employee wellness

A truly valuable return on your corporate wellness program is whether your employees can take their nutritional and fitness knowledge they learned in the office and bring it home to their families.  If your employees rely completely on the color-coded utensils in your company cafeteria to tell them what and how much to eat, then your Wellness program is falling a little short. 

According to the CDC, September is "Fruit and Veggies - More Matters" Month.  No matter what part of the country you and your employees are in, fall is the perfect time to get outside and show off your wellness chops. Be sure your Wellness program hypes the area’s local farmer's markets, which are sure to be selling the season's perfect fall produce: pumpkins and other richly colored squash, root veggies such as parsnips, turnips, carrots; and purple, golden, and sweet potatoes.  Strolling through the market with family and loved ones burns calories, and de-stresses the mind.  At home, this fall bounty can be drizzled with olive oil, a pinch of sea salt and pepper, and roasted to perfection.  Not only does this taste delicious, but it smells wonderful.  Other fall time treats include figs, garlic, endive, ginger, pears, apple and chard.  Your educated employees know that increasing the amount of plants and vegetables in their diet lowers their risk of many types of cancers, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and hypertension.   When dinnertime comes, your health savvy employees will fill their plates two-thirds full of veggies. The more color on the plate from the variety of vegetables or fruit, the better. 

While your employees wait for their fresh veggies to roast, they can log some outdoor and kid time raking leaves and jumping in the piles.  Playing ball or tag equals more calories burned for everyone in the family.  Building a tree house or fort, taking a hike in the woods, changing the focus from their usual routines and enjoying the outdoors provides a healthy shift in focus for all involved.   If your employees don't have a yard, perhaps a trip to a local park to enjoy the fresh air is in order.

Seeing your employee and their families enjoying a richer, healthier lifestyle is the true picture of your return in your Wellness investment, because healthier, happier employees live longer, healthier lives.

In the November 15, 2010 issue of the Huffington Post, Glenn Close penned an article that revealed that her sister suffers from a bipolar disorder and her nephew suffers from schizoaffective disorder. According to Close, over "57.7 million Americans - 26 percent of the country - live with a diagnosable mental illness in any given year." Close argues that because of the stigma of mental illness, many Americans never seek treatment and are discriminated against in the workplace, and that every 17 minutes, someone in our country commits suicide.  According to her article, mental illness is the leading disability in the United States, and costs society over $190 billion annually.

According to the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation, mental illness not only affects the ill person, but can also affect everyone around them. About one in four adults experience a mental illness in a year, which means statistically that everyone in that person's workplace will be either directly or indirectly affected at some point in their working career, or will experience an issue themselves. 

There are many types of mental illness, according to the Mayo Clinic, ranging from obsessive hand washing, ongoing depression or sadness, alcohol or drug abuse, to schizophrenia or other delusional disorders. The Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation maintains that mental illness accounts for an enormous piece of the financial productivity pie in the workplace, about $105 billion worth. This includes losses due to absenteeism, presenteeism, disabilities and injuries in the workplace.

Ms. Close sites that the key to eradicating and erasing the stigma of mental illness in the workplace is education and training.  For more information on her family's organization, go to http://www.bringchange2mind.org.

Forecasting any company’s return on investment for a wellness program can be difficult.  In a corporate wellness program, the immediate return can be especially hard to measure. Just ask the experts like Ron Goetzel, Director of the Institute for Health and Productivity Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. "People ask me what to expect. I'm more conservative: 1.5- to 2-to-1 over three years," says Goetzel. "ROI is a dirty word. ...it's very tricky. People are used to seeing it in the financial world, and it migrated over into healthcare. Financial executives always want the bottom line, the dollars and cents of what they're doing."

But the belief that wellness pays and the concept of seeking a return persists. According to a story in USA Today based on a study in Pediatrics, IBM employees and their families were given the opportunity to improve their eating and exercising habits over a twelve week program.  They would receive a $150.00 cash rebate by satisfying a few requirements; watch less TV, less computer time, make better food choices, and spend quality time with the family. 

How did this program perform? In simple terms and without a typical six-figure consulting study, the program passed the participation test; 22,265 (52% of the eligible employees with children) signed up to participate. But only 11,631 (52% of those who signed up) completed the requirements and received the cash incentive. Is getting 25% of your employees and their families more active and eating healthier worth $1.85M (an estimate of program costs plus incentives)? This is a tough question to answer in terms of ROI. Not so tough to answer in terms of employee morale, work/life balance, and their perception of IBM as an employer who cares about their families’ health.  

The Alliance for Wellness ROI, Inc. is a company that has set standards to determine ROI on wellness programs. “The goal of the Alliance for Wellness ROI, Inc. is to promote wellness and demonstrate that a wellness expenditure is an investment and its ROI can be objectively measured.”

According to Alliance for Wellness ROI, Inc. there should be eleven components to a wellness program:

1. Work Life Balance
2. Employee Assistance Plan
3. Disease Management
4. Health Risk Appraisal
5. Telephonic Coaching
6. On-Site Medical
7. Weight Management
8. Smoking Cessation
9. Wellness Education
10. Preventive Care
11. Fitness

There are variables that affect each of these components such as age, underlying health factors, and gender, and many of these components will overlap. Measuring and recording the results of these standards is the core of presenting an accurate, tangible prediction on returns.  It’s easier to immediately see the return when someone is motivated to lose a few pounds for a handful of cash.  In a bigger, more realistic picture, the ROI of a corporate wellness program can also be measured.  It just takes little longer. Years longer.

