetting?
There’s, there, that constant back pressure can cause a really poor relationship with a [00:14:00] person and their work where they feel like they, there’s a loss of agency and autonomy, and they’re constantly burdened by the next thing on their to-do list. And so the importance of talking about and prioritizing employee wellbeing from a leadership and an organizational standpoint is massive in that kind of an environment.
And of course, back to that symbiosis, that’s going to serve an organization really well because then you’re going to have fewer employees that are burning themselves out, that are exhausting themselves, and at the very least, are doing really poor quality work because they are not at their best, because they are burning the candle at both ends.
Porschia: Yeah. So in my years working with companies, I’ve seen the attitude around employee wellness change, [00:15:00] and you, I think, were alluding to this with your husband’s experience. Why do you think executives and leaders are more open to discussing employee wellness at this point?
Danielle: The companies and the leaders that are most open to discussing it are those that have experienced the, the fallout themselves.
Either, either personally themselves, they have experienced burnout or maybe a loved one has, or maybe they’ve seen that play out in a colleague where they’ve just completely depleted themselves and then it leaves the company in a lurch when that person suddenly has to leave, or that person has a mental breakdown or a physical health crisis.
There’s been some sort of wake-up call typically for a leader who is willing to say, “Yeah, this is important, and we are gonna bake this in to our culture and our values as a [00:16:00] company.” That’s been my experience. I, I would love to say that there’s more discussion about this in business schools.
And, I just completed an MBA just over a year ago, and we talked a tiny bit about well-being and work-life balance and all of that. We did have an entire ethics class with an entire section focused on corporate responsibility. And, if folks are hearing this, and I don’t know about you, Portia, but I talk to and work with a lot of big-hearted and forward-thinking HR professionals that are all on board.
They see the symbiotic relationship because they live at the intersection of the human element and the organization. So those folks get it, and the number one question I get from those folks when I give talks or I lead workshops on these topics is yeah, I’m in. I’m all bought into this.
[00:17:00] How can I get my CEO bought in? How can I help my CFO get bought in, my COO?” And that is still a question that is hard to answer because it’s hard to open people’s eyes to the, the necessity of this unless they’ve seen it play out. Because we’re not hearing about it in business school. We’re not hearing about it in equal measure to the other things that take higher priority, which is the bottom line
Porschia: Yeah
I do agree. I think the conversation is out there more, but similarly to the conversations I have with organizations about employee engagement and turnover and things like that, sometimes a lot of executives just aren’t concerned until you, put the ROI, put a number on it for them.
Danielle: Yep.
Porschia: So Danielle, what do you think are the essential parts of an employee wellness [00:18:00] initiative?
Danielle: I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not lip service. It’s not box checking, and it cannot be temporary When I think of an employee wellness initiative, what I prefer to [00:19:00] promote in the companies that we partner with is that this needs to start with the leadership, and it needs to happen by example.
So there’s a whole lot we could talk about there, right? It needs to be modeled. It needs to be adopted by the leadership. From there, there needs to be a bit of an examination of the company, the current culture, and the artifacts of that culture, right? The do you have an ethics statement? Do you have a mission statement?
Do you have a vision? Do you have values? What does your website say? What does your printed material say? What does your onboarding process entail? And every little artifact that could tell an outsider about your organization, is there evidence in [00:20:00] those artifacts of a value and an importance around employee wellbeing?
And if there’s not, we gotta start there The reason for that is employees have a really good radar for box checking and for lip service. And making visual changes, verbal changes, and commitments can be a, can send a really strong message. So if we’ve got leadership modeling principles of wellbeing, we’ve got the organization buying in and communicating about these things, then it goes into walking the walk, and how do we invite change?
How do we invite engagement in wellbeing? And there’s so many ways that have been invented for [00:21:00] doing this. There’s so many things that are technology-based, that are rah-rah, group gathering, event, lunch and learn spa days. There, there’s just like a whole spectrum. There’s no right or wrong way to do it.
I do think that taking a one-size-fits-all approach is not ideal. So I would say the, the other essential element here is ask Notice what do your people respond to? What are they asking for? What are they interested in that could start to create a bit of a ground swell and an interest in this conversation?
I could go on and on. The other piece that comes to my mind is psychological safety around, around these programs. I actually– I wrote a white paper for, in the midst of my MBA program about kind of the, the [00:22:00] history of corporate wellness, and it didn’t– it doesn’t have the most altruistic and benevolent origins.
It really has its origins in, mitigating liability, reducing their health costs especially for self-funded health plans especially for large corporations. It was all, it was all in service of really themselves and their own bottom line. And it was masked as, “Hey, we want you to take care of yourselves,” but really what we want you to do is do these things so that this health insurance company will give us better premiums.
