Instead of waiting to pay for the treatment of sick employees, some employers will soon turn to the concept of wellness management--with a twist. They’ll give employees a concrete financial incentive to participate, says Tom Lerche, senior vice president of Aon Consulting.

The process, which is handled through an outside organization to preserve privacy and HIPAA compliance, begins by having employees and their covered spouses take a voluntary health-risk appraisal each year. These questionnaires identify factors that lead to such chronic diseases as asthma, heart disease, and diabetes, which can account for 20 to 35 percent of a company’s medical expenses, Lerche says. If the appraisal identifies two or more risk factors that point to a potential health problem, the employee or spouse is a candidate for health coaching with a nurse, health educator, dietitian, or exercise physiologist. The coach sets up a plan for the health risk and keeps track of the employee’s progress via weekly phone calls. The incentive for the employee is a reduction in insurance premium payments--$55 instead of $75 per month, for instance, Lerche says. And if the employee stops participating, the insurance discount can be suspended until he gets back on track.

"Too much of what we do is a short-term approach," he says. "Fifty percent of disease is ultimately preventable," and this approach can head off many major health problems.

"It’s for the employer that has low turnover, wants to invest in employees, and wants to see to it that they’re productive and in good health" in the working years ahead, Lerche says.

Americans eat too much. They spend too much money. They are obese and in debt and worried about personal safety and job security--especially since 9/11 and the economic downturn, says Harriet Hankin, president of CGI Consulting in Malvern, Pennsylvania. And those are some of the reasons they’re increasingly looking for spiritual comfort, she says. "The biggest change in the workplace is the interest in spirituality. It’s about doing the right thing. It’s not about religion. It’s about job satisfaction. Jobs in the future will have to be more meaningful. Pay won’t be as important as a good job."

Referring to the rising number of books on spirituality and business and in subjects such as work/life balance, Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, says he’d agree that spirituality in the workplace is a noteworthy trend. Workers are looking for meaning and purpose, he says. "The word ‘spirit’ comes from the word ‘to breathe.’"

With steeply mounting numbers of educated women, glass ceilings are going to shatter in the coming years, says John A. Challenger, CEO of international outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. Between 1979 and 1999, the number of women earning four-year college degrees jumped 44 percent, from 444,000 to 640,000, he says. At the same time, the number of men receiving four-year degrees is declining--from 532,000 in 1993 to about half a million in 1999.

As women earn more college degrees and ascend more corporate ladders, Challenger says, they "will make further inroads into management and exec ranks, and the workforce will have to create an environment where a balance between work and home life is more valued. Temporary and part-time work and job sharing will be more common." There also will be more re-entry opportunities for women who leave the workplace for a few years and then return.

At the same time, more men will be moving into "women’s jobs" like nursing and teaching, Challenger adds. The result won’t be that women are crowded out of the job market. "The major change will be this: The line between men’s and women’s work will blur and fade."

A job-skills shortage is already reality in the manufacturing industry, and is likely to spread to other industries over the next 10 to 15 years as baby boomers retire. Despite a recession that cost 2 million manufacturing jobs, a recent study by the National Association of Manufacturers warns that "manufacturing could experience a shift from merely having a talent shortage to facing a serious labor crisis."

That’s just manufacturing. Warnings also are forecast about the need for savvy, well-trained workers in job categories such as information technology and the global-energy and electrical-utility industries. Shortages are expected in the global competition for managers, engineers, technicians, skilled craftspeople, and front-line workers, mostly jobs requiring a college degree or technical education. Experts say changes must come on a broad front, from better technology and skills training in secondary schools to aggressive recruitment to a coordinated national workforce policy.

As technology becomes more sophisticated, the ability of those who administer company--and government--computer networks to monitor the comings and goings of workers will grow exponentially. While privacy experts shudder, cameras, keystroke logging, biometric devices, and network monitoring are becoming de rigueur within many organizations.

In the future, the cat-and-mouse war between businesses and crooks will lead to more sophisticated surveillance, the standard use of data encryption, and sophisticated data-mining techniques that spot potential problems and risks by analyzing patterns. "Increasingly, companies are realizing that security is not an option, it’s a basic requirement," says Alan Brill, senior managing director at security consulting firm Kroll Inc., New York.

Not surprisingly, the threat of terrorism is raising the stakes. For example, the U.S. government’s Terrorist Information Awareness program proposes to sift through vast quantities of business and government data to detect suspicious activity. "The dangers are greater than ever," Brill says. "It’s clear we’re living in a new era."

Let’s say you took up the hobby of collecting every annual report from public companies over the last 40 years. You’d be shocked at how little you’d learn about what organizations often say are their "most important assets"--their people.

A few--like the Atlanta Braves, EDS, and Deutsche Bank--have gone out of their way to tell people what their workforces are worth or how much value their training will bring in the long run. In the years to come, however, human resources executives will start to see many more statistics on turnover, absenteeism, and revenue per employee in corporate publications.

"What’s the basis for competition in the 21st century?" asks Thomas P. Flannery, the director of Ernst & Young’s human capital practice. "It’s your ability to think through complex problems, serve the customers better, and be more creative." All these qualities come down to the capabilities of human beings, he says. Wall Street analysts will want to see what corporations know about the people who are winning patents for the company and closing big deals. And when companies show what people are worth, it also reminds shareholders how vulnerable those "important assets" are. Machines stay put, but as Flannery says, "People can walk at any time."

As costs soar and the number of uninsured Americans--both employed and unemployed--rapidly expands, there are about as many predictions about where health care is headed as Carter’s little pills. Employers are paying an increasingly large share of the cost--and so are employees. And almost everyone acknowledges that some dramatic change in health care is likely, perhaps even inevitable, in the next decade.

The country is indeed moving toward some form of universal health care system, says Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He points out that the United States is the only industrialized country where access to health care is dependent on employment. Says Pfeffer, "In other countries, access to health care is a fundamental human right." 

Workforce, June 2003, pp. 43-56 -- Subscribe Now!