Customer-Centric or Employee-Centric Wellness Culture . . . or Both?

Does your organization take a customer-centric or employee-centric approach to wellness and health?

In an employee-centric organization each employee is valued and considered critical to the organization's success in delivering its shared vision and mission. On the other hand, customer-centric essentially describes an organization that is operated from its customers' point of view, and a customer-centric enterprise uses business strategies throughout the organization to best serve customers. Or, you can look at it this way. Pretend your employees are your customers.

Becoming customer-centric is about changing the components of the customer experience and aligning them around a target to create consistency and harmony. The same can be said for your employees. And, for a wellness program to succeed, a company committed to being customer-centric is one in which the executive and management teams lead by example, one where the organizational structure itself defines the company. Self managed teams which drive a customer-centric organization can be compared to the wellness teams that drive, push and pull each other to achieve an organizational culture of wellness. CLICK HERE to find out more about the LoneStart Team Esteem Challenge

Wellness touches us all throughout our lives. It means actions to avoid the explosion of chronic disease costs. It also means challenges. Statistics show that half of all deaths in the U.S. can be attributed to just a few preventable behaviors: smoking, physical inactivity, poor nutritional habits and stress. This is important when looking at an employee-centric approach to wellness. By implementing a wellness initiative and creating a culture of health in the workplace you are encouraging employees to focus on the quality of their lives. You are also reinforcing that you are an employee-centric organization, which in turn enables your employees to better serve your customers, thereby creating to some degree, a customer-centric organization as well.

The number of people with chronic conditions is rapidly increasing. Between 2000 and 2030, the number of Americans with chronic, mostly preventable conditions is projected to increase by approximately 37 percent, an increase of 46 million people. That's roughly the current number of Medicare recipients in the U.S. With chronic conditions come increases in the number of health care claims, increased absenteeism, greater employee turnover and reduced productivity. And in many organizations, more often than not, focus is on treatment or action after-the fact as opposed to prevention and behavior change. As an example, many employee benefit plans focus heavily on access to acute care rather than management and avoidance of chronic conditions. This is exactly the place to begin to merge the practices of a customer-centric focus with an employee-centric direction in creating a new and sustainable culture of wellness in your organization.

While offering an employee wellness initiative in your organization may not be by definition a "true" customer-centric application, the principles and goals are much the same: Create an organization that recognizes, understands and responds to the needs of its customers - and its employees - and you will have served both.