And will you please take better care of yourselves so that you are not as much of a financial and health risk to the company? And I get it. It makes sense, but put yourself in the shoes of that employee. How excited are you to show up and to do [00:23:00] your annual health exam and to make sure that your company knows that you did?
Probably not too excited. So there– because of that dichotomy, there’s been this, this invention of incentives. I reject incentives in the, the wellness programs that we design simply because it, it just reeks too much of the old origins of corporate wellness initiatives. So I very much encourage leaders to take a purely altruistic and symbiotic approach.
Ask yourself, “What would our company look like if everyone was a little happier and a little healthier?” And that should be reason enough. And there are certainly, you mentioned ROI, there are certainly connections from, healthier, happier employees inherently stay longer, [00:24:00] inherently show up to work more often and have less absenteeism.
When they show up, they are more productive and more contributing so thereby reducing presenteeism, as we call it. I could go on and on, right? It… The data says that for every dollar you spend on wellness, you will get $6 back. It’s a one to six ratio, and there’s a reason for that. Humans need to be able to be humans.
So when we think of our employee wellness initiatives, our programs, our culture, I really like to think of it as em- as wellness culture. As we look at cultivating that, we’ve got to ask h- how is this helping, how is this helping our teammates be able to [00:25:00] take care of themselves better? That’s gotta be the goal.
The goal should not be how many people can we get to show up to this meditation class? So I’m more interested in actual outcomes than lip service, than going through the motions, than doing things that look like wellness and they sound like wellness. And that can be valuable, but we also want to look at, okay, what is the actual impact and change that this program is creating culturally and organizationally as well as individually?
Are we moving the needle for anybody? And that’s something that we really focus on in our programs.
Porschia: Yeah, I love it. And so you were going where I was going, no surprise, Danielle, and I think you started answering this, but I still wanna ask you, from your perspective specifically company culture has been another hot topic on this show.
We discussed it in episode 71, but how do you think employee [00:26:00] wellness impacts that overall company culture?
Danielle: Ooh I think it goes both ways. It’s a bidirectional relationship for sure A lot of the companies that we’ve worked with are in the professional services, so high, high demand PR firms CPA firms.
These are really high stakes professionals that have high stakes deliverables for their clients. Imagine a firm walk– and I’ve walked into these firms, right? To give workshops and to lead, leadership trainings. There’s a sense of we are whole humans that are showing up as healthy and happy as we can, and then we bring what we have to our work.
Contrasting that with the burnout mills that many of these professional service firms turn into, it is [00:27:00] competitive, it is brutal . It’s demanding unnecessarily and when you have people that are living full, rich lives that includes a sense of well-being That absolutely impacts the culture, especially if those people exist in the leadership team.
Massive influence in the culture because that, they are bringing that to the decisions that they make. They are bringing that to the way that they are managing their team. The demands and requests that they are making, the expectations that they have are inclusive of the human element, which is inherently limited, right?
We aren- we do not have infinite energy. We do not have infinite time. We have limited resource of time and energy to [00:28:00] meet expectations and deadlines and deliverables. So we absolutely, if you have healthier, happier, whole, well people in these organizations, that espec- especially if they have power and influence in the organization from a policymaking standpoint and a leadership standpoint, of course that’s gonna impact the culture.
And it’s mostly going to happen in those interpersonal moments of noticing that one of your direct reports is seeming a little off or a little worn down, right? And having the sense and the humanity to notice that and to call it out and say, “Hey, are you all right? Is there anything I can do? How is your workload feeling right now?”
And being able to have a human conversation and to take organizational responsibility for some of that wellbeing of that individual rather [00:29:00] than if we cut over to the burnout mill style It’s always going to be just try harder. Just work faster. You just must not be doing your work efficiently enough.
Why are you making this so hard?” It’s, it- there’s no responsibility. It’s all that individual’s problem and fault. And it’s never just one thing. It’s always both, right? So absolutely wellbeing, employee wellbeing, especially leadership wellbeing is going to impact culture.
Porschia: I completely agree.
So from your perspective, Danielle, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve seen companies have with their employee wellness initiatives?
Danielle: Number one is engagement. Any program that you roll out, you are not going to get 100% engagement. That is just the nature of humans. We have agency, and we like it that way, and if something doesn’t sound good to us, [00:30:00] we’re not gonna participate.
And there’s nothing, there’s no amount of coercion or incentives or peer pressure that is going to change that. So yeah, just do not expect 100% engagement. So adjust- adjusting expectations which is another challenge that I see is that just unrealistic expectations of wellness programming from leadership.
