Even companies with wellness programs don’t evaluate enough
It’s the first week of January and a law firm in Dartmouth, N.S. is starting the year off right.
Boyne Clarke kicked off 2013 by taking junk food out of the vending machines and replacing it with healthier options, said Wendy Shulman, director of HR at the firm.
“We haven’t had any sugar riots yet, but we’ll see,” she joked.
There’s fruit available on each of the company’s three floors and each staff member was given a free pass to the gym across the street for the first two weeks of January.
It’s part of the company’s health and wellness program, which also includes smoking cessation programs, lunch and learns on health and a yearly wellness subsidy that can go towards whatever the employee chooses: Clothing, gym memberships or diet programs.
In 2012, the Conference Board of Canada released a report on the return on investment for wellness programs, called Making the Business Case for Investments in Workplace Health and Wellness which detailed the company benefits of having a comprehensive wellness program.
Among them: Reduced benefit costs, less absenteeism and higher productivity.
One of the most important things that came out of the study was that very few employers that have wellness programs toevaluate the effectiveness of what they have in place, said Louise Chénier, a research associate with the Conference Board in Ottawa and one of the authors of the study.
It’s not necessarily a new finding, said Chénier, but she stressed the importance of constantly evaluating wellness efforts.
“That’s an issue because without an evaluation process, without evaluating your processes, you can’t make them better,” she said. “You can’t even see if those are the right programs to present to your workforce.”
The study found about one-third of employers measure program outcomes, but very few employers, less than one per cent, analyze the ROI of wellness programs in a rigorous way.
Part of the reason few employers evaluate what they have in place is because there are many barriers to assessment, she said.
Employers often don’t even know where to start in terms of evaluating the wellness programs they already have in place, she said.
Often the programs that are in place are not comprehensive enough and don’t address the specific needs of the workforce, said Chénier.
So how should a company evaluate wellness programs? Participation and satisfaction rates are a good place to start and should be measured after wellness initiative, she said.
“Are employees actually participating in your programs? And are they satisfied with the programs that you’re offering? Because if they are not participating or if they are not satisfied when they are participating you are not going to have an impact,” she said.
Starting up a wellness program
If a company isn’t ready to evaluate the ROI on its wellness program — because they don’t have one yet — the first step is to start.
“The first thing to do is definitely look at your actual workforce,” said Chénier. “A lot of employers don’t look at what the health status of their workforce is. So what are the health issues in your workforce?”
A great place to start is by having employees do a health risk assessment, which are usually available for free through benefits programs, Chénier said.
Even a workforce survey to see what wellness programs areas employees are interested in is a good start for employers who may not be able to do a health risk assessment, she said.
Lori Casselman, assistant vice-president of health and wellness at Sun Life in Toronto, said her company starts the process of implementing a wellness program by showing CEOs the benefits data for their workplace.
Sun Life will look at costs such as prescription drug utilization, short-and long-term disability, attendance numbers and percentage of smokers in the workplace population if that data is available.
Management buy-in
Not all companies have the benefit of management buy-in to the benefits of wellness programs like Boyne Clarke does.
Shulman and her team haven’t had to sell wellness to their bosses, it was already on management’s radar, she said.
“We are in the enviable situation of having the firm’s support,” she said.
But some management teams are going to want a cost-benefit analysis before starting a new program.
“Its funny because everybody wants to talk about ROI, the return on investment, and that’s a bit of a slippery slope and from a wellness professional perspective its a sore spot,” said Linda Lewis-Daly, a workplace wellness consultant based in Toronto.
The ROI focus often comes from organizations with a leadership that has not completely bought into prevention, she said.
Organizations often contact Lewis-Daly because they have already identified a particular need or interest or see specific need in the corporation based on their benefits usage, so they already know where the return on investment should be seen if they implement a program.
But if management buy-in isn’t that easy, Lewis-Daly suggests another option to present to higher-ups.
“I would like to introduce the concept of the cost of doing nothing,” said Lewis-Daly. “I think whatever you invest in workplace wellness you will get back to some degree.”
Employers may not see the savings immediately, it may take time for behaviours in the workplace to change, but those benefits will be there, she said.
“Start small, but just start,” she said.
There will soon be more data to show management the benefits of starting.
To prove there is return on investment in wellness programs, Sun Life is embarking on a two year study in partnership with Western University’s Richard Ivey School of Business based in London, Ont., said Casselman.
The study kicked off in January 2013 and will last two years. Preliminary results are likely to be released in the fourth quarter of this year, she said.
“There isn’t a lot of reliable, published research in this space.”