In our Wellness discussions, it’s vital to include not just the health of the body, but also of the mind.  According to the CDC, the cost of anxiety and stress disorders in the U.S. is between $ 42 and $47 billion each year, and depression costs between $44 and $53 billion. These numbers include treatment costs, absenteeism, presenteeism, and mortality costs.

 According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health:

• One-fourth of employees view their jobs as the number one stressor in their lives. 

• Three-fourths of employees believe the worker has more on-the-job stress than a generation ago.  

• Problems at work are more strongly associated with health complaints then are any other life stressor - more so than even financial problems or family problems.

Stress sets off the sympathetic nervous system, which is also known as the “Fight or Flight” mechanism. Muscles tense, respiration quickens, and various chemical dumps occur in the brain.  This is great in a dangerous situation where a body needs to react quickly, but to experience this continuously takes a huge toll on the biological systems.  Unchecked, this can lead to crises in relationships at work and at home, lack of sleep, violent feelings, rage, exhaustion, mood swings and loss of morale. According to the Encyclopedia of Occupational Safety and Health, there are studies that directly link stress to suicide, cancer, cardiovascular disease, back issues and body pain, and reduced immune function.

Science has known for a while that exercise improves mood, but now we are starting to understand that it also makes for a calmer brain that is more resistant to stress.  The New York Times recently published an article explaining the science behind why exercise relieves anxiety.

You can help your teams deal more effectively with stress and lower the costs associated with the fallout of this debilitating condition.  Providing a Wellness Program that offers counseling, fitness and nutrition advice, mind body relaxation techniques, and support creates a safe, creative, and high performance environment for all of your employees and maybe even for you too.

When you create a culture of wellness inside your organization, your employees will bring that information home. When that home has children, the importance of this transfer of knowledge increases exponentially as a healthy, fit child is more likely to realize a happier, more fulfilling life. 

According to a recent study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, a child’s weight has been directly shown to affect their financial future. The study states that “adults who have been overweight since high school are more likely to be unemployed or on welfare than those who gained weight gradually during their 20’s and 30’s.”  The connection between diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease has been very well documented, but this study draws a very clear line from childhood obesity to a failed economic adult life. This association also illustrates the importance of addressing the wellness of children as soon as possible, and we believe that parents are in the best position to achieve this goal.

Giving employees the culture, information and tools necessary to bring a healthier lifestyle home to their families will help the long-term outlook for their personal health, the health of the company and the future financial security of their children.

According to the Mayo Clinic, starting a fitness program may be one of the best things an individual can do for their health. 

The latest Surgeon General’s report supports this as well.  In case you’ve lived in a cave for the past few years, you’ve already heard that regular physical activity reduces the danger of succumbing to heart disease, the leading cause of death in our country.  And for you CFO's out there, an active fitness participant can cost your organization up to $1,250 less in health care costs per year according to a 2008 study in the journal Preventing Chronic Disease. Wellness can also reverse the effects of hypertension, diabetes, and certain cancers, as well as reduce hospital admission rates significantly for these same conditions. Numerous studies also confirm that exercise can not only prolong your employees’ lives, but can also stave off depression, anxiety, and other emotional issues. 

What might not be as obvious as the fact that exercise is good for you and your employees is that like all things, exercise should be done in moderation.  Nothing breeds success like success, and for those who need exercise the most this means starting out with a low to moderate level of physical activity. Walking is a great example of a level of activity that for most employees is a safe and simple platform for better health.

Whatever program for physical activity your company offers in their wellness palate, it should be based on both common sense and solid science.  A moderate exercise program is one that your employees will be able to enjoy and stay engaged in for a long healthy lifetime.   

Organizational culture can occur through default or design. When creating a culture of health and wellness in your company, striving for the best in design is the ultimate goal. David Hunnicut, President of The Wellness Councils of America, interviewed dozens of wellness experts and speakers at the 2010 American Journal of Health Promotion Conference and discovered that the path to perfection has four guidelines:

1. Establish a broad base of senior leadership support

2. Engineer a health promoting environment with obvious options to be active, eat well and minimize stress

3. Strive to change the influential policies

4. Tap into every communication channel at your disposal

An appropriate culture of health can make a world of difference in the performance of your human resources. Are you designing what you and your leaders want, or are you accepting just what you can get?

Although healthcare costs are front and center in the debate, the single largest expense for most companies comes in the form of payroll. If that is true for you, then it makes sense that increasing employee productivity has the greatest potential for improving your bottom line. Achieving even single digit improvements in your team's ability to do their jobs will improve their quality of work and their capacity for innovation. To enable your team to perform with intention to excel and attention to detail, increasing their physical capabilities through exercise and sound nutrition is a proven foundation for success. To create a successful wellness strategy for productivity, make sure it includes these foundations of a healthy lifestyle.

According to the CDC and the Surgeon General’s report, millions of Americans have diseases that could have been entirely prevented with regular physical exercise. The numbers are overwhelming: 13.5 Americans have coronary heart disease, 8 million Americans have adult onset diabetes, 95,000 of us are diagnosed with colon cancer every year, and about 1.5 million people experience a heart attack in a year.

As the year winds down, it is natural to reflect on goals and behaviors we’d like to change.  It’s easy to make excuses for why we haven’t yet made the changes we’d like to, and most often, it comes down to time.  It’s important to remember that we can accomplish big things in small bites of time.  You can read a picture book to your little one in ten minutes.  You can take a quick jog on the treadmill, call a relative, make an appointment for you