How Corporate Wellness Programs Help Your Bottom Line

Health Benefits for Workplace

You cannot wave a magic wand and instantly transform everyone on your staff into a healthy individual. If you currently offer health benefits at your workplace, it’s a smart place to start because it will ensure that your employees don’t put off seeking care until they get very ill.

However, you are likely aware of the limitations of what doctors can do to advance general wellness. (Trust us, even the physicians are annoyed.) Most of the time, when your employees go to the doctor, it’s for serious or evident issues; nevertheless, they quickly forget the doctor’s recommendations for ongoing behavioral or lifestyle modifications. In fact, some people might postpone making significant lifestyle changes simply because medicines like high blood pressure medications are readily available.

However, you’ve got a benefit in this game: As an employer, you have access to your employees in a way that hardly anybody else does. Your staff members might put away their newspapers, ignore their mothers or spouses, and only go to the doctor if problems become unbearable. However, it’s tougher to tune you out. You can utilize your special access to your employees to share health information and foster a healthy company culture through business emails, memos, or meetings.

Due to all of these factors, many employers in India now — nearly 80% of them, according to a recent count — are implementing innovative strategies to support employee health and employee wellbeing. Many instances of workplace wellness initiatives have been highlighted in the media and news publications like ET in India which have a branded initiative called – India’s Best Places to Work. Businesses now provide for their employees on-site health screenings, exercise gear, and meditation classes, help them replace junk food with healthy options in employee cafeterias, reward staff with bonuses for lowering their cholesterol or weight, pay for smoking cessation and other treatment programs, and much more.

The main concept is to provide a carefully curated menu of fitness and behavioral activities, as well as some instruction and pointers toward more specialized health treatments or programs, in order to address your employees’ most urgent health requirements.

But before we get there, let’s quickly discuss the likely outcomes of employee wellness programs. Over time, a strong, thorough workplace wellness program might result in the following advantages:

• Fewer absences
• More productivity on the job
• Higher employee happiness, and Greater worker retention
• Less money will be spent on health insurance

Lets go into more detail about why achieving all above four benefits is doable and worthwhile:

Lower Absence Rate

One thing is certain according to science: people who are physically well end up taking fewer sick days. Employers have been able to significantly lower absenteeism thanks to workplace wellness programs. Just encouraging people to exercise can have a significant impact: Persons who consistently engage in moderate exercise miss 18% fewer days at work, whereas people who engage in vigorous exercise miss 32% fewer days at work.

Spending less of your allowed sick time is not the be all and end all. Sure, employees with limited sick leave are more inclined to report to work regardless of how they are feeling, but this only encourages presenteeism.

Of course, you won’t notice a difference if your workplace’s policy is to combine paid time off (PTO) with vacation time, which is becoming more and more prevalent among American firms. But at least they’ll be having more fun on their days off, and maybe they’ll return calm, renewed, and prepared to get back to work.

Increased Productivity At Work

All the research points to employee productivity as the area where workplace health initiatives pay off most. This makes sense when you realize that practically any worker can achieve some improvements in overall health and fitness, regardless of whether they are at risk for developing major medical illnesses. Better health also leads to more energy and productivity. According to 61% of CFOs polled in a 2002 study by the Integrated Benefits Institute, there is a “strong correlation” between employee health and employee productivity.

If your workers were more fit and healthy, just think of what a useful and perhaps even enjoyable workplace you could have. According to a study from Australia, productive employees are 3.1 times more likely to be in good health. Employees who are in good health not only perform better at work but also recover more quickly from illnesses and injuries. Perhaps you can avoid needing to hire more employees to make up for the unproductive and unhealthful ones.

Numbers by themselves can never fully tell the story. Most likely, your employees don’t work alone; instead, they collaborate in teams, provide one another advice on projects, or simply talk at the cafetaria and water cooler. Each employee has worth that goes far beyond the results of their workday. The morale, motivation, and productivity of the entire workplace can be increased by a worker with a pleasant attitude, a healthy physical condition, and optimal physical and mental effort.

