With healthcare costs and chronic disease rates continually rising each year, it will only become more difficult for both employees and employers (who must pay to insure their employees) to keep up financially, which is why successful employee wellness programs are becoming an increasingly important asset in the workplace.
During a presentation at the Maine Health Management Coalition's (MHMC) "Leading Maine to Better Health" conference on Thursday in Portland, Maine, Jerry Noyce, president and CEO of the Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO), discussed the ways in which successful employee wellness programs can positively affect both a company's spend on employee healthcare and the productivity level of employees.
"With employee pay typically rising 3 percent per year, compare a 19 percent pay increase to an 82 percent healthcare cost increase over the past five years. And experts estimate that healthcare costs will continue to rise at 8-9 percent each year," said Noyce during his presentation.
Noyce added that poor health of employees adds to higher absenteeism, higher disability costs, higher employee turnover rates, more customer dissatisfaction and variable product quality – all important reasons to implement an employee wellness program.
In 2008, HERO began a collaboration with Mercer, an employee health consulting firm, on the HERO Best Practice Scorecard, which includes a checklist of employee health program components, activities and outcomes to give employers information they can use to help decide how to invest in their own programs, according to Noyce. As of September 2012, 788 employers have used the scorecard to implement their own employee wellness programs, and so far, 45 percent of those employers have reported an improvement in medical plan costs due to the programs with another 32 percent that have yet to measure their results, he added.
Noyce said that employers using the scorecard can enter their results into a database that reports national average scores and maximum scores on each measure. "You can easily see where your gaps are and easily address those gaps," he said.
Among the most important aspects of the scorecard and implementing a successful program are leadership engagement, engagement methods (such as incentives) and the measurement and evaluation of such programs, said Noyce.
"What we see in our database is the higher the score, the more the employer has spent on their program, which also means the higher the impact of the program and the more companies are measuring their results. We believe that these programs have three pillars – leadership engagement, communications and incentives. These three pillars have measureable impact on an employers' cost of healthcare and the health of their employees," he said.
Finally, Noyce added that making an employee wellness program part of the culture at the workplace may be the most important aspect of a successful program. Integrating a wellness program into the overall culture includes the active participation of executive leadership and the branding of the program "so it's something employees really remember."
"You have to get the message right and come together," he said. "If you do that, you're going to have a successful program."