erhaps the most significant difference between yesterday's and today's wellness
movement is the science behind it.
Employers who are just now embarking on the wellness
path are doing so methodically, collecting data from all relevant sources to better
gauge the impact their programs are having, not only on health but also on productivity.
For the past six years or so, we've been looking at
the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine link to to see what
other employers have been getting in terms of return on investment," says Patti
Clavier, who works in group health and well-being strategy and operations for Santa
Clara, California-based Intel Corp.
Dr. Joyce Young, well-being director for IBM Corp.,
has had several studies on the impact of wellness programs published in that journal,
including one on an Internet-based work-site smoking cessation intervention and
another on an incentive-based online physical activity intervention on employee
health status.
"There is also some good data showing how much more
smokers' health care costs are," Young says. "We also found that people who were
physically active more than twice a week had costs $500 to $600 less than those
who were not physically active. You have to do sophisticated analysis to understand
all the reasons for that. But the patterns are there."
A review of 56 published studies of work-site health
promotion programs by the Washington-based
Partnership for Prevention
found they produced an average savings-to-cost ratio of $5.81 to $1. The programs
also reduced annual health costs by an average of 26 percent, reduced absenteeism
by 27 percent, and reduced workers compensation and disability claim costs by 32
percent.
"What you find is a very comprehensive holistic approach
to health and productivity management will usually be cost neutral in year one,"
says Shelly Wolff, national leader for health and productivity at Watson Wyatt Worldwide
in Stamford, Connecticut. "Year two is when you start seeing return on investment,
and by the time you get to three years, things really start kicking in and you really
do see ROI," she says, adding that longer-term studies have found the gains continue
for at least seven years.
Many employers also are starting to measure the impact
of wellness programs on productivity in addition to health care costs by combining
claims data with data on absenteeism, occupational injuries and disability claims,
Wolff says.
Pitney Bowes Corp., for example, won the C. Everett
Koop National Health Award twice, in 1995 and in 1997, for its work measuring wellness-program
ROI, which produced "good hard metrics showing that by investing in health improvement
programs you actually saw reductions in absenteeism costs," says Dr. Jack Mahoney,
director of health strategies at the office equipment manufacturer, which is based
in Stamford, Connecticut.
The collective impact of ill health on the workplace
is what is called the "burden of illness," says Andrew Webber, president and CEO
of the National Business Coalition on Health in Washington.
"You put the whole picture together in terms of what the illness burden is costing
you," he says.
"It's not just health care costs; it's the time away
from work. That's a big part of where the return comes from," Wolff says. "If a
company is only looking at health care cost trend as their marker of success, they're
missing the other real, important costs that are impacting the health and effectiveness
of your employees and the organization.
"We do know that people with health risks, people who
are overweight, people who smoke are off work more. That means someone else is doing
their job, so you've got higher replacement costs, you've got overtime, and that
has a cascading effect on stress, which is another part of what we saw in our research,"
she says. "You kind of get this domino effect."
Workforce Management Online, April 2008 --
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