How to Navigate a Consolidating Wellness Market
Original post benefitnews.com
The corporate wellness industry is growing up. And with maturity comes mergers, acquisitions and a flurry of opportunities that can lead to advances in technology and innovation.
Eventually.
Today, the landscape is confusing. Especially for HR and benefits buyers charged with navigating it. Here’s why:
● Large wellness providers are merging with each other to get bigger.
● Aggressive funding rounds are pressuring companies to innovate and grow quickly to meet investor expectations.
● Large wellness providers are acquiring niche solutions to market.
● Providers are building functionalities that go beyond traditional wellness program capabilities.
Corporate wellness certainly isn’t the first HR category to see wild fluctuation periods. All technology markets move through cyclical waves of change, which follow a surprisingly consistent cadence:
● A period of initial growth. Companies launch to compete with one another with similar solution sets, vying for popularity and mind- and market-share.
● A period of growth stymies. Growth hits a standstill due to economic conditions or market saturation.
● A period of consolidation. Larger players acquire market-share and technology enhancements through partnerships and mergers.
The HR world saw this cycle play out with integrated talent management systems in the early 2000s.
Back then, many different providers sold recruiting, performance management and learning technologies. Hundreds in each category competed with one another, and dozens attracted significant funding to try to dominate the market.
In 2007, the talent management market hit its peak. Companies consolidated, some went out of business, and eventually, we were left with a few dominant providers — SAP, Oracle and IBM.
What did these leaders do right during the industry’s tremendous growth cycle? They mastered their core platform capability before moving on to the next stage of an integrated platform.
So SuccessFactors, now a part of SAP, hitched its wagon to performance management and built a complete vision before expanding its talent management offering. Taleo (now with Oracle) and Kenexa (now with IBM) did the same with recruiting and learning, respectively.
Other talent management providers jumped on the integration bandwagon too early. They tried to cover everything ─ but weren’t good at anything. They couldn’t differentiate themselves in a crowded, shrinking market. Most were shut down or acquired.
I don’t know if corporate wellness will follow this exact path. But the history of enterprise technology indicates an inevitable tipping point. Here are my predictions for what’s to come:
1. Consolidation isn’t going away. It’s clear we’re in a phase of consolidation. Larger companies and private equity buyout firms are acquiring smaller companies, and we expect even more mergers and acquisitions to close the capabilities gap across wellness solutions.
2. The pressure’s on for heavily venture-capital-backed firms. Investors see a ticking clock in front of them. Many want their payoff, and they want it fast. The period of market consolidation doesn’t last forever — and the opportunity to quickly expand to get bought is often made at the expense of product stability, support and internal innovation. Exit pressure increases later in the life of a venture fund as well (for all but the most long-term investors).
3. Providers will jump into unfamiliar waters. Companies with niche offerings will try new things. Recognition providers might add well-being and learning services, and performance companies might try to add analytics tools. But merging different companies, cultures, customer-facing teams and approaches can be difficult and time-consuming, and potentially confusing for employees. Even when providers acquire companies that already specialize in purely complementary capabilities, the devil is in the details. Every acquisition takes time to integrate, and every new feature set takes time to develop.
4. Buyers will be frustrated with all of it. If you’re looking for stability and measured outcomes, then the wrong provider can be a nightmare of new account representatives, technology change and product difficulties. Corporate wellness as a category has room to grow into solutions that embrace the whole employee. Choose wisely.
Three things to focus on
It’s not an easy time to choose a long-term wellness partner. But buyers can take precautions to avoid getting swept into the carnage of acquisitions and consolidations. Here are some best practices to follow when you’re purchasing technology in an unsteady environment:
1. Prioritize your needs as an organization. What major issue is your organization trying to solve? In a crowded market, many challenges and solutions exist ─ but you need to prioritize what’s critical to your success. What is your company trying to achieve in the market? What key capabilities do you need to meet your overarching business goals? What features aren’t as important?
2. Address those needs. This seems obvious, but broader platforms often lure buyers into making decisions that compromise on critical areas. The solution you choose should have excellent bench strength in your highest priority area. For instance, if your main goal is improving employee well-being (and related outcomes), look for a partner that specializes in it ─ not a benefits provider with one small well-being feature.
