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Wellness In The Workplace
April 2007
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Workplace Wellness Challenges
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It's Showtime

What you might think you know about wellness programs.

  • They're time-consuming.
  • They'll cost you more than you'll save.
  • They don't work.
  • Employees won't participate.

What you might not know:

  • For every dollar companies spend on wellness programs, they save up to $6 on employee health benefits—a 600 percent return on their investment.
  • Based on national statistics, if you have 50 to 100 employees, you might be paying $2,900 to $5,800 per month for medical, prescription and lost productivity costs—on mostly preventable conditions.
  • Almost one-half of all Americans report having a chronic illness—they account for 75 percent of our national spending on health care. And 80 percent of all chronic disease is caused by three preventable health behaviors: physical inactivity, poor nutrition and smoking.
  • Wellness programs don't have to be time-consuming to be effective.
  • With the right promotion, interest building and top-down "buy-in," wellness programs do work.
  • Most people want to improve their long-term health and wellness and given opportunity, information and incentive, employees willingly participate in employer-sponsored programs.

And now, it’s show-time. Grab a healthy snack and a bottle of water and CLICK HERE for a short, PowerPoint presentation.

This isn’t just a pitch to promote the LoneStart Wellness Initiative within your organization (although that’s obviously part of it), but rather to explain the benefits of a well-developed, effective wellness program in general.
Consider the following questions:

  1. What programs do you currently have, and are they working?
  2. What programs would meet more of the needs of your employees?
  3. Why are you willing to invest in wellness and what outcomes are you hoping for?
  4. What can you realistically afford to invest?
  5. What will happen and how much will it cost if you do not invest in wellness?
handsinunison
The truth is: we can’t really buy our health and wellness. We already own it. It’s ours, the good, bad and ugly, not someone else’s to sell to us. And, some of us just don’t take care of it. We know what we should do, but don’t. As you are well-aware, our long-term health and wellness individually, and the health and wellness of your employees, are forms of human capital. The people in your organization define its character and its capacity to perform. An organization’s people are its greatest asset. And, people are assets whose value can be enhanced through investment. The goal is to maximize value while managing risk.

Just as you can’t increase your knowledge of something without a commitment of your own time and effort, you can’t increase your health without being personally involved in that effort. Sometimes it just takes opportunity and information and sometimes it needs a “little push.” While simple, the concept that good health cannot be purchased means we have to consider and accept the following implications.
  • Each of us has the greatest influence on our own health and wellness.
  • We place too much responsibility on others for our own health and wellness (and too little responsibility on ourselves).
  • We assume that spending more on health care gets us more—and better—health.
  • We must find ways to motivate those who need it most, to take responsibility for their own health and wellness and make those changes necessary for long-term improvement.

As the value of people increases, so does the performance capacity of the organization. Enhancing the value of employees through better health is a win-win goal for employers and employees alike. The more your organization recognizes the intrinsic value of each employee, and the more it recognizes that this value can be enhanced with nurturing and investment, the more it recognizes that a variety of incentive strategies and working arrangements can be created to enhance each employee’s contributions to organizational performance—and this makes sense in both business and human terms.

Considering health and wellness as human capital is an economic concept, based on decades of economic research. One of our goals is to present insights—and solutions—solutions that apply both to ever-escalating health care costs in the U.S., to the hard economic costs to employers, to the long-term health and wellness of employees, and to employers' needs to efficiently provide a wellness program that will aid in recruiting and retaining valued human capital.
forkedroad
The road to a successful wellness strategy is a process, one with steps that represent both achievements and necessary building blocks, on both the part of management and employees. It is a road that requires specific stages of development. And, successfully managing health and wellness and workplace productivity requires employers to be able to ask the right questions to begin with, ask good questions, persist in getting answers, and to know how to question answers that might seem counter-intuitive (that’s where you may find some of your most promising answers). These steps, or building blocks include:

  • Confirm the fact that management matters: This means proving to yourself and your employees that health and productivity challenges can be managed. Real progress can be made by dedicating time, focus and necessary resources to address problem areas. Examples of this stage might include: Improving health and wellness resources among a population of employees in a facility or site by establishing a "culture of wellness," or achieving demonstrable and visible results in a specific health-related intervention, such as weight loss or smoking cessation.
  • Leverage accomplishments to broaden the initiative's efforts: Success will earn the trust and support necessary to meet additional challenges. And, success at one facility or site can inspire competition among other locations to better manage health and wellness issues.
  • Understand both the program's structure and infrastructure: Typically, organizational structure and infrastructure changes happen over time because of a strong leader (or team of leaders) that understand clearly what must be done—and why—and are able to take action when the moment is right for program development or implementation. If management doesn't have clear insight as to what it hopes to accomplish, it can't communicate its goals to employees.

Whether you consider yourself an experienced professional with a health management strategy already up and running, someone trying to get a health management effort on its feet, or someone trying to put new life into an existing initiative, it’s important to remember that all the slick data in the world is no guarantee that your organization will ever change the dynamics that are driving some of their biggest health- related problems without the willing participation of employees and management alike—and without a clear vision of the goals to be realized.
Jay
Jay Seifert, one of the co-founders of the LoneStart Wellness Initiative, will be presenting at the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals 2007 Conference on April 4th in Dallas. The topic, You Don’t Have to be a Visionary to See the Benefits of Employee Wellness, will explain: Why wellness is like poetry, why concrete is transparent, and how knowing this will improve profitability, productivity and visibility.

The LoneStart Employee Weight Loss and Wellness Initiative is currently being successfully implemented in eight hospitals across Texas. These hospitals are not only investing in the health and wellness of their most important resource—their employees—they are addressing an urgent public health crisis and reinforcing their role as the leading wellness resource in their communities. LoneStart is proud to be a partner in these efforts.

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If your organization is ready to take responsibility for promoting healthy lifestyles and a healthy work environment, LoneStart is an effective, low-cost and easy-to-administer employee wellness program, which functions equally well as a stand-alone initiative or as a high-impact jump-start to existing or proposed employee wellness strategies.

Contact us today to find out how the LoneStart 21-Day Wellness Initiative will change your workplace.

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A Challenge. An Opportunity. A Solution.
The LoneStart 21-Day Wellness Initiative
phone: 512.894.3440