Employee Contentment And Retention

Ask any CEO to list the secrets to their company’s success, and keeping the best performing individuals on staff would likely rank high, if not first. The advantages of retaining a person with years of expertise and experience may be enormous, given the cost of hiring and training a new employee. Unfortunately, the workers you want to keep the most will always have the best possibilities to go on to a position with greater health benefits or a less stressful, more efficient work environment.

You may believe that your top performers already take good care of their health on their own, without your assistance. That, though, would miss some of the points.

Will a top employee be content (to use an extreme example) dealing with the illness, depression, and sluggishness of their less healthy peers while carrying the extra weight for a sick workforce? Most likely not.

On the other hand, research has demonstrated that workplace health initiatives can foster vital interpersonal connections among staff members. Your staff members are most likely already developing networks of coworker friendships or mutual aid.

It won’t take them long to begin influencing one another’s health behaviors. For example, they could exercise together or compete to consume five servings of fruit and vegetables every day.

Small and medium-sized organizations with wellness programs such as regular yoga classes at the workplace or weekly Zumba© dance sessions routinely receive positive feedback from staff members who say they are inspired to work more and perform better. Managers claim that wellness initiatives boost employee morale, which may be due to the fact that their staff members are feeling better overall and perceive that their employer cares about them as individuals.

Lower Costs For Health Insurance

The expenses of health insurance and workers’ compensation insurance have been dramatically reduced for many firms who have implemented workplace health promotion and wellness programs, with some studies finding reductions of up to 30%.

However, the majority of experts conclude that not every firm should anticipate seeing spectacular improvements and that lower health care expenses shouldn’t be your main driving force for implementing a workplace wellness program. For instance, your health insurance provider won’t just say, “Oh, they’ve begun a wellness program, let’s cut their prices.”

The underwriting process, which determines rates, considers a wide range of factors, including the average age of your employees and the price of providing healthcare. However, in the long run, having a healthier workforce may help your company reduce its insurance costs and workers’ compensation claims.

Based on wellness initiatives, there may be a trend toward even greater potential savings — or at the very least, minimal rate hikes.

Health plans might start pressuring employers to implement more wellness initiatives at work. Some insurers are beginning to concur that it will be worthwhile if they establish a standard list of five or six requirements that employers must meet in order to either be permitted to purchase a different or better health plan or receive a rate discount — possibly an exercise or smoking cessation program or requiring employees to complete screenings or health risk assessments.

The likelihood of savings is high because wellness initiatives may also help reduce workers’ compensation costs.

Workers’ compensation insurers are examining how wellness programs may enhance employees’ physical preparedness, stress-reduction techniques, and levels of presenteeism — improving factors that may all potentially lessen workplace accidents.

A fit person is less prone to sustain a back or wrist injury. In an factory setting or even an office setting, a person who effectively handles their stress is less likely to become disoriented, cut their finger, or suffer another injury. Therefore, it makes intuitive sense that a wellness program, in addition to more traditional safety initiatives, might help lower the number of workers’ compensation claims.

It’s possible to develop a successful wellness program without providing health insurance. Offering health benefits to your employees is a good idea because they need access to quality healthcare to stay healthy. But even if offering health insurance is out of your price range, you may still make a significant contribution to employee wellness. In fact, if your employees are responsible for paying for their own medical insurance, they have a stake in being healthy to keep their costs low.

All Said And Done

Budgeting for employee wellness programs could appear unimportant in comparison to other projects with a stronger connection to revenue development. Nevertheless, investing in the well-being of your staff will yield an almost instant return in the form of a happier, healthier, and more effective workforce.

Employee Wellness at Forever Living, Mumbai

Forever Living – the American health and wellness products company has recently started yoga at the workplace with our yoga and wellness instructor Esha Hans. Watch some photos and a Facebook Live video below from a recent session conducted at the Forever Living Mumbai office situated in Bandra and watch how our trainer Esha makes employees stretch, loosen up and destress!

Facebook Live Video of Office Yoga @ Forever Living