Nutrition and Productivity: Wellness Coaching in the Workplace with Danielle Dinkelman

In this episode of the HR Mixtape, host Shari Simpson welcomes Danielle Dinkelman, co-founder and CEO of Advanced Corporate Wellness. They delve into the critical role of wellness coaching in enhancing employee experience and combating burnout, a timely topic as organizations increasingly recognize the importance of mental health and well-being in the workplace. Danielle shares her personal journey into wellness coaching and highlights how companies can invest in their employees' health to improve retention and productivity.

• Learn how wellness coaching can bridge the gap between information and application for employees.

• Discover why investing in employee well-being is not just altruistic but a smart business strategy.

• Explore strategies for creating a psychologically safe environment that fosters open communication and stress management.

Hit “Play” to gain insights that could transform your organization’s approach to employee wellness!

Guest(s): Danielle Dinkelman, Co-founder and CEO, Advanced Corporate Wellness

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
You're listening to the HR Mixtape. Your podcast with
the perfect mix of practical advice, thought-provoking interviews, and
stories that just hit different so that work doesn't have to feel, well,
like work. Now, your host, Shari
Joining me today is Danielle Dinkelman, co-founder and CEO from
Advanced Corporate Wellness. Her coaching practice supports people in

(00:25):
creating self-motivated lifestyle changes to reclaim their health
Danielle, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today.
Thanks for having me, Shari. I would love if
we could start with you sharing a little bit about your journey
as an author, as somebody who is

(00:49):
in this wellness strategy space, and ultimately how
you ended up co-founding the organization that you're with now.
Yeah, sure. Story time. Let's do it. Well,
gosh, first of all, you have to know that I've been married for
18 years and we have four children. And
my foray into health and wellness really started

(01:10):
with those kiddos in combination with
a major car accident injury that I had actually gotten into a
few years prior to becoming a mother. And
through needing to figure out how to get myself out of chronic pain and
then having four children in eight years and
needing to figure out how to feed them so that

(01:32):
they're actually satiated. I don't know anybody that
has children, you go to Costco, you buy a big thing of goldfish or
pretzels and you think it's going to last for a month before you
go to Costco again, but it doesn't. It's gone so
fast. And so I started becoming really interested and
fascinated by nutrition and why is certain food satiating

(01:53):
and energizing and other food is just addicting and
compulsive in nature. Meanwhile, I was in my own space
trying to get out of pain. And I was exploring fitness and exercise,
going through a lot of chiropractic and massage and all these things. And
so years and years have gone by. And in
2017, I had gotten really

(02:17):
passionate about plant-based nutrition. Around that
same time, my husband was diagnosed with cancer. And it
was kind of like those two those two things kind of came into
alignment that plant-based nutrition can actually be really, really powerful
for folks that are trying to combat cancer, especially
if you're wanting to do it in natural ways. So

(02:39):
that was in 2017, and he is
healthy and well now here in 2025. And
I'm grateful for the information we had to help him
and support him from a nutritional standpoint. And from
there, it just became Honestly, a
bit of a calling. There was a moment where I was feeling a

(02:59):
lot of gratitude for the ways that I was able
to raise my kids and get myself out of pain and
get my husband through cancer. I was actually out
on a run. I was in Bear Lake, Utah, and got
up to the top of this mountain and just overcome
with gratitude. I'm a person of faith

(03:20):
and a voice came into my head and the voice said, you know, I didn't give all
of this to you for you to keep it to yourself. I gave it to you because I want
you to help other people be successful with it. I
was not expecting anything like that, but I was immediately excited
by that idea. And so I dove into this
thought of how could I do more with this? How could I help more people

(03:40):
with it? For small children, teaching music
lessons from home was my focus at the time. Going
back to school to become like a nurse practitioner or a nutritionist kind
of felt out of the question. But really the
question that I was asking was how do you
help a person actually do the

(04:01):
thing that they know will help them feel better, whether
that's physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, any of the ways. That
was the gap that I had run into again and again over these years of
trying to help friends and family take control of their health
through habits. But I found that I was really good
and fast at changing my own habits, but other people weren't.

