Shape Up Your Company With a Wellness Program

It was more than a decade ago, but it might as well have been last year, when many other small businesses were caught in the same painful pinch.  The leaders at Highsmith, a Wisconsin-based marketer of supplies and equipment to schools and libraries, encountered the worst kind of sticker shock: a 53% rise in the company's health-insurance premiums.

Though the spike in 1990 was caused by some unusual claims by just a handful of employees, management saw it as a harbinger of future problems unless steps were taken to keep a lid on costs and claims. "We decided we would manage health care and not let it manage us," says Bill Herman, Highsmith's vice president for human resources.

So what did Herman and his colleagues do? They launched a workplace wellness program that eventually would address the physical and emotional health of about 200 employees and have a dramatic impact on the company's productivity and bottom line.

 Wellness on the bottom line

Any business big or small that wants to supercharge its workplace would be well-advised to pay attention to the Highsmith experience. This is true even for small businesses where health insurance isn't an issue — because none is offered — but where absenteeism and productivity are.

"If a Fortune 500 company has 150 people a day out sick, there still are thousands of workers to cover for them," says David Hunnicutt, president of the Wellness Councils of America (WELCOA), a nonprofit organization that shows member companies how wellness programs can enhance profitability. "But if you're a small company with six employees, and two are out, you've just lost 33% of your work force."

The good news is that small businesses have an inherent advantage when it comes to instituting effective wellness programs: The smaller the employee count, the easier it is to change workplace culture. And there are plenty of cost-effective measures that are affordable for even the smallest company.

Like everything else, there's a right way and a wrong to institute a wellness program, and I'll get into that in a minute. First, though, if you're inclined to doubt the efficacy of such programs, consider the impact it has had at Highsmith.

 · The strategy has helped the company keep a tight lid on health-insurance costs, with its premium rising just 3.1% in 2003 and 2.9% in 2002.

· Turnover also has slowed dramatically. In 2001, while the average employer in Wisconsin's Madison-Milwaukee corridor was losing 22% of its workforce, turnover at Highsmith was just 8.7%.

· As for the company's workers' compensation costs, Herman says, "they haven't just slowed down, they've actually gone down. It's significantly less than what we were paying in the early '90s."

 For more options on making wellness your bottom line, call your Corporate Health Consultant today.  Or watch for “Seven Steps to Workplace Wellness” in the March 2009 newsletter.

 Philipp Harper, 2008 Microsoft Corporation.  1/1/2009

  2009 Healthy Tips!

1. Try 2 weeks without sweets. It's amazing how your cravings vanish.

2. Eat more fruit. A person who gets enough fruit in his diet doesn't have a raging sweet tooth.

3. Eat your sweets, just eat them smart! Carve out about 150 calories per day for your favorite sweet. That amounts to about an ounce of chocolate, half a modest slice of cake, or 1/2 cup of regular ice cream.

4. Try these smart little sweets: sugar-free hot cocoa, frozen red grapes, fudgsicles, sugar-free gum, Nutri-Grain chocolate fudge twists, Tootsie Rolls, and hard candy.

   By Top Dietitians of the American Dietetic Association for Prevention, 2007