By David C. Fortosis bio
In our first article on wellness, we addressed the rationale for making employee health improvement a priority in the workplace. We pointed out that wellness is multifaceted with social, emotional, financial and physical health all interwoven dimensions of a healthy and productive person—at work and at home.
Let’s be honest: The primary reason physical wellness should even be considered as a business imperative is because healthier employees are simply more alert, more focused, more engaged in their work, more present at work and more productive while there. And, since employees spend the majority of their waking hours in a week in the workplace, it makes sense to plan and execute a wellness program there.
Professional services firms, such as law firms, are high-stress environments where billable time and client service demands compete for the time it would take during the workday for employees to focus on health. (In fact, professional services firms may want to address the risk factor of stress first!)
So how do we start?
Leadership
As stated earlier, the primary reason any wellness program succeeds is if senior leadership believes that an investment and focus on health will result in healthier and more productive employees.
So talk to leadership. What do they want for the firm? Do they believe in wellness? Do they believe in it enough to direct you to create a business plan?
Dr. Ron Goetzel of Emory University has written a blog/article addressing all the arguments against wellness programs. It’s a good resource if you need help convincing management. Also, Dr. Dee Edington’s book, “Zero Trends: Health as a Serious Economic Strategy” is a solid, research supported book on why health improvement yields measurable results in individual and business performance.
How to get started?
Let’s assume that you have the approval and support from leadership to launch a physical wellbeing program. What’s next?
Step 1: Collect input
Employees will tell you what they need and want with respect to their wellness interests or priorities. So ask them. Ask them why they have been successful with their health and why they have failed. Ask them what they need from you to help them address their own unique wellbeing goals. This will help you and management decide where to first focus your efforts. By the way, don’t be surprised if they tell you that what they really need is more time to address their health.
Select a confidential Health Risk Survey instrument. There are dozens of different surveys on the market. Your insurance company may have one or you may wish to look at some of the newer ones that are accessible through a mobile device app.
The blinded, confidential results (rolled up into broad, company-wide statistics) will allow you to get a sense what you should be focusing on as a company.
- Are your employees heavy tobacco users?
- Do they exercise infrequently, or at all?
- Are they overweight?
You will need to ensure that employees understand that the individual results are confidential and that everyone should take the survey or you will be restricted in how you rely on the data results
Step 2: Launch the “awareness campaign”
If an individual does not know his/her health risks and the impact of modifiable behaviors on those risks, then they will be unable to focus on making any meaningful changes. The awareness step has three components:
1. Obtaining a lab blood test to assess an individual’s current health risks. The lab blood draw can be done in a doctor’s office as part of the insurance benefit, conducted by a wellness company as part of their programming, or at a stand-alone lab like LabCorp. Employees will need to have a written or electronic copy of their personal results.
2. Completing the Health Risk Survey. It is ideal to have the lab results before the Health Risk Survey as the questionnaire will ask for lab measures like Blood Pressure and Glucose readings. Individuals will receive a personal report following the HRQ which will help them understand their risks and create a baseline for them to compare their improvement each year.
3. Consulting with the individual’s primary care physician to review lab results and its implications for health. The physician must be asked to offer advice on the health risks and what the patient should focus on specifically in the months or year to follow. The employee should insist that their physician and they together set up a personal action plan for health maintenance or improvement.
Step 3: Select a wellness firm
Primary care physicians and their staff may not have the time or expertise to help a person develop and be accountable for a personalized, annual plan for improvement. This is where some wellness companies can fill the coaching and accountability gap and eventually help the individual have more meaningful conversations with their physician.
There are more than 300 wellness companies in the US with a myriad of programs, approaches, mobile apps, requirements, philosophies, and price points. You may need help searching for the right vendor. One of the most successful approaches to finding a vendor with the right fit is to conduct a “reverse Request for Proposal” where you make your wish list of vendor requirements then have an expert only send the RFP out to those that meet your program requirements.
Step 4: Set goals
By the time you have corporate-wide data from the Health Risk Survey (and even corporate-wide lab results rolled up into broad statistics) and the survey results from your people, you can now set some clear, company-wide, measurable annual goals. Achieving the goals can be jump-started by launching a walking program (using wearable devices to help people track their individual and group goals), offering a voluntary weight loss program, setting corporate goals to ensure every employee has a primary care physician, or offering free nutrition/cooking courses online or on-site.
If Nothing Else
If there was only one thing an organization could do to affect the health of its employees, it would be to make it easier for employees to get active. And there are many ways to do that. For example, you could:
- offer subsidies for health club memberships where the subsidy is dependent on actual use (e.g., eight to ten visits a month to maintain the subsidy);
- provide free wearable exercise monitors, such as FitBit, Fuel Band, or any other reliable pedometer device, and having senior management set public walking or step count goals for themselves, then encourage group or individual steps goals;
- offer guilt-free 20-minute exercise breaks during the day to walk as a small group (these can be working sessions too!); or
- manage workloads so staff can actually take advantage of a firm-wide commitment to getting more active.
You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how even these small actions will yield big results.
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