|
|
|
|
Healthy Profits
The new breed of corporate wellness programs are not only good for the
employees, they can be spectacular for the company. BY ROBERT MCGARVEY
It’s 4:30 a.m., the alarm rings, and up pops Karen Rohan, president of both Philadelphia-based CIGNA Group Insurance and CIGNA Dental and Vision Care. Running shoes laced on, she is out the door for a six- to seven-mile run on workdays, probably eight to 10 miles on weekends. Every so often, she adds a half-marathon or full marathon to her fitness schedule. Rohan, at 45 years of age, says she sleeps in hotel beds 60 percent of the time, but she nonetheless sticks to that training schedule. When weather is bad or she’s in a town where she doesn’t know the best running routes, she’s on a treadmill, but given her druthers, she is outdoors on the pavement, “usually by 5 a.m.” One other thing: Rohan recently took up Bikram yoga, to enhance her flexibility, and in Bikram the room is heated to 105 degrees (supposedly an ideal temperature) and participants go full-out for 90 sweaty, heart-pumping minutes. Right there, in that snapshot, is one of the new looks at corporate wellness, 2008 style. These days, top executives do not just talk about wellness, they live it.
Snapshot two: At pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca in Wilmington, Delaware, a mammography machine is available to busy employees who might otherwise not have the time to sit for a session. Joe Henry, AstraZeneca’s executive director of U.S. safety, health, and environment, says that the machine has performed about 9,000 mammograms — and it has detected 37 malignancies. “This program has saved lives,” says Henry. The big point: Companies are bringing wellness on campus, with many offering free access to on-site healthcare practitioners, blood tests, and advanced diagnostic equipment and, say representatives at these companies, more and easier access to these services pays dividends in healthier workers.
Snapshot three: At Compuware, a Detroit IT consulting firm, more than 250 people (who formed 87 teams of three), recently participated in the company’s four-month- long Weigh-In program, where the goal is to lose weight — lots of it. According to Tom Anderson, Compuware’s director of wellness and work/life, these employees — who got personalized evaluations and encouragement from the company’s wellness staff — lost more than 2,000 pounds. The reason for the teams: “They help keep each other motivated,” says Anderson. The lesson: Group motivation matters, a lot, and when many coworkers are pulling in the same, wellness-oriented direction, good things just may follow.
Is all this sounding serious? It should. Change has cascaded over corporate wellness programs and, in the space of a generation, has transformed them from a nice employee frill to a bread-and-butter issue with stark bottom-line impacts. “There is much more seriousness about wellness today,” says Dr. Kenneth Cooper, founder of the Cooper Aerobics Centers in Dallas and McKinney, Texas, and a leading figure in wellness, dating back to the mid-1960s when he coined the term “aerobics.” He adds: “The biggest change is the new emphasis companies are putting on reducing the cost of healthcare.”
That is the 900-pound gorilla. Healthcare costs have emerged as a significant financial concern, and one upshot is that organizations everywhere are looking at ways to slice costs . “Companies are looking to impact the utilization of healthcare, which is where wellness comes in,” says Rob Cola , president of Brown & Brown Consulting, a Philadelphia-based benefits specialist. He adds that an estimated 30 to 45 percent of medical claims are directly attributable to lifestyle choices, such as smoking, alcohol abuse, and obesity. Many companies now believe that if they tackle bad employee choices head-on, good things have to trickle down to the profit-and-loss statement.
At the Dow Chemical Company, for instance, 75 percent of employees participate in company-sponsored fitness programs, ranging from smoking cessation to indoor and outdoor walking paths. And, says Julie Fasone Holder, corporate vice president, marketing and sales, human resources, and public affairs, competitive organizations are seeing healthcare costs increasing seven to 10 percent, “but we are half of that.” Dow also claims its programs have produced a 14-percent drop in the number of employees at high risk of a calamitous health event.
At Worthington Industries, a metal processing company based in Columbus, Ohio, Kay Cooke, director of benefits, says the company’s extensive wellness program — which provides employees everything from yoga and kick boxing to smoking cessation tools — shows potent returns. “You need to track results, and we do,” says Cooke, who elaborates that the way Worthington crunches the numbers, it is getting a $2.64 return for every $1 spent.
At SAS, a business intelligence software company in North Carolina, spokesperson Dave Thomas says that the company’s array of on-site facilities and wellness activities, including a 77,000-square-foot recreation facility at headquarters, is used by 96 percent of headquarters employees, and “contributes to our annual turnover rate of about four percent, compared to an industry average above 20 percent. One Stanford professor who uses SAS in case studies has estimated that our low turnover has a bottom-line benefit to us of around $100 million a year. The short version: Happy, healthy employees do better work for our customers.”
