“Good investors are always
looking to find ever more sophisticated ways to understand the underlying
strength of a company. Health and wellbeing are powerful indicators in
assessing the businesses ability to attract, retain and motivate top performing
employees. In fact there is increasing evidence that a healthy workforce
provides a competitive advantage”
With years of experience in
prompting and promoting wellness in organizations – here is what we set out as
ingredients and a recipe for “Building Healthy Workplaces” at plugH
Leadership Commitment
Haven’t we heard culture
has strategy for breakfast and culture more often than not is modeled from the
top. Some indicators to leadership commitment are
- Is there a specific budget for wellness initiatives?
- Is there a specific team devoted to driving wellness initiatives
within the organization
- Does the CEO have a healthy lifestyle?
- How often does health & wellness find priority in a CEO’s communication
to her people?
Measurement of the correct data
What’s measured improves
(though I am also tempted to admit that everything that counts can be counted). Nonetheless in order to manage anything you need to know where you are
to decide where you want to be. Measurements would mean
- Metrics around indicators of health and wellness in an organization
– Health Insurance claims, Engagement surveys, Absenteeism etc
- Around employee health you need to measure and track data at two
levels –
- Health screening (bio-metrics like BMI, Random Blood Sugar, BP,
Cholesterol) measures are good indicators to work on for slightly older
employees who have sinned enough for their sins to show up in their health
screening reports
- Health Risk Assessment to measure which of the indicators (measured
as a part of the Health screening) are at a risk of going awry due to the
lifestyle of the participant today. For the kind of young population
working in our services industry it is more important to measure all
dimensions of their lifestyle and not wait for the effects to show up in
screening results
Relevant Plan Design
Wellness initiatives have
to be “responsive” to the findings from the measurement. Initiatives
which are taken as a ‘fad’ or as a ‘knee-jerk’ reaction to a health exigency in
the organization are short lived in the memory as well as the lives of
employees in the organization. Given that budgets will always be a constraint
it is also important that the design of the initiatives is such that maximum
value of every rupee spent is extracted. For eg. an annual preventive health
check for senior employees is going to do nothing for their health if it’s not
followed up with a support plan for individuals. We have seen organizations
going in for Preventive Health checks where more than 95% of people have done
practically nothing with these reports as their health metrics deteriorate in
the annual health-check report year after year gathering dust in drawers
at home.
Disciplined Implementation
Strategy without execution
is hallucination. The keyword here is discipline. Either organizations should
have a well managed wellness team reporting into the Chief Medical Officer and
even if the team has shared responsibility it needs to be run like any other
business process within the organization. In the absence of a resident
“Wellness expert” it is more prudent to take advice from outside. Be
careful about hiring the right wellness partner whose interests are aligned to
yours and who has bandwidth to understand wellness and experience to run health
promotion programmes. A free service taken from the hospital which does your
preventive health check will only inflate your insurance claims. I don’t need
to explain – right?
Ongoing Support
Wellness is about living
life fully. It cant be done in shifts or batches or only at the workplace and
not at home. Its perennial and all pervading. Wellness initiatives need support
of the entire management infrastructure to actually bear fruit. Haven’t
you heard that one – an organization asked employees to not work late and asked
for lights to be switched off at 6 p.m.. Managers have therefore asked their
teams to carry their laptops home. Support – you get it?!
Having read this – do you
think your organization has it in itself to build a healthy
workplace? Write in if you have interesting experiences to share to either
support or flout my opinions.