3. Consider integration capabilities instead of a one-size-fits-all. One positive development of the consolidation phase? Companies want to make it easy for you to connect with different services. This means you don’t need a provider that does everything. Choose the (integration-ready) one you love ─ and tailor it to meet your own unique needs.
Choose technologies that meet your core needs rather than finding a provider that claims to do it all. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Focus on what’s important to your organization:
● What’s going to improve your employee experience the most?
● Who has the capabilities and people to guide you to your desired outcomes?
● What do you need right now, and what can you wait a few years for?
You are the only one who can answer these questions for your organization. When you do, you’ll find the corporate wellness provider that aligns best with your business strategy – and your employees’ needs.
Top healthcare benefit trends to watch
Original post benefitsnews.com
The number of employers offering a healthy living/incentive program grew in 2015, and is one of several trends to watch as the year 2016 unfolds, analysts say.
Plan design changes and programs such as incentive and wellness were of increasing interest to employers last year and most “continue to turn to their brokers and consultants to learn more about new health plan benefit designs and distribution models,” says Tiffany Wirth, executive director of the Healthcare Trends Institute.
“Helping employees better understand the value of provided benefits and making cost-conscious benefit decisions continues to remain important to employers,” she says.
The number of employers offering a healthy living/incentive program grew from 29.8% in 2014 to 34.6% in 2015, according to the HTI’s 2015 Healthcare Benefit Trends Benchmark Study.
During a webinar unveiling the results, Wirth said 21.8% of employers are considering such a program and 16.7% are still learning about them. About 1 in 4 employers (24.7%) indicated they weren’t interested in offering such a program.
“We’re starting to see these types of programs take hold as [healthcare] reform is being adopted and companies are pushing employees to understand their decisions, their purchases, and all of the different things that go along with healthcare benefits,” she says.
As part of incentive program tracking, HTI has also been examining what sort of wellness programs companies are implementing, Wirth says.
Almost half (44.6%) offer at least one type of wellness program, the survey found. Thirty-one percent offer biometric screenings and about 30% offer an opportunity for health risk management.
Key differences from the 2014 benchmark study, Wirth says, included the ranking of top benefits offered by employers. The three highest company-offered employee benefits in 2014 (PPO, family plan and prescription drug) continued to rank high in 2015, but dental came in at No. 1 this year, with about 74% of employers offering it.
More than half (52.1%) of respondents said they had some familiarity with defined contribution plans and private exchanges, with the majority of those who indicated they were interested in offering a DCP identifying 2017 as the year they would likely do so.
Wirth says continued interest is growing among employers to learn and understand more about DCPS.
EEOC Issues Proposed Rule on Employer Wellness Programs
Originally posted by Rick Montgomery, JD on April 20, 2015 on thinkhr.com.
On April 20, 2015, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a proposed rule that would amend the regulations and interpretive guidance implementing Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as they relate to employer wellness programs. The proposed rule amends the ADA regulations to provide guidance on the extent to which employers may use incentives to encourage employees to participate in wellness programs that include disability-related inquiries and/or medical examinations. The EEOC will accept public comments on the proposed rule until June 19, 2015, following which final regulations will be issued.
The EEOC has released a series of 10 questions and answers which outline the issues at hand, define terms involved in the proposed rule, and explain how wellness programs interact with regulations such as the ADA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and other federal nondiscrimination laws.
Employers do not have to comply with the proposed rule at this time; however, until final regulations are formulated, employers should take a careful look at their wellness programs to ensure compliance with the ADA, as many of the requirements set forth in the proposed rule are already requirements under the law.
At this time, employers should not:
- Require employees to participate in a wellness program.
- Deny health insurance to employees who do not participate in a wellness program.
- Take any adverse employment action or retaliate against, interfere with, coerce, or intimidate employees who do not participate in wellness programs or who do not achieve certain health outcomes.
Further, employers should ensure that all employees are equally able to participate in any wellness programs or incentives offered, and that those employees needing reasonable accommodations to participate are offered those accommodations.
How to make wellness work
Originally posted May 29, 2014 by Andy Stonehouse on https://ebn.benefitnews.com.