(04:23):
And I was confused by that. So I discovered that health
and wellness coaching was a thing. And it
was the thing that answered that question, that bridges the gap between information
and application. And I just dove headfirst into that.
And I got certified in 2018, ended up going
into private practice, helping mostly women get off of

(04:44):
the dieting roller coaster for The first three or four years, that
was my focus. And eventually we, yeah, we launched
a B2B option where we have a whole team of
wellness coaches that are working with the employees of
our clients, helping people work on diet
and exercise, but also working on stress management and mindset

(05:05):
and the habits that are going to help them not burn themselves
What an amazing story to get where you're at today. I'm sure
you get asked this next question a lot by even
potential clients and other people that you talk to. But
why is it a company's responsibility to take this

(05:28):
on for their employees? You know, I can I can hear managers in
my head saying, like, yeah, I care about mental health. I care about stress
reduction and I'll check in on my employees. But is it really necessary
Mm hmm. It's not. It's totally not necessary. Is
it an excellent idea and an excellent investment? Yes.

(05:48):
So let's talk about that. At first
glance, you're middle of the road. manager
might think, oh gosh, this just seems extra. This
seems fluffy. This seems kind of like,
oh, we're trying to just send a message of care and concern. Yes,

(06:08):
you are doing that. And there is
a very real altruistic reason for actually
for the business itself. That it is for the good of
the business and for the good of the employees. So
we are huge believers in the symbiotic relationship between employees
and organization. And that's why our company logo is

(06:31):
these two overlapping hexagons. So when
the employees are healthy and happy and coming as optimized
humans, everything's gonna get better. They
are going to be more receptive to correction and feedback.
They're going to be feeling better about themselves physically, mentally, emotionally, all
the ways. So I could go on and on,

(06:53):
but it's really an investment in
the individual which comes right back to performance and
Have you been able to see with the organizations you work with, increases
statistically in retention and productivity and those types of

(07:13):
We lay out the math for folks, you
know, and as an HR professional, I'm sure you're very familiar with this, but
not all managers or business owners are. But
the cost to the company of replacing just
one person that leaves because of burnout, You
can take their annual salary and you're going to be paying probably

(07:35):
around the cost of their annual salary just
to replace that one person. And that's going to vary depending on what level
in the company they are, right? So slightly less for entry-level staff and
up to 1.2 of their salary if
you're looking at an executive, right? So you can do
that math really quick. Like if we can even just save one

(07:56):
person from burning out and putting in not
even a two weeks notice, but just saying, I'm done, goodbye. Wow,
we have saved you a whole lot of money, a whole lot of headache. So
yes, we've absolutely seen instances where folks
were, as somebody said once, I'm feeling a little crispy.

(08:17):
And that was their way of saying, I'm on the edge of burnout here.
I don't know if I can keep going. And so what our
coaching does is really give those folks a
confidential third party space that they can process what's
really going on here. Is it the job? Is it the company?
Or is it how you are engaging with your work? Okay,

(08:40):
and we don't really address the first two, but we can absolutely address
the third, which is something that the company can't address.
It's very, very difficult for them to really get
into the details of how people can engage with their work in
a healthy and sustainable way. So absolutely, we see
increased retention. The big

(09:02):
metrics that we measure ourselves is looking
at three things. We ask folks after they've engaged with our coaching program, have
We ask them, how has stress management improved? How
has focus and productivity at work improved? And
how have your healthy habits improved over the time that you've been working with coaches?

