corporate wellness programs

The University of Michigan published a unique study that reported a substantial return when a company invests in corporate wellness.  What set this study apart from the rest was that it considered all costs involved with implementing a long-term employee wellness program, such as menu changes, employee recruiting, and marketing.

For the nine year study, researchers at the U of M followed a midwestern utility company and discovered a net savings of close to $5 million after offering a corporate wellness program that not only aimed to take care of sick employees, but also kept the rest of the employees and their families healthy and on the job.

According to Alyssa Shultz, research area specialist intermediate, the midwestern company spent $7.3 million on their wellness program over the nine years.  After determining various medical and pharmaceutical costs and employee time off, Shultz reported a savings of $12.1 million.

“One of the advantages of the study is it shows that a sustainable program will give you savings,” stated Dee Edington, a research scientist in the University of Michigan school of Public Health.

At the IHRSA 2010 conference today, Larry Chapman referenced a research study in the February 2010 journal "Health Affairs" that showed every dollar spent on wellness programs reduced corporate medical costs by $3.27 and absenteeism costs by $2.73. Where else in your organization are you enjoying a combined ROI of 600%?

Unite. That's right. It's time that we realize that many of the solutions to more efficient healthcare and increased productivity among our employees are up to us.

It's time to understand that we must give our people the tools to ease them into a new way of healthy thinking and eventually healthy living.

We are smart enough to know that a healthy life is a better and less expensive one, we must share that knowledge.

The goal of our blog is to provide ideas, tools, resources, and advice to help your company achieve the most priceless resource of all: health.

We all know the high cost of absenteeism, prevalent when workplace morale is low and employees are unwell, unhappy, and call in sick. But what about the costs when they do come to work sick, depressed, or just plain don’t want to be there?  This extremely expensive phenomenon is called “presenteeism.”   

In my last post, I passed along tips from the APA for keeping your employees productive and resilient.  One of them was: “Don’t panic. Take a deep breath.  Don’t get swept up in doom-and-gloom hype. Stay calm, focused and realistic so you can consider all of your options carefully.”

What is resiliency, and why is it important to your corporate health and wellness program?  Merriam Webster defines “resilience” as:

1: the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress