Will healthier workers make for a better workplace?

By Gina Smith


Earning for a living is the primary purpose of employment for us. We all have different jobs. Some of us work indoors; some of us work out of doors. Most of us work a nine to five. Some work in the day, some work at night. Irrespective of the job conditions and timing it is an accepted fact that the health of the employee is very important factor.

The big question arises, is it cost effective?

An example is the multinational Amway, which employs 3900 locals. The company says that for every dollar it spends on fitness for employees, it gets two dollars back in savings. How do they justify that? One visible result was that the medical claim of the persons who took part in the fitness program went down by 8 percent. Many of them become slimmer and fitter. One woman who works for Amway lost 85 pounds in 18 months. This has given her an abundance of energy which naturally had reflected in quality work and increased production for the company. It is an recognized fact that such workforce oriented fitness program take as long as three years to start giving returns. They say it takes time for employees to learn new behaviors.

On the reverse side of things, those employees how do not participate in some sort of program to improve their health up their healthy costs by close to 23 percent.

Another company, Flexco, located in Illinois, has established a program to encourage employees to eat better and exercise. Because the program was so successful, this Grand Rapids company was able to move to a high-deductible health program cutting annual premium costs by $100,000. The bottom line is that this program is very effective. In addition, the company helps pay the employee deductibles.

As an incentive, the employees earn wellness points when they join this program. This will help them reduce their expenditure on health costs by about 850 dollars. This is an important insensitive in getting employees to buy in to the program. This would also ensure that the employee joins it willingly and not by way of any force.

This program can be incorporated in the overall strategy of the firm. This integration helps the company overall. They have healthy people who are willing to stay healthy and combine that with the goals of the company. Furthermore, it also enhances the working atmosphere of the company.

Often employees are unhappy when they are asked to undergo tests for this, but it often helps to diagnose certain deceases before they become bad.

These two examples show that it makes a lot of sense to encourage employees to stay healthy, whether you do it through the company or you encourage them to do it on their own. Other companies have had success giving their employees free membership to weight watchers online. The examples shows that you can significantly lower the bottom line when you have healthier employees. This also makes the workplace more congenial.




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