GUEST COLUMN
Rethinking workplace wellness programs
By Chuck Reynolds, Principal
The Benfield Group
St. Louis
A review of headlines in the health care business press over the past six months indicates we are on the verge of renewed interest in work site prevention and wellness.
An aging work force, the return of near double-digit inflation in premiums, an overall sense that managed care — and more specifically HMOs — have failed to deliver on their promise of health improvement, and a resurgence of self-funded insurance programs all point to growth for work site prevention and wellness initiatives.
This is good news to anyone who, in the presence of flat or declining health care costs over the past five to eight years, has seen the yoke of employee wellness passed to health plans, or simply dropped.
Before resurrecting these efforts, however, it is incumbent first to make an honest assessment of workplace prevention and wellness, and to set a course that will lead to a lasting role in the corporate quest for employee health and productivity.
Excluding a handful of outstanding work site-based prevention and wellness programs, it is fair to say that work site prevention and wellness — as an industry unto itself — has fallen short of its potential.
Why work site wellness fails
To understand why, it is helpful to examine the fundamental reasons why work-site wellness fails. Five contributors to failure are:
1. Lack of Strategy. Most programs are heavy on tactics and light on strategy. Often, corporate health promotion efforts are like a fibrillating heart — full of activity, but without a clear purpose or productive output.
2. Isolation/Fragmentation. Too often, prevention and wellness programs have existed apart from the broader context of employee health and productivity. As such, the programs are viewed as accessories to the real business of the business. Limited in impact, they are particularly vulnerable to cutbacks.
3. Lack of Measurement. The quest to quantify has, for many years, been the Holy Grail of work site prevention and wellness programs.
Unfortunately, most have not found it. Despite leaders’ efforts to report their findings and build credibility for the industry, skeptics remain largely unconvinced of the value of prevention and wellness. It is both interesting and important to note, however, that a common denominator among the strongest work site programs is that they measure and report specific outcomes.
4. Unrealistic Expectations of Programs. A recipe for certain disappointment is to mix two parts promise with one part delivery. In the industry’s zeal to be a white knight for legions of unhealthy habits, we’ve made promises that we simply don’t yet understand how to deliver. Although it may not have been our intent, we’ve painted mental images of a corporate "Wellville" that has yet to come to pass.
5. Unrealistic Expectations of People. We know too well the sense of disappointment that comes with expecting too much from people. Although recent attention to stages of change have helped to reframe our expectations, there remains the notion — at least among corporate decision makers — that we should be able to see populations grow healthy and fit before our very eyes.
Put all the above together, and the business of work site prevention and wellness has everything it needs to disappoint and fall short of its potential. The question then is: "What can be done to turn the situation around?"
Keys to success
If you look at the work site prevention and wellness programs that succeed, this is what you’ll find:
1. Strategic Integration. This begins with a fundamental understanding, not of prevention, but of your business. Companies with successful programs understand how the success of their business depends, or doesn’t depend, on the health and productivity of their employees.
Say, for example, employees in a given plant have a high incidence of back injuries. To develop a successful work site prevention program, leaders would have to understand how these injuries affect employee health and productivity. They have to understand whether and how prevention and wellness fits into this picture.
Once the relationship between business health and employee health is understood, the path to integrating prevention and wellness strategically into the business becomes visible. The role of the program — the things that the program should and should not do — becomes more clear. The logical linkages with other programs and stakeholders become more evident. In this new light, a strategy to integrate prevention and wellness can be formulated.
2. Focused Execution. The value of defining an integrated role for prevention and wellness is only realized if the execution of that role is focused and disciplined. For many, this will require just saying no sometimes. A symptom of the collective insecurity of our profession has been a complete willingness to do whatever is asked, whether it fits or doesn’t fit within our plans. A sound strategy provides the security to stay focused and to say no to requests that divert our limited resources.
3. Targeted Measurement. By highlighting what is truly important in the integrated scheme of things, a solid strategy makes outcome measurement possible. Perhaps the focus changes from reporting course attendance to tracking compliance of a handful of high-risk employees and dependents.
Perhaps there is a concerted effort to measure the value of prevention and wellness offerings to the recruitment of certain employees. Perhaps there is a scientific study of the impact of exercise on the incidence of back injuries. The point is that measurement ties to strategy, which, by the nature of its development, ties to what is important to the business overall.
Implementation of these steps is by no means easy, but it is an essential task for those driven to succeed with their programs. As an industry, it is a broad application of this strategic, focused, and measured approach that will establish prevention and wellness as a pivotal part of the corporate quest for employee health and productivity.
(Editor’s note: Chuck Reynolds is a principal at The Benfield Group, a St. Louis-based consulting firm specializing in wellness and prevention strategies. He can be contacted at www.thebenfieldgroup.com.)
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