For all the talk of the benefits of onsite wellness programs – in both the healthier, more productive lives of workers, as well as the presumed employer cost savings as sickness, injury and absenteeism are reduced – are American companies really getting the most out of their wellness dollars?
A new EBN survey, which drew responses from 245 benefits managers, administrators and human resources professionals, finds that wellness programs work best when employee incentives – be they cash or decreases to insurance premiums (or penalties for not achieving goals) – are clearly established. But meeting wellness objectives, be they cutting costs, increasing employee productivity or lowering on-the-job absences, remains a struggle, and companies who’ve implemented wellness programs say they sometimes find it difficult to justify the investment in those costly ventures.
Wellness programs, as a result, are still on the “to do” list of many respondents; only 44% are currently running a wellness initiative, with more than a third either thinking about or almost ready to roll out a program of their own. A lack of benefits/HR managerial resources and the challenging nature of showing the financial justification for wellness’s costs are the biggest factors holding them back, according to the survey.
Among those who’ve actively adopted a wellness program at their workplace, the results are largely positive, but not breathtaking. Just 5% of respondents say they’ve completely met their top objectives – cost savings and cost avoidance – though 53% say they’ve “somewhat” met those goals and a third say they’ve achieved “a little” of that goal. The same goes for other top goals – improving employee health and longevity, and enhancing employee engagement and participation – with respondents reporting only mid-level success, at best.
Respondents said they personally had far less interest in using wellness to increase employee retention and satisfaction, reduce absences or increase overall productivity. “Turnover is an issue in our industry; spending money on wellness for people that leave hurts the ROI on wellness,” one respondent added.
What works
In order to make wellness successful, those who’ve set up and retained a program say that it’s critically important to offer easy-to-use wellness educational tools for employees. This is a much easier task to accomplish, they say, than objectives such as transforming their workplace culture into one centered on wellness, or getting employees engaged in wellness offerings.
But there are still plenty of success stories, and examples of what helps to get workers fully engaged. “A culture of wellness and associate programs requires a long-term commitment,” one respondent noted. “We are beginning to see results after only two years in effect.” Most of those with positive wellness outcomes say they’ve used incentives to help push participation in their programs, with almost half offering cash or gift cards and 40% offering health insurance premium discounts … or penalties, on the other side of the coin, for employees who do not take part.
Survey participants offered their opinions on the vendors that they work with; according to the results, the top five wellness partners include Cigna Behavioral Health, WebMD Health Services, HumanaVitality, OptumHealth Care Solutions and Alere Health Improvement. The various units of Blue Cross/Blue Shield are also important strategic partners for many companies. Interestingly enough, 19% of those respondents with wellness plans in place admitted they did not work with a specific wellness vendor at all, opting to do the heavy lifting of implementing and running a wellness program on their own.
Wellness’ saturation also appears to be directly connected both to the type and the size of business respondents are engaged in. While office-based workplaces such as banking and financial services, plus health care – rife with potential health issues among sedentary workers – make up the largest percentage of those taking the survey, manufacturing and industrial worksites are also important settings for wellness programs. More than 65% of our respondents work with employee populations of 1,000 or fewer, almost a third in companies less than 100.
The survey’s results echo the experiences of benefits managers such as Katie Sens, director of human resources for Chemprene, a small manufacturing firm in New York’s Hudson Valley. Sens oversees the wellbeing of about 115 employees, and says that like many workplaces across the country, those involved in daily physical labor out on the manufacturing floor tend to be in better shape than the company’s desk-bound workers.
“We’ve tried to create interest by offering gym memberships, but we had problems with our health insurance providing coverage,” she says. “But we’ve been inspired by our boss, who walks every day and has lost about 75 pounds in the process, so we worked out another arrangement with Gold’s Gym – we’ll pay if they go eight times a month.” In addition to standard wellness pushes such as smoking cessation and flu shots, Sens says her company has partnered with online weight loss and nutrition and lifestyle coaching provider Retrofit, paying half of employees’ costs up front and hosting group programs.
“Our boss is aboard, I’m in it, as are several other managers and their sponsors, hoping to lead by example,” she says. “Now I’m getting a lot more questions about the program, and certainly raising awareness.” As for ROI on Chemprene’s wellness efforts, Sens says the company is hoping to achieve a better bottom line for its health insurance costs, which she and management will be keeping a close eye on as the wellness programs develop; their efforts are too early to tell, she admits.
