Is the high cost of providing health benefits for your employees getting you, and your company, down? Have you already tried everything you can think of, including cost sharing, cost shifting, managed care, risk-rating and cash-based rebates or incentives, with little or no slowing in the exponential rise in costs? If so, then you may have decided that there’s nothing else to be done except to decrease or eliminate health benefits for your workers and hope you’ll be able to deal with the fallout from disgruntled workers. Don’t give up hope yet. There is one thing you may not have considered—a strategy which has proven to be the bottom-line savior for many companies and organizations—helping your employees reduce their health risks and become healthier.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re in the construction business, not the health promotion business. You employ your workers, you don’t parent them. Even so, there are some very important data that you need to consider. Over the past twenty-five years, study after study in company after company has proven that a healthier workforce produces higher quality work, uses less of the company health care benefits, has higher morale and productivity, is less likely to become ill or injured, is absent less often and is less likely to have worker’s compensation claims. Does this sound too good to be true? Well it isn’t.
You don’t have to take my word on this, check it out for yourself sometime. A quick search on the web will give you page after page of success stories like these:
- Employee health promotion programs at Coors saved the company over $2.3 million in lost wages and over $1.9 million in rehabilitation costs and cost avoidance.
- At Travelers, members of the company sponsored fitness center used 19 percent less sick leave than non-members.
- Westinghouse workers who participated in health promotion programs cost the firm $1,715 less than those who did not.
- Johnson & Johnson reduced absenteeism by 15 percent in two years and cut hospitalization costs by 34 percent in three years after implementing a worksite health promotion program.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Though the results are not as well documented as for those larger companies, small businesses can also use health promotion programs and strategies to improve the overall health of their employees and ultimately reduce the utilization and cost of health benefits, decrease absenteeism and turnover and improve productivity and morale. With preventable illness making up 70 percent of all illness and the associated cost, can you, or your company, afford not to give it a try?
Beginning a worksite health promotion program doesn’t have to be expensive or difficult. Start by taking a good look at how you’re currently spending your employee health benefit dollars and what’s putting your employees on sick leave. Did any of your employees have a major illness or disability last year? Red flag conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, pre-term delivery of a newborn, back injury and accidents. Employees or family members of employees with these potentially high-dollar claims can drive up your health care costs exponentially and drain your workforce with absenteeism. Once you know what’s costing you the most, make a list of the health behaviors which contribute to that illness or disability.
Smoking, being overweight, eating a high fat diet, excessive alcohol use, uncontrolled diabetes, stress and living a sedentary lifestyle contribute to both cardiovascular disease and cancer. Lack of pre-natal care, smoking and alcohol use contribute to pre-term delivery. Excessive weight, stress, alcohol or other drug use and living a sedentary lifestyle contribute to back injury and other on-the-job injuries and accidents. So, the next step is to do a quick survey of your employees to find out which of those risk behaviors are the most prevalent. Offer workers a small incentive for answering your questions about their health risks honestly. Then you’ll know which behaviors to address first.
Even if you don’t have the time or resources for questionnaires or risk assessment, you can’t go wrong by addressing the top three destructive health behaviors—weight, smoking and lack of exercise. It’s almost a sure bet that reducing risks among your employees in these three areas will pay tremendous dividends over the long haul.
“And how should I do that?” you might ask. Start small. Encourage your employees to move more with exercise prompt signs such as “Take the Stairs,” or “Stretch before Lifting,” placed in prominent places. Offer healthy food choices in vending machines or make a small refrigerator and microwave available for workers who want to bring healthy food with them to work. Stick a health reminder message into paycheck envelopes with a coupon for bonus leave for employees who lose weight or stop smoking. Encourage workers to walk at their lunch break by giving them an additional ten minutes, provided it’s used for exercise only. Provide health screenings or flu shots on site, even if you have to charge a small fee for the service and convenience.
Challenges are often a very successful promotion strategy. Competitiveness is human nature, so it’s easy to organize workers into teams to compete for small rewards by making incremental changes in their health behavior. I’ve seen team challenges help employees lose weight, eat fruits and vegetables, drink water, walk and even quit smoking.
Many companies have gone so far as to pay for extensive health screenings, weight loss and smoking cessation programs or health club memberships for their employees. Though it’s likely that such extreme measures will produce greater results, the benefits of even the most simple and inexpensive worksite health promotion programs shouldn’t be minimized. In addition to helping your company’s bottom line, worksite health promotion efforts show your employees that you, and your company, care about them and their families.
Construction Business Owner, March 2008
