Health/productivity management

When you feel healthy and energetic
at work, aren’t you more productive? Don’t you think the same can be said of your employees? Isn’t one of
your biggest challenges, then, providing a
means for employees to stay healthy or —
at worst — avoiding prolonged absences
from work?

Smart Business talked to Terry
Garrison, a San Francisco-based senior
consultant with Watson Wyatt, a global
human capital and financial management
consulting firm, about ways that organizations can engage their employees in integrated health improvement and productivity management. Incorporating accountability empowers employees and
minimizes the impact of absenteeism.

How can employers engage their employees
to become accountable for improving and
managing their health?

Most organizations believe they have the
power to improve overall employee health
and productivity and have, in recent years,
provided employees with tools for making
health care choices. Although employees
seem to appreciate these services and
tools, it does not always result in their
improved health and work productivity.
What is required is an integrated strategy
that raises accountability and effectiveness
of all stakeholders.

Incentive plans that simply reward people for improving their health often do not
result in long-lasting behavior changes or
lower health costs. Alternatively, employees are more likely to adopt long-term
behavior change if they have a personal
relationship with, and are accountable to,
someone who can reinforce their self-determined plan for behavior change.

Integrated strategy starts by identifying individual employees with health
risks through Health Risk Assessments
(HRA) and reviewing medical and pharmacy claims data. Those employees can
then be offered the services of a health
coach who can offer personalized education about their specific health risks
and help tailor a plan to address those
risks.

Are there points where health management
and absence management intersect that can
improve overall program effectiveness?

Our research shows that integrating
health and productivity best practices can
result in desired health management outcomes and lower health care and wage
replacement costs associated with
absence. This is where the health coach is
again effective by becoming a single point
of access to support absence- and productivity-related programs.

Working in tandem with appropriate incentives can enable and support the desired
behavior from employees. For example, we
know that depression frequently occurs with
a variety of physical illnesses and impairments, such as chronic lower back pain, and
that people who suffer from chronic or catastrophic health issues are 60 percent more
likely to be depressed and have 40 percent
higher health care costs. A well-trained
health coach can identify confusion and non-compliant behavior; identify whether a root
cause is depression; educate the employee
on the effects of depression and various
treatment options available under the
employer’s benefit program; and refer him or
her to appropriate mental health resources.

How can internal workplace and HR policy
and practices promote health and productivity?

In recent years, employers have become
better in managing employee health productivity, but they still have room for improvement. A key component is making managers
and supervisors accountable for supporting
company health care strategy. To accomplish
this, however, you have to have incentives for
managers to care about whether people are
at work, as well as training and tools to help
them follow through on policies.

How does vendor management fit into this
new equation?

Many national health and disability carriers
use a variety of subcontractors. The result is
that some organizations have up to 10 vendors addressing various components of their
health and productivity programming.

We recognize that it is rare for employers
to find one or even two vendors that meet
best practice for all their health-management and absence-management program
needs. To address this, we endorse annual
summits that engage vendors to discuss the
various functions they perform and then
collaboratively develop a plan to align and
optimize roles and processes. Undoubtedly,
organizations that establish strategies to
evaluate the effectiveness of their entire
vendor continuum will fare better at managing their health and productivity outcomes.

What kind of results will a company that follows these suggestions expect to see immediately and down the road?

Research shows that successful health-and productivity-management programs
produce a positive return on investment of
3:1 to 7:1. Typically, it takes 18 to 24 months
to see the first positive returns, though some
components may produce in a shorter time
frame.

TERRY GARRISON is a senior health and productivity management consultant in the Group Health Care Practice at Watson
Wyatt’s San Francisco office. Reach her at (415) 733-4404 or
[email protected].