Can wellness alone really produce such sweet results? Maybe it can, and just maybe the secrets about what works — and what doesn’t — are not that secret. Companies with successful programs like to celebrate their triumphs. Cases in point:
REWARDS WORK. At Pitney Bowes in Stamford, Connecticut, workers who follow wellness practices (zero tobacco use, daily flossing, regular exercise, and so forth) earn credits that can be applied towards purchasing more employee benefits. Maximum reward is $225 per head and, says Dr. Brent Pawlecki, the corporate medical director, Pitney Bowes’ program is both flexible and generous. For instance, the company target body mass index is a very fit 25 (30 is obese), but the employee who starts at 31 and sweats his or her way down to 30 will get full credit, says Pawlecki, who stresses that it’s the momentum and direction towards progress that count. Other companies do much the same. At AstraZeneca, for instance, employees can choose from a variety of healthy and organic meals in the cafeteria, and healthy snacks are available in the vending machines. More broadly, wellness-focused employees who participate in the company’s Get HIP! program (featuring fitness classes, health screenings, and the like) earn points that can be traded in for rewards ranging up to plasma TVs.
OFFER MANY ACTIVITIES. “If you cannot find a wellness activity to pursue here, you are just not looking,” says Kimberly Hicks, wellness coordinator at SAS. Everything from Pilates to yoga and even children’s games played by adults (“dodge ball is getting very popular,” says Hicks) is available at SAS’s recreational facility, and the idea is that something will appeal to every worker (70 percent of whom use SAS’s facilities quite regularly, reports Hicks). One size definitely does not fit all when it comes to fitness, and variety pays off in higher usage rates, Hicks says. “Fit it to the culture” is more advice from Tevis Gale, founder of New Yorkbased Balance Integration, which helps companies develop wellness programs that fit. Just one example, per Gale: Some companies want gentle yoga classes, others insist on heart-pounding, fast-paced flow yoga, and there really is no right or wrong. It’s about what suits an individual company’s population.
GO VIRTUAL. As workforces go virtual and remote and also as business travel takes employees away from home base, the wellness question is how to reach them. Technology just may be solving this. Austin, Texas-based demandFitness, for instance, offers its corporate clients access to a library of 200-plus fitness videos (many as short as five minutes), most of which are designed to be done in hotel rooms and other areas with limited equipment and space. Fitness routines can be streamed over a broadband connection or simply downloaded to a laptop for access anytime, anywhere. “Today the gym can be virtual, and this brings fitness to the 85 percent of the population that struggles to work gym visits into their routine,” says John Webster, demandFitness cofounder. Across the country, many organizations are racing to offer virtual wellness tools to their otherwise hard-to-reach, mobile workforces.
STICK WITH IT. “It takes time to build a culture of wellness. You have to stick with your program to see results,” says Teresa Taylor, chief administrative officer at phone company Qwest. Employees often initially view wellness initiatives skeptically; others just aren’t aware they exist. “You have to market these programs internally,” says Taylor. Tenacity pays off. When Qwest debuted health screening tests administered by the Mayo Clinic, just 12 percent of eligible employees took advantage of the opportunity. A few years later — after much marketing along with prize drawings that gave lucky winners incentives such as iPods — “we are at 25 percent,” says Taylor.
Consider all of those steps and one more: Get company leadership involved, in a close-up and personal way. Remember Karen Rohan, the CIGNA president and marathoner? She is proof that leadership commitment inspires employees. Rohan recently led a group of 115 employees in the CIGNA Falmouth Road Race, a seven-mile race on Cape Cod. That’s up from 25 the year before, says Rohan, who is particularly proud of her coworkers who had never before competed in a race (“my chief marketing officer ran her very first race, for instance”). When the top executives are living a wellness philosophy, it makes it that much easier for others to join in, and the benefits are clearly contagious, all the way from the finish line to the bottom line.
CEO CHALLENGE
Talk
about grueling. An Ironman triathlon is one part swimming (2.4 miles),
one part bicycling (112 miles), one part running (a 26.2-mile
marathon), and the mind-bending newsflash is that, increasingly,
corporate CEOs are participating. That’s the word from Ted C. Kennedy,
who organizes the exclusive CEO Ironman Challenge. The CEO part is not
just public relations spin, either. Past participants in these events —
held in the U.S., Europe, and Asia — have included CEOs from Motorola,
Lending Tree, Toshiba Europe, and even luxury hotelier Rocco Forte who,
at age 60, recorded a mouth-dropping time of 11 hours, 40 minutes.
Forte
is the rule, not the exception. Most CEOs come in at 11, 12, sometimes
13 or 14 hours, but that these busy, high-stressed performers come in
at all is the real story. “The CEOs who participate are very, very
serious about this,” says Kennedy, who indicates that these are CEOs
who are personal exemplars of wellness in their own companies. At the
very least, they put a high priority on fitness. Most train two to
three hours a day — “they don’t find time, they make it,” says Kennedy.
Most
events feature six to 10 CEOs, mainly men, but a few women do compete,
and, says Kennedy, “about 99 percent of entrants finish.” He is not
surprised by that. CEOs, by their very nature, are exceptionally
competitive, and that means these are people who, if need be, will
crawl across the finish line. None have done exactly that, in Kennedy’s
recollection, but many cross the line with more blisters, sores, and
pains than they ever could have imagined. Is it worth the long prep
time (Kennedy estimates an already fit CEO will specifically train for
an Ironman triathlon for about 24 weeks)? Absolutely, says Kennedy: “A
fit CEO is a confident CEO.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|