(09:24):
And on average, we see improvement around 30% in
the stress management, 20% for focus and
productivity, and over 60% improvement in personal healthy
habits. What's really exciting is
if you just think of one of your coworkers and
ask yourself, what would it be like to work with them? Or

(09:45):
think of yourself, what would it be like for them to work with me if
I was 30% less stressed, 20%
more focused, and 60% just healthier and
happier? So across the board, we
see that this works and it does take some
time for,

(10:06):
depending on the organization, for them to really get a
taste of this and see, yes, this is going to work for us.
Now, I will say the spaces that we have seen this work the best is
in professional services, where there's high pressure, high
stress, deadlines, client delivery, all of that.

(10:28):
Or in the social services, actually, kind of
more in the nonprofit and government agency side. These are
the folks that are dealing with what we call secondary trauma
or vicarious trauma. They are working with
a population that has gone through some of the worst things that
humanity can offer. And they are there to

(10:48):
help them, right? So we are there to kind of help the
helpers make sure that they are taking care of themselves when
they're off the clock. Those are the spaces that we see this
So in a former role very early on in my career,
I was a mental health technician at a

(11:09):
residential center for teenage girls who were wards of the state. So that
exact population that you're talking about, and there was
no resources for stress management
for what you're talking about. I mean, granted, we had EAP and you could always talk
with the more seasoned technicians that were there. Having
an ancillary resource like that could have been very interesting and

(11:31):
honestly might have kept me in that career a lot longer. Because there
were definitely days I came home and the emotions were overwhelming
because you couldn't express those during the workday. So I can
see how that could be very valuable for those different populations. How
have you explained to employees
as you've come into an organization to provide this service The

(11:56):
psychological safety between the coach on
your side and them and the employer, because I
could see, you know, with EAP there is a little built-in trust
there because the employer isn't getting specific records
or generic, hey, this many people use the service. How

(12:17):
Yeah, great question. So since we are
functioning as health and wellness coaches, everything we do
with employees, all of the coaching that we do is protected by
HIPAA. So everything that gets talked about
between the employee and one of our coaches stays there. It
does not get reported to management. And we make sure that

(12:39):
everyone understands that that is the arrangement. It's quite different when
you bring in, let's say, like an executive coach or leadership coaching,
right? Often that becomes kind of a three-way
relationship where the coach is saying, hey, manager, what
would you like your direct report to work on in coaching with me? What
outcomes would you like to see, right? And there becomes kind of this collaborative and

(13:02):
three-way relationship. In our setting, it
is more like the EAP, like you said. Everything is confidential. And
we see anywhere from 20% to 40% engagement rates
with the companies that we work with. And we're usually around about 100 employees
is kind of the space that we're in, kind of the small to mid-sized space. people

(13:24):
get it. They're like, great, you're not going to this. Okay, this is a
safe space. This isn't about me.
You know, like you said, putting on a straight, a strong face for the people they're
serving or trying to just like buck up
and do it for their managers. Right. So it's
a place where they can kind of let the walls down and really

(13:47):
be honest about what's working well for them and what's not working well. And
our coaches are more than anything, they are experts in
behavior change. So we're looking at, you know, what do
you want to be experiencing that you're not yet? And how can we
reverse engineer that into behaviors, habits, rituals for
yourself that will help you be able to sustain the

(14:11):
Wow, really, really cool concept. And
it definitely aligns with the trends we've seen in the
change in HR and companies over the last couple years.
And I think that There is still a little hesitance to
the word safe space, I think, because it's not being
used in the way that I would say we're probably talking about it. So

(14:33):
I could see how organizations have been
hesitant to implement programs like this. But what we're really talking about
is how do we create an environment where employees can
learn about their stress triggers and navigating
those things and potentially setting boundaries that maybe they don't have. You know,
it's really hard for us in HR to set boundaries because we just we

(14:54):
want to be there and a lot of times we want to give that white glove approach, which
requires a lot of, you know, mental load for us.
So if you have somebody listening who's interested in
Yeah, our website is a great space, acwcoaching.com, or
they can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. And we also have a

(15:16):
LinkedIn page for the company there. Those are
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