Healthy employees can lead to a healthy—and wealthy—organization. At Benefits Canada’s Healthy Outcomes Conference in June, plan sponsors and industry experts came together to focus on connecting their bottom line with wellness and benefits programs.
HR trend reports show that employee engagement remains a top priority for HR professionals. The need to ensure that employees who are at work are really at work (mentally, that is) is an ongoing issue that organizations face as they ponder the costs of lost productivity due to absenteeism and presenteeism.
Canadian employees significantly underestimate their personal health risks, which underscores the need for targeted wellness programs in the workplace, according to a study.
How are employers promoting wellness at their companies? Here are just a few examples.
Independent Health, located in Buffalo, New York, is the first health plan in New York State to introduce money-back rewards for buying fresh fruits and vegetables. The benefit will be available beginning January 1, 2014.
Novus Health is expanding into the United States with the opening of a new client services and business development office in Los Angeles.
The role of wellness in the Canadian workplace has been increasingly embraced by employers as a key piece of their total health management strategy. Since its emergence, we’ve seen organizations move from offering their employees flu shot clinics and walking clubs, to having on-site chronic disease management programs to help keep employees productive, present and adherent to treatment.
Sometimes, an organization is very clear on its communications objectives: to educate, heighten awareness, modify behaviours, reduce confusion and put out a call to action. But it takes a keen sensitivity to one’s employees to know how to reach them in order to achieve those objectives.
Organizations are facing benefits plan cost increases, which are driven by healthcare inflation, increased utilization, and an aging workforce with rising health and societal responsibility pressures and challenges. Benefits plan sponsors intuitively understand that health and wellness initiatives should lead to more effective management of employee support programs and will positively impact employees’ productivity. Unfortunately, concrete documented evidence of return on investment (ROI) for wellness initiatives undertaken by benefits plan sponsors has been relatively rare in Canada.
Smoking bans on all company property both indoors and outdoors should be a visible part of a comprehensive non-smoking policy in Canadian workplaces, according to a report.