Offerings matter
Employee participation in our survey respondents’ wellness efforts also greatly varies by the complexity of the programs they offered. Overall, the highest participation was experienced in safety and injury prevention programs – more than half of respondents said the majority of their workers took part, followed by health screenings (including biometric tests, flu shots, health risk assessments and on-site health clinics), with at least 50% of employees taking part. Significantly less participation was noted in awareness, education and support programs, stress relief efforts and disease management programs; in workplaces where direct physical activities were offered, the majority of respondents said that less than 50% of their workers took part.
Teisha Haynes, global benefits supervisor for international oilfield service company Halliburton, continues to work to find productive and cost-efficient wellness options for her 35,000 U.S. employees and 75,000 dependents, spread out at 104 worksites across the country. Haynes says that the teamwork atmosphere among the company’s largely laboring workforce can actually be beneficial, when it comes to getting workers more actively engaged in physical activity.
“We realize that our employees like to work in teams and compete, so we have implemented a number of physical activity challenges that allow them to work together and compete against other business units for not only bragging rights, but a donation to the charity their select,” she says. “We have had participation from the executives, all the way down.”
For Halliburton, many larger worksites now include an on-location physical activity coordinator (“wellness champions”) to help provide compatible, healthy exercise, even for those employees not necessarily dragging pipes on an oil rig. Those coordinators are tasked with figuring out what works best in their local environment – and what vendors can provide the best services at annual wellness fairs, be they biometric screenings, heart health clinics, mammograms, or exercise programs (Red Wing Shoes, for instance, has helped with foot health assessments at various locations).
Do the efforts pay off? Haynes says measuring the investment in wellness can be a challenge, though the company is moving to quantify things more clearly by comparing claims numbers and data from health risk assessments. “We get some positive signs, like ‘employees are feeling better,’ but that produces pretty fuzzy numbers, so we’re thinking of working with Truven’s health analytics database to get more solid results,” she says.
Among those companies that are reluctant to implement a wellness program, common impediments emerge: 46% say that wellness is simply not a priority for them now, while 20% of others say that they lack the staff resources and time to help establish a wellness system. More often than not, they admit they are “still questioning whether we need one or not,” as well. As a result, a quarter of those still on the fence about wellness say it will be at least a year, if not two, before they’re able to get underway with a full wellness push.
Those who have yet to start up their own wellness program say they are primarily frustrated by a lack of time and resources to do so, as well as the financial costs involved in both start-up and administration of a wellness offering. “Our company is just a year old so it takes time to find out what employees want and will participate in,” one respondent wrote. Others said that their upper management has yet to be convinced of the merits of a wellness program; quantifiying the potential savings, whether they be direct cost reductions or overall decreases in sick leave, remains the biggest stumbling block.
Those cost-related fears may not be unfounded: 40% of survey participants who formerly had a wellness program but have abandoned those efforts say they did so primarily for financial reasons, as well as out of concerns of issues of employee privacy or anti-discrimination laws. Some changed health care providers or lost a partnership with their wellness vendor, as well.
As a more successful alternative, some survey respondents say they have worked to establish very specific objectives for their wellness programs, working with wellness vendors to find the right fit. Dale Johnson, employee benefits manager for the city of Cary, N.C., says that involved developing an innovative functional movement screening – not unlike those used in professional sports – to better understand the musculoskeletal strains of an aging workforce engaged in medium to heavy physical work, and use exercise and better day-to-day techniques to reduce strain and injuries. Johnson says the holistic program, developed with the input of research from nearby Duke University and initially implemented with the city’s public safety employees, resulted in a tangible negative trend in health care utilization and costs.
“The jury’s still out on the long-term impacts of the program, but we’re now considering expanding it to our employees in public works and utilities,” Johnson says. If this variation of a wellness program can significantly cut costs, Johnson says it could be a very positive sign that focused wellness efforts pay off.
Do You Have an Employee Wellness Plan?
Originally posted May 19, 2014 by Bridget Miller on https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com.
Employee wellness plans have been gaining popularity in recent years, and with good reason: they can benefit both employees and employers. An employee wellness program is simply a program that intends to promote the health and well-being of employees. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but the key is that the program has a goal of improving employee health.
The benefits for employees are fairly obvious:
- The potential for improved health
- Support in the form of encouragement, goals, or even team activities
- A focus on healthier choices
- Maybe a reduction in cost
But the benefits for employers are sometimes overlooked. This is unfortunate because employers actually stand to benefit a great deal as well. Here are just a few examples:
- Improved employee health can mean fewer absences for illness and higher employee productivity levels.
- Investing in employees can improve employee morale. Over time, this can even reduce turnover.
- Healthier employees often cost less to insure over time.
These benefits are there regardless of company size or industry. Every organization can benefit.
Starting an Employee Wellness Program
Starting an employee wellness program can be quite simple. (Of course, it can be quite involved too, depending on how far the employer wants to go with the program.) Here are some examples of easy ways to get started focusing on employee health:
- Provide health screenings. Examples include blood pressure or Body Mass Index (BMI) screenings.
- Provide food fact sheets. Simply having access to more information can allow employees to make healthier choices.
- Start employee fitness groups. Examples include walking groups or even sport team creation to compete in local leagues.
- Conduct individual health-risk assessments (i.e., questionnaires that help assess overall health and risk factors at an individual level). These are usually administered by a third party and come with personalized reports on health risk factors.
- Give away health-related promotional items. Examples include pedometers or water bottles.
- Remove on-site food that does not promote good health; replace it with healthier options. This can be implemented in many areas, such as vending machines, cafeterias, catering for meetings, break room options, etc.
- Provide information on the health benefits of quitting smoking.
- Distribute other wellness-oriented communications, such as health-related newsletters.
- Conduct training sessions on health or wellness-related topics.
- Allow longer lunch breaks to give time for exercise.
- Provide discounts on health insurance or otherwise reduce the cost.
Of course, employee wellness programs can also be implemented on a much broader scale, too. Here are some more in-depth examples:
- Adding an on-site fitness center or partnering with a nearby fitness center to offer free employee memberships; and
- Sponsoring employee contests. (Be sure to follow the latest guidelines under the Affordable Care Act when it comes to participation and rewards.)
Be aware that there are some rules governing wellness programs, particularly when a bonus or discount is based on an actual change in health status (e.g., lower blood pressure or cholesterol) as opposed to simply participating in an activity (e.g., a health screening).
No matter what type of employee wellness programs you implement, be sure to have a plan to communicate the program details to employees. Getting employees excited and involved is the first step to gaining the benefits. Focus on the benefits for the employees in all communications and make it easy to participate, even offering incentives where appropriate.
Employers want workers to be accountable for their own health: Survey
Originally posted May 19, 2014 by Stephanie Goldberg on www.businessinsurance.com.
DALLAS — Employers are implementing healthy lifestyle programs and activities for workers and developing workplace cultures in which employees are responsible for their own health, Julie Stone, leader of business process benefits, health and group benefits at Towers Watson & Co., said of the new health care landscape.
“The commitment to workforce health is clear, and that translates in many different ways in organizations — from building a culture … in your worksite, onsite health care, to just how you design your plans and what you incent people to do or not do,” Ms. Stone said Monday during a session on navigating health care reform at WorldatWork's 2014 Total Rewards Conference in Dallas.
Towers Watson and the National Business Group on Health asked employers what their top priorities were via the 2014 “Employer Survey on Purchasing Value in Health Care,” released in March. Ms. Stone, who is based in Parsippany, New Jersey, said developing a workplace culture where employees feel personally accountable for their health was at the top of employers' list.
Healthy workers tend to be more productive, present and fully functioning, which has a direct link to the employer's bottom line, Ms. Stone said.
“The healthier your workforce, the lower your cost,” she said. “It's another way of reducing your spend before the excise tax without having to take away from a benefit design perspective.”
She said it's important for employers to build a strategy around the health care reform law's 40% excise tax on high-cost health coverage that takes effect in 2018.
“About 60% of the organizations that we've surveyed and work with are likely to hit the excise tax if there aren't changes made to the costs of benefits,” Ms. Stone said, adding that 71% of employers surveyed expect to change their health plans in preparation for the excise tax.
Employers’ Corporate Wellness Incentives Climb to New Heights
Originally posted February 20, 2014 by Michael Giardina on https://ebn.benefitnews.com
With a reported 15% increase in wellness incentive spending within their health care plans, corporate employers have their sights set on improving their workforce’s overall health in 2014 through wellness programs for both employees and their significant others, according to a new survey from Fidelity Investments and the National Business Group on Health.
The fifth annual study finds that corporate employers expect to spend an average of $594 per employee on wellness-based incentives, an increase from 2013’s $521 average. For smaller employers with less than 5,000 employees, the employee average reached $595, a $151 increase from levels reported in 2013.
Approximately 95% of employers plan to offer some sort of health improvement program, highlighting that benefit plan sponsors have labeled wellness programs as an integral part of their benefits program in this post-Affordable Care Act world. Also, 74% note that they offer incentives for employee participation, which is a 12% dip from last year.
“While the use and measurement of corporate wellness programs continue to evolve, it has become clear that many employers understand the value of – and are committed to – wellness-based incentives in their company health plan,” says Robert Kennedy, health and welfare practice leader with Fidelity’s benefits consulting business.
The most popular programs include lifestyle management courses that focus on physical activity, weight and stress management. Disease and care management programs – which look to manage chronic health conditions – were also favored.
Doling out for spouses/HSAs
From the 2014 survey, Fidelity and NBGH found that nearly four out of 10 employers disclosed that their plan will include options for spouses or domestic partners. Last year, results highlighted that 54% set out plans to expand wellness-based incentives to include dependents and roughly half said they were including spouses and dependents in wellness communications.
Average payouts for spouse and domestic partners are expected to reach $530 in 2014. Employers with more than 20,000 employees expect to spend an average of $611 on this group.
Other incentives such as heath savings accounts and flexible spending accounts were expected to incentivize more employees use. Roughly 34% list that they plant to contribute to these accounts in order to bolster disease or care management engagement and 30% hope these deposits will add to weight management programs participation.
“Based on the feedback from this year’s survey respondents, it’s obvious that wellness programs not only play a key role in many corporate health care plans today, but they’ll continue to be an integral part of corporate benefit programs in the future,” says Helen Darling, the retiring president and CEO of NBGH.
Obesity drives up workers’ comp claims
Originally posted November 21, 2013 by Dan Cook on https://www.benefitspro.com
Obese employees make more workers’ comp claims, and they make costlier ones than non-obese employees.
That conclusion was drawn by Lockton Companies based on its review of several independent studies on employees with high health risks (including obesity, smoking, high blood pressure and limited physical activity) and workers’ comp claims.
The Kansas City, Mo., provider of risk management, insurance, and employee benefits consulting services cites three studies that, when taken together, paint a troubling picture, especially of the impact overweight workers can have on workers’ comp claims.
Lockton says that wellness programs, properly designed and implemented, can address this situation by helping obese workers lose weight. But Lockton doesn’t offer any stats on how effective wellness programs are overall in combating obesity.
Still, the studies cited offer food for thought.
The University of Michigan Health Management Research Center studied Xerox Corp. employees and confirmed that “employees with high health risks tended to have the highest workers’ compensation costs.”
Xerox was an early proponent of wellness plans. The UM followed employees for four years and reported that “workers’ compensation costs increased for those employees whose health risks were increasing or high already (e.g., smoking, physical inactivity, hypertension, high cholesterol, and life/job dissatisfaction).”
Lockton also refers to a 2010 study by the National Council on Compensation Insurance which more closely correlated obesity with workers’ comp claims.
The data “showed that workers’ compensation claims that included the obesity comorbidity diagnosis incurred significantly higher medical costs than comparable claims without the high health risk. NCCI also discovered that claims for employees identified
as “obese” almost tripled from 2000 to 2009 from 2.4 percent to 6.6 percent,” Lockton said.
Lockton then cites a more recent NCCI study testing whether “the lost-time duration of obese claimants is a multiple of non-obese claimants.”
It was.
“According to their findings, obese claimants incurred medical costs 6.8 times higher than non-obese (as defined by body mass index), were twice as likely to file a claim and an indemnity duration that averaged about 13 times higher,” Lockton summarized.
