Most wellness studies show the employees have better health behaviors. Wellness programs can also help alleviate depression and the symptoms of depression as well as improve life satisfaction. Even the American Heart Association has completed an extensive review of the ability of wellness programs to improve health and reduce cardiovascular risk. Others have evaluated all of the research and reported that wellness programs, do in fact, have the ability to improve employee health.
In researchers completed one of the most rigorous and comprehensive reviews of wellness programs. This study is called the Rand Report. Here is what the authors concluded:. We find that workplace wellness programs can help contain the current epidemic of lifestyle-related diseases, the main driver of premature morbidity and mortality as well as health care cost in the United States.
The foundation of any good wellness program must be focused on helping employees adopt healthy behaviors. Elevated blood glucose, high blood cholesterol, and high blood pressure are almost all caused by unhealthy diets and lack of physical activity. Eating and exercising are behaviors.
A randomized clinical trial was designed to help people improve their nutrition and physical activity. When researchers looked at the results, they were stunned to learn that in as little as six weeks health risks could improve dramatically. Those who maintained healthy behaviors experience lower health risks for six weeks, six months, 12 months, and even out to 18 months after this program began. When you change your diet, get active, and avoid tobacco, really good things happen.
Boise School District is a WellSteps client and not long ago we published the results of their changes in health risks. After one year, a lot of employees who had elevated health risks at baseline, had reached healthy risk levels. Source: JOEM. Reductions in elevated health risks are important. Low health risks are the foundation of good health, and wellness programs are a great way to help employees and their spouses avoid elevated health risks.
There are hundreds of research papers that evaluated the ability of wellness programs to reduce elevated health risks. One particular study looking at almost , wellness participants and showed that 5 0f 7 health risks improved after one year. Another researcher looked at all of the published studies to get a consensus. This review showed that comprehensive wellness programs will have a significant impact on elevated health risks.
There is one weakness that almost all wellness programs have. After 30 years of evaluating dozens and dozens of programs it has become clear that it is difficult to impossible to get large groups of employees to reach and maintain a healthy body weight.
The obesity epidemic is caused by a variety of cultural factors and helping employees lose weight has proven to be exceptionally difficult. While the research suggests that helping people improve blood cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood glucose is possible, helping people lose weight and keep the weight off has proven to be hard to do. Just take a look at the body mass index BMI data in the table above. Those who are obese do lose some weight after a few years but not very much. There is some hope.
Recently, the RAND study showed some promising results:. If the focus of your wellness program is to help individuals reach and maintain a healthy body weight you should prepare yourself to be disappointed. The unhealthy culture that surrounds most of us makes it extremely difficult to lose weight, in fact, most people in the United States and in the industrialized world gain weight every year.
Wellness programs are very effective at reducing elevated health risks like blood pressure, glucose, and cholesterol which are all great reasons to have a wellness program. But they are not very effective at helping people lose weight.
Without the impact of all the wellness programs in the world, obesity would be even worse than it currently is. Wellness programs may not help your employees reach a healthy body weight but it looks like they are helping your employees to stop gaining weight. There are almost different studies that have looked at the financial impact of wellness programs. These studies are not easy to do, they require extremely complicated ROI analyses, and they take years to complete.
In , a comprehensive review on the financial impact of worksite wellness programs was published. That study reviewed different research papers. The ability of a wellness program to reduce healthcare costs depends upon how effective the program really is. Having an occasional lunch and learn about nutrition or just doing a biometric screening will not be enough to move the healthcare cost needle.
Comprehensive worksite wellness programs that improve employee behaviors will see a bending of the healthcare cost trend. Most often they will discover that the savings from program participation will be greater than the actual cost of the program.
Almost everyone of these return on investment ROI studies show a positive return on investment. Researchers from Harvard recently published another summary of the wellness ROI research.
Source: Health Affairs. Among the 22 different studies that looked at wellness programs and healthcare costs, the average return on investment was 3. Last year researchers evaluated the impact of the WellSteps wellness program at a large school district.
Here is the actual healthcare cost trend for this worksite. After four years of wellness this worksite is actually spending less on healthcare costs than it did before the program began. Poor employee productivity can be defined as physically being at work but not working. This type of poor productivity is called presenteeism. It is estimated that the cost associated with presenteeism due to poor employee health is at least 2 to 3 times greater than direct health care expenses.
While the estimated cost of presenteeism dwarfs the cost of health care, it does not receive the same level of scrutiny among employers preoccupied with controlling the direct costs of poor employee health.
There are a lot of reasons why employees have low productivity. They may not know how to use the equipment, they may be distracted by other employees, they may not know what they are doing, they may be tired, or they might be on Facebook. One of the main causes of presenteeism is poor health. New understanding of presenteeism has been revealed in recent research published by the journal Population Health Management. These findings demonstrate that poor health behaviors are strongly associated with high levels of presenteeism.
In short, unhealthy individual lifestyle choices may result in substantially higher levels of lost productive work time. Poor health behaviors eventually lead to elevated health risks and chronic diseases. The figure below shows how health risks such as excess body weight, elevated blood pressure, and high cholesterol increased the odds of having high presenteeism. The other health conditions in this figure further paint the presenteeism picture—the presence of risk factors, pain, and chronic disease, especially chronic depression, dramatically increase the odds of having high presenteeism.
These results confirm several ideas about the benefits of wellness. She was also awarded the highly contested Personal Trainer of The Year Award from Fitness Australia, beating over national nominations. Melani is the creator and mastermind behind our range of corporate wellbeing programs and workshops.
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Wellness programs can improve employee health and habits, which reduces instances of absenteeism resulting from sickness, burnout, stress, and related issues. Absenteeism affects productivity in different ways. An absent employee is unlikely to finish his projects on time, which affects other departments as well. If he is working on a crucial part of a project, his colleagues might not be able to complete their part.
These delays might hurt delivery projections and the company might incur fines or losses. By extension, this will damage the company's reputation. Habitual absenteeism can also cause resentment in the workplace as remaining employees will be forced to pick up the slack while their colleague is away.
This not only hurts productivity, but it lowers employee morale. All rights reserved. No part of this site or the publications described herein may be reproduced without the permission of Recser Human Capital. Sign Up. Login Sign Up. More and more companies are waking up to the realization that having happy, healthy employees is essential for their bottom line.
And this is where wellness comes in. If you are an employer who is still on the fence about workplace wellness programs, here are five reasons why you should be jumping on board: 1.
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