We’re not miracle workers. We… and we’re not necessarily problem-solvers in the way that the corporate space is used to thinking about problem-solving. We are more like gardeners and ecologists, and we’re coming into your biosphere as an organization and saying how can we adjust the temperature here?
How can we adjust the soil? How can we adjust the watering of these organic beings that are coexisting to meet a common goal?” [00:31:00] That’s a huge challenge to, to invite a corporate-minded binary, if I do this, I get this result sort of space to adopt a slightly more organic space. I can show you the data.
I can show you the results, and it’s gonna take your involvement over time, letting these things take the time that they take. Yeah, so I would say engagement. I would say expectations. And then I think the, the third one is just the decisions and the design of how do we know? How do we know what will work?
How do we know what people will get the most benefit from what they will value? How do we know? You don’t know until you try. You can, certainly ask whoever you are engaging with to help you design and deploy wellness initiatives. Absolutely ask them what their track record [00:32:00] is.
Absolutely ask them for the data and the impact reports that they can show you in, in other organizations. And that can give you a lot- To go on. And if they can’t deliver that, then maybe go talk to someone else who can. Yeah, I would say those are the top three that, that come to mind. I
Porschia: love it.
I love it, and I also really enjoyed your analogy of, being a gardener or an ecologist, right? And so it could… From my perspective, it sounds like, one, it could take some time. You’ve gotta plant the seeds and really look at the whole ecosystem as opposed to just, what’s the result, right?
So I love that. I love that. So tell us more about your business, Danielle.
Danielle: Sure. I came, we came into this from private practice. I did not come into this space as a someone who had first-hand experienced corporate life. But I saw the [00:33:00] power of individual wellness coaching on professionals.
So we have much just taken what works in the private practice space in health and wellness coaching and we have adapted it to work for teams and professionals. So I have now a team of my own of national board certified health and wellness coaches. Let’s see, there’s four of them now, and they do all the fulfillment on working with the individuals that, that opt in to the programs that we deploy for our clients.
On average, we get anywhere from 20 to 40% engagement of let’s say, you’ve got 100 employees, 20 to 40% of them are going to opt in to the coaching that we are offering. That is in stark contrast to the national average of EAP employee assistance program utilization in the United States is in the [00:34:00] single digits on a good day.
So- we’re really proud of that. The coaching itself happens in 30-minute phone sessions between one of our coaches and the employee. They… It’s a relationship-based process where they work with the same coach as long as it’s working well for them on any aspect of their personal or professional life that could help them be a little healthier and a little happier.
So we start them out with a wellness wheel exercise that lets them look at all the different dimensions of wellbeing, including physical, spiritual, social, financial, and a few others. Yeah, so that’s our w- that’s our core program, is let’s get individualized support from a wellness perspective into the hands of as many people as, as are willing and able to participate.
On average, Portia, we see the folks that use that program, they self-report up to [00:35:00] 60% improvement in personal healthy habits, around 30% improvement in productivity and focus at work, and about 30% improvement in stress, reducing stress. That’s some pretty amazing impact. If you can look at any organization and ask yourself what would this team look like if we could get 20 to 40% of them to be 60% healthier, 30% less stressed, and 30% more focused?”
Yeah, you’re getting your ROI on that for sure. So we’re really proud of that. Over the years, we have added things like our wellness culture leadership training that invites executive leadership all the way to middle management into the, the mindset shifts and the values and the beliefs, and then, yes, the habits and the practices that really embody a culture of wellbeing that is most effective if it’s starting with [00:36:00] leadership.
So we really love doing those trainings, and from there, it’s, if we can have both of those happening, that we’re working with the leadership and we’re making this benefit of the wellness coaching available to individuals, talk about an ecosystem that’s going to really start to thrive and change.
So that’s what we’ve been up to the last few years.
Porschia: Absolutely. It sounds like some great work, and we’ll be providing a link to your website and other social channels in our show notes so people can find you online. Now, Danielle, I wanna ask you our final question that we ask all of our guests. How do you think executives or professionals can get a positive edge in their career?
Danielle: From my wellness lens- I really believe that those that prioritize their wellbeing have a competitive edge. And if not in that moment, you certainly have that edge in the long [00:37:00] run. It’s really this question of sustainability. And of course, there are seasons and times for sprinting, but we’ve got to have the skill set to recover from those sprints.
If you take an athletic mindset, an athletic trainer mindset on these things to… At any time you are pushing yourself to the limit as an athlete, you are also going all out on your recovery. And those professionals that take that same approach with their work and their wellbeing they do much better in the long run in the sustainability of their career.
Porschia: Danielle, you have shared a lot of insights with us today, and I’m sure that our listeners can use it to be more confident with their employee wellness programs. We appreciate you being with us.
Danielle: Thank you so much, Portia. [00:38:00]
