Insıde HR Tech
By Steve Boese/Inside HR Tech Columnist
Making Wellness Serious and Fun
It’s no secret that employee
benefits have risen to the top
or near the top of most HR
leaders’ priority lists. Costs
to organizations for employee
medical coverage continue
to climb—with double-digit
premium increases seemingly
the norm.
Recent developments and
uncertainty arising from the
Affordable Care Act have only
ratcheted up the pressure and
heightened the challenge. Like
it or not, you as an HR leader
and your organization are
probably going to spend more
time on benefits for the rest of
2013 and certainly in 2014 as
the effects of the ACA unfold.
The ACA might be a
confusing jumble of new rules
and requirements and we
don’t really know what it will
mean to our organizations yet,
but for most of us, we can be
pretty confident about a few
things in this morass.
Chiefly, we know that, if
the majority of our workforces
did just a little bit more to try
and improve their health, if
fewer employees smoked or if
a few more bicycled to work
instead of driving, lots of good
things would result. Employee
absenteeism would be
reduced, medical costs would
decrease and people would
just generally feel better—
likely leading to better, more
fun and potentially more
productive workplaces. But
just because it seems obvious
and kind of simple, that
doesn’t mean it’s easy—for
HR or for individuals.
Not surprisingly, new
technologies aimed at helping
organizations meet these
challenges are emerging.
I recently talked with one
of these solution providers,
Virgin HeathMiles, about
the role of technology in
driving behavior change
and increasing employee
connection and engagement.
Virgin offers organizations
tools to conduct companywide
fitness and wellness
challenges, a portal for
information sharing and
employee tracking of their
individual progress toward
their goals, and accessibility
from any device an employee
has at any time.
Despite the cool new
tools, the “stickiest” part of
a solution such as Virgin
HealthMiles’ might be the
social component—the
element that makes someone
who might not feel up to
exercising or climbing the
stairs feel like they’re not alone
in their struggle. The solution
is built for intra- and even
intercompany contests, and
when I spoke with executives
at Virgin, they told me that the
social aspect of the technology
often proves to be what drives
participation rates for this kind
of a solution.
Steve Boese is a co-chair
of HRE’s HR Technology®
Conference (www.
hrtechconference.com) and a
technology editor for HRE. He
can be emailed at sboese@lrp.
com.
Benefıts
By Carol Harnett/Benefits Columnist
I made what I would call a brilliant mistake several years ago that ransformed how I
view health and wellness. Many healthcare
forecasters project that, if Americans simply ate
better, exercised more, drank less and didn’t
smoke, we could reduce chronic disease and
healthcare costs by 75 percent.
So, many of us—myself included—spent
a lot of time speaking and writing about
the potential impact of behavior change on
healthcare costs in general and employer-
related health and productivity costs
specifically.
A few years ago, several employee-benefits-
consulting groups took me—and the insurance
company for which I worked—at our collective
word. They proposed an arrangement whereby
the benefits consultants would implement state-
of-the-art health-management and wellness
programs with selected employers in exchange
for discounts from my company on short- and
long-term disability insurance rates.
If you want to capture an insurance
company’s attention, ask them for a discount.
Before we agreed to the arrangement, we
negotiated an actuarial exercise in which we
studied the impact of the proposed wellness
programs on disability incidence. What we
found was an enormous disappointment for
all: The wellness programs had absolutely no
impact on employee-disability incidence.
Our disappointment in the study’s outcomes
allowed us to move for ward and test a separate
hypothesis we had kicked around for about a
decade.
Fortune magazine listed a number of our
employer clients on the 100 Best Companies to
Work For ranking every year. We knew from
our research that many of these companies
reported lower healthcare costs than those
A Brilliant Mistake
competitors that did not make the list. The
theory we decided to test was that these
top-ranked companies would also have
lower disability incidence rates than similar
companies we insured.
We first completed a cursory study of the
companies of interest compared with our book
of business. The results caught our attention.
The Fortune-selected employers exhibited
disability rates that were 50 percent lower than
our book of business. Our second and third
studies were more rigorous and the overall
trend held up. The outcome was a decision that
we could offer any employer on the Fortune
100 list (that was not experience-rated) a
10-percent discount on its disability rates.
All of us involved in this research believed
our mistake in overvaluing the potential
impact of wellness programs on employee
disability and absence rates led us to a larger
realization. Employee satisfaction—what
some label as happiness—had a statistically
significant impact on employee absence.
My belief coming from my “brilliant
mistake” is that, if HR executives invested
more time in the classic principles of good
HR leadership, companies could potentially
have a greater impact on employee health and
productivity than they could implementing
any wellness program.
Is employee satisfaction that results
from a worker’s relationship with his or her
supervisor one of the holy grails behind
employee health and performance? And, if
HR leaders could improve this variable, would
the results outperform health, wellness and
prevention programs?
My experience tells me yes.
Carol Harnett, an expert in the field
of employee benefits, can be emailed at
caharnett@aol.com.
