Corporate health and wellbeing programs offer wide-ranging benefits for employees and, it seems, their employers, reports Lynnette Hoffman
Corporate health and wellbeing programs offer wide-ranging benefits for employees and, it seems, their employers, reports Lynnette Hoffman
Traditionally, company health promotion programs have often been seen as a privilege reserved for senior management. But now, large corporations such as Woolworths, ANZ, Vodafone, Boral and BlueScope Steel are making health a priority for their entire staff. As a result, other companies that operated with the ‘exec only’ mindset are taking a new look at that market, says John Lang, managing director of corporate health promoter Good Health Solutions.
“Two thirds of our clients are non-executives,”he says. “Increasingly employers have shied away from only providing benefits for the boys club at the top. The economic benefits are heavily documented and there is lots of evidence of lost productivity through poor health.”
More than 300 studies have tracked the impact of health promotion in the workplace, mostly in the US, and the results have shown real benefits including significant increases in productivity and energy, decreases in absenteeism and workplace injury, improved employee satisfaction, engagement and culture and positive lifestyle changes. On average benefits outweighed costs by a ratio of 2.92 to 1 and medical costs dropped by an average $393 per person. Improved health has also been linked with reduced ‘presenteeism’ and is currently being documented by AHM Total Health in the Australian workforce.
Push for egalitarian benefits
The trend toward more inclusive policies has led to companies looking for programs that are universal in their appeal and scope. Many are offering programs that monitor overall health and provide information sessions that can be easily tailored to their specific staff population, rather than opting for onsite fitness facilities or discounted gym memberships which are seen as targeting the already healthy workforce and not the general population.
“Gym memberships only have 3 to 5 per cent take-up, and most of the people who take it already go to the gym, or if they don’t they can’t sustain it. So it’s not changing habits,” says Cate Hathaway, Boral’s general manager for workers’ compensation. Instead, Boral has implemented a program of seminars on health topics that are important to its workforce, so not just fitness and nutrition are included, but also stress management and the importance of good sleep among other health issues.
Employees and their families have access to a health resource centre where they can speak to experts about health and wellbeing issues in complete confidence. The advice covers everything that can impact wellbeing, from back care to parenting to relationship issues.
BlueScope Steel’s focus on health
At BlueScope Steel, meanwhile, AHM Total Health ran 130 half-hour staff seminars in June, covering men’s health, nutrition, exercise, weight loss, smoking, alcohol and stress management. Employees and their families participated and were invited to complete health assessment questionnaires to gauge what areas of their lifestyle and health could be improved.
The “Take Two For Your Health” program was designed as part of the company’s effort to “achieve zero harm,” says Dr Chris Darling, manager of safety health and risk at BlueScope Steel. The company made a target to improve the health and awareness of its employees and help them take control of health risks in 1996.
“What we wanted to do was give access to everybody,” Darling says. “We want to target the large middle group who have some knowledge about their health, but could use a little more information about what they can do to help themselves.”
Interest from employees exceeded expectations, with 2,070 of the company’s 3,500 employees attending seminars and 545 taking part in the personal health assessments. Darling says the company had been aiming for a 50 per cent turnout and had planned to conduct 400 assessments. Anecdotal feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, he says, and the company is now collating the results to create baselines to see “what the health issues are in this workplace and what we can do about it”.
‘My Health’ at ANZ
As of May, all ANZ employees have been eligible for free health checks every 18 months and can access comprehensive health information online. The My Health initiative comes under the umbrella of ANZ’s Breakout program, implemented five years ago to improve the overall performance culture, behaviour and mindset at the organisation, says Shane Freeman, the head of ANZ’s people capital department.
“We want people to bring their whole selves to work,” he says. “We believe that assisting our people to think about their physical health, fitness and vitality can create a foundation from which they can draw energy at work and also in their personal life.”
The comprehensive health assessments give staff an idea of where they are at and what they can work on in a practical way. ANZ also run seminars, participated in a study on depression in the workplace and have some 200 teams enrolled in the global corporate challenge, a worldwide competition that encourages employees to walk the recommended 10,000 or more steps a day
A September 1 report by analyst Macquarie Research Equities found ANZ well ahead of competitor National Australia Bank in terms of employee engagement, and estimated that the difference was costing NAB $28.5 million a year. How much of that comes down to health initiatives is difficult to say, but Freeman says he is willing to bet it is a part of the picture.
Building a business case
“There’s an overarching framework that relies on the belief that highly engaged staff are more productive, and whatever we can do that’s better for our staff will be better for the business as well,” Freeman says. “It’s at the very pointy end of the business rationale.” But despite growing acknowledgement of the impact health makes on overall performance, building a business case for large-scale health promotion continues to be a challenge for many organisations. Nearly all the studies to date have come from overseas, though Boral and BHP are among the Australian companies hoping to track their outcomes more specifically to determine how improved health relates to factors such as workplace injury and productivity.
But by and large, Australian companies have avoided tracking outcomes because it is costly. The result is that organisations are not able to provide hard evidence for the benefits and when hard economic times hit, health benefits are often some of the first programs to be cut.
Consequently, an increasing number of health promotion providers are pushing for more substantive studies documenting the results of improved health for Australian workforces. AHM Total Health, for example, will soon be publishing a study that looks at the impact of health on presenteeism in hard terms, but that sort of data is still at beginning stages here.
Health promotion also tends to be a long-term goal, which makes it a tough sell when budgets are tight. “You don’t often see a quick change in health outcomes. So for example people can change their eating habits to be healthier, but the onset of diabetes is 20 years,” BlueScope’s Chris Darling says. So how do organisations build a strong case for these programs in the absence of local data?
ANZ and BlueScope Steel both already had policies in place that allowed HR directors to add health promotion as part of a bigger agenda of improving overall culture. ANZ’s Breakout strategy encompasses a range of initiatives, one of which is health. For BlueScope, health promotion complemented the company’s long-term goal of zero harm. Hathaway says Boral built its business case around the need for sustainability given its ageing workforce.
Commitment for Boral’s program came easily from senior managers, but it took time to get management at individual sites on board, mainly because of concerns over the budget as well as about the time the program would take out of the employees days, but those concerns were eventually resolved.
“We liaised with the unions and they came on board when they realised it would be totally confidential and there was no hidden agenda. We spent $1 million per annum on the whole program, which is not much when you consider we’ve had such good anecdotal evidence already,” Hathaway says. “We feel it is money well spent because we’re looking after our employees.”