What Lockton suggests is that companies take the following steps to empower their wellness plans to really help employees address chronic health issues:
- Proactively engage HR and employee benefits to better understand the scope and breadth of existing corporate wellness initiatives, as well as how the organization is tracking the effectiveness of those programs.
- Determine how your insurer and/or third party administrator is capturing data on comorbid factors in workers’ compensation claim files and how that information can be incorporated into effective analytics.
- Collaborate with internal safety, health, and environment professionals (if applicable) to discover how best to integrate employee wellness with workplace safety.
“Effective corporate wellness initiatives have shown to be successful in not only reducing the duration of lost-time workers' compensation claims,” said Lockton's Michal Gnatek, author of the report, “but also in promoting healthy behaviors that potentially inhibit unsafe or inattentive workplace behavior.
“Risk managers and claims professionals should be adding employee wellness to the available arsenal of weapons to combat increasing claims.”
Survey: Employees still under-informed on ACA, wellness
Originally posted November 8, 2013 by Tristan Lejeune on ebn.benefitnews.com
Only 15.1% of workers at large employers say they are “knowledgeable” or “very knowledgeable” about health care reform and the Affordable Care Act’s public exchanges, and nearly one in five can’t say for sure if their company has a wellness program or not, according a recent survey. The poll’s results, released this month, speak to a population that has confidence in the communication efforts of their benefits administrators, and that points out some serious shortfalls in that communication.
The survey, which spoke with 400 employees at companies with north of 2,000 each, found that only 29.5% could correctly identify times when they can make changes to their health plans, like open enrollment, according to the Jellyvison Labs. Jellyvision, which created ALEX, a virtual employee benefits counselor, says all but one of the employers involved in the survey offer health insurance, but employees still demonstrate large education gaps on their own benefits.
More than 90% of surveyed workers say it’s at least “somewhat important” to understand ACA and its implications, but less than a fifth actually consider themselves knowledgeable. The good news is employee confidence in their employers’ ability to communicate the necessary information is high: nearly 80% think their companies can properly bring them up to speed, and more than one in three rate their confidence levels on this point at eight or higher on a 10-point scale.
Some 77.6% of those polled agree that it is at least “somewhat important” for their organizations to offer a wellness program, but almost one-fifth don’t know with any certainty whether or not their company does so.
“One of the most important things we learned from this data,” says Josh Fosburg, vice president of business development for the Jellyvision Lab, “is employees aren’t getting everything they need to know about their employers’ wellness programs and other benefits. For instance, nearly half of employees in our survey think they have to pay something in order to take advantage of the wellness programming that will help them manage their weight, stay on top of their prescribed medications, or cease smoking. That’s bananas.”
Jellyvision says employers need to “up their communications game” in order to help employees take advantage of everything included in their benefits offerings.
The Evil Presence that Lurks in the Workplace at Halloween
Originally posted by Denise Rand on https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com
Halloween can be a very scary time of the year for HR pros! An evil presence is out to kill the efforts being put into company wellness programs—Halloween candy. Yes, it seems like Halloween becomes the end of year "kickoff party" for calorie-, sugar-, and fat-filled holiday celebrations in workplaces, sabotaging companies’ health efforts.
And besides candy, it’s a safe bet there will be plenty of orange-colored cakes, cupcakes, donuts, and even orange bagels within easy reach. However, there are some proactive steps the HR department can take to keep your employees from falling victim to a sugar rush and extra holiday pounds.
Health experts Dian Griesel, PhD, and Tom Griesel, authors of the book The TurboCharged Mind (January 2012, BSH), offer the following tips to avoid a crash:
- Make an office resolution to keep out of the office all the extra candy that the kids brought home or that didn’t go to the trick-or-treaters.
- Start the day by brewing a pot of pumpkin-flavored coffee or tea. This should help get coworkers in the spirit of things.
- Bring in a variety of fruit for morning break and colored veggies for enjoyment at lunch or afternoon break.
- Take a lunchtime walk to see the change of foliage and get some fresh autumn air.
- If your “office bakers” must produce Halloween treats, have them try making a gluten-free, low-, or sugar-free pumpkin pie. There are even many recipes for crust-less, no-shortening versions that make things even more healthful—and easy.