News Archive
Management QOL in the News - May 25, 2009
Angela M. Downey, Good Health Is Good Business; Wellness Culture; Why some organizations score over others, Financial Post
Organizations have employed integrated worksite health promotion (WHP) -- policies that encourage employees to choose lifestyles that may improve their health -- for years now. But more and more organizations are using specific bottom-line motivations to define their health promotion activities.
They are designing programs to reduce specific benefit costs rather than relying on direct assessments of employees' needs -- a "hard" approach as opposed to a "soft" approach to WHP.
This trend is likely driven by evidence that creating an environment that encourages employees to take more responsibility for improving their lifestyle choices can have a significant positive impact on productivity, absenteeism rates, morale and, important in today's cost climate, reduce employee benefit costs.
Reviews of WHP studies reveal that sick time can be reduced by 28%, health-care costs can be cut by 26% and workers' compensation can be lowered by 30%.
But all these benefits of WHP don't come easy. Many organizations attempt to create programs that succeed in building a culture of wellness. On the other hand, many fail to achieve the expected results.
The question remains why some build a culture where making better personal lifestyle choices is the norm for employees and some organizations try but never reach the point of institutionalizing a wellness culture.
Recent research undertaken by a team of academics in Canada is trying to address this question. Dr. Ali Dastmalchian and myself from the University of Victoria, along with Dr. Helen Kelley from the University of Lethbridge and Dr. David Sharp from the Ivey School of Business, have gathered data from 75 organizations in Canada deemed to have exemplary WHP programs.
The organizations come from government, financial, manufacturing, health and service industries and each has been recognized as an example of innovative, and in many instances, award-winning organizations.
When we looked behind the result of these organizations, this is what we found:
Exemplary Organizations Use Change Theories
All the firms in our sample embarked on a process of organizational change.
The first step an organization needs to take if it wants a change to be long-lasting is to get its organization ready for change. Once an organization's employees are ready for change, they will try the change on, leading to early adoption.
If commitment to the change is built, then the change will be institutionalized within the organization.
Of some surprise was the amount of readiness activities the organizations in our sample undertook. They used all the change model recommendations to ensure their employees were ready to take more responsibility for their own well-being. They created awareness that there was a gap between the current state of employee well-being and where individuals could be.
With top management support, the implementation team provided the evidence that WHP could fill this gap by planning and designing a program of health promotion activities that met the needs of the employee base.
The readiness process contributed to employee self-efficacy, and provided insights into what benefits were in the program for the employees. In addition, the organization trained and supported multiple change agents to lead and foster the change.
Normally, in a change process, there is an extensive period of adoption, referred to as a "trying on for size" period. Through the adoption phase individual commitment is
built and a change can be institutionalized within an organization. The "adoption" stage in our exemplary firms was very short. Once convinced that this change was in employees' best interest (as well as organizations'), recipients of the change moved fairly rapidly from being ready for change to internalizing the change resulting in improved lifestyle choices.
Hard and Soft Wellness
Normally we expect to see WHP emanating over time out of HR departments, or the traditional health and safety departments, or in today's new environment, out of newly designed departments created specifically to plan, design and implement WHP.
The process starts with accessing the current health status of employees through questionnaires and then designing a program of activities that matches the needs of the employees based on their health status. In some organizations this includes such activities as diet clubs, walking groups, health information fairs, and monitoring processes (i. e., blood pressure, hearing etc.). Employees and their requirements for a healthier life are at the core of this process.
One unanticipated finding was a turnaround in this normal approach to developing WHP. The past few years have seen an increased call for the business justification for developing WHP.
We found firms that were doing just that. They began the process by examining their benefits costs.
They determined what was costing the organization the most and started by planning and designing WHP activities that would reduce those costs. For example, an analysis of employees' use of pharmaceuticals may reveal that the organization's employee base has a high prescription rate for stress-and depression-related drugs.
Organizations are building their WHP around this fact, designing activities to reduce this pharmaceutical use with the main goal being the reduction in the cost of benefits although meeting those goals should also benefit employees in the long run.
The change process is still used to create readiness and institutionalize change, but the motivation is considerably different than it has been in the past for most organizations developing WHP.
The traditional approach to WHP we are labelling "soft" wellness and the bottom-line approach we are labelling "hard" wellness. It remains to be seen if this new bottom-up cost-driven approach is successful at improving employees' lifestyle choices and whether it influences more organizations to consider the idea of building a wellness culture. Currently, it appears to be working for some Canadian organizations!
--- Angela Downey is an associate professor of accounting at the University of Victoria and has been researching worksite health promotion for nearly two decades. In addition Dr. Downey is a health economist examining the financial implications of changes in health treatments and service delivery models
