Posts belonging to Category health

Generally speaking, we all know how so-called coercive wellness programs work. The essential idea is to reward employees—or impose consequences on them, depending on how you look at it—for adopting certain healthier behaviors.

A common example is what’s sometimes known as the “smoker’s surcharge.” Companies hit tobacco-using employees with a higher insurance premium, ostensibly encouraging them to stop smoking, be healthier and more productive, and cut down on healthcare costs.

Such programs may be well-intentioned, but aren’t always embraced by the workforce.

Comcast Corp., however, seems to have found a way to get its nearly 120,000 employees on board with its efforts to stub out cigarettes.

At GlobalFit’s 7^th Annual Innovations in Wellness Summit, held yesterday in Philadelphia—just blocks from the cable giant’s headquarters—Lauren Gemberling, wellness coordinator with Comcast, shared some details on how they’re doing it.

In July of this year, the company begins charging a $25 per-paycheck premium to employees who smoke. This past November, Comcast employees were asked to indicate whether they used tobacco, and if so, whether they planned to enroll in the company’s smoking cessation program by July.

Planning to enroll and actually doing it are two different things, of course. But to date, 8,430 Comcast employees have done just that, and the overall results have been extremely positive, says Gemberling.

She showed the audience some examples of Comcast employees saying so themselves, through video testimonials the company has collected since November.

For example, one employee recalled his reservations upon learning of the company’s implementation of the premium, questioning his employer’s role in his personal health decisions.

In the four months since, however, he says he’s joined the program, quit smoking, gotten a gym membership, lost weight and bought a new car—which may have been made easier with the $600 he estimates he’s saved per month since giving up cigarettes.

Such examples aside, any organization introducing such a program is bound to see resistance from some workers who feel their employers are crossing a boundary, not to mention unfairly taking money out of their pockets.

Gemberling, however, says they’ve gotten largely “great feedback” from the workforce at Comcast. A key, she told the audience, is not to spring such changes on the workforce. Give employees plenty of time to process the premium change and consider their options, she said, and assure them the program’s overarching goal is to offer an incentive—and assistance—that helps them kick a dangerous and difficult-to-break habit.

“This is the first time I’ve rolled out a program where employees have said, ‘Thank you. I’ve been trying to change this behavior on my own for years, without success. I’m thankful for the help.’”

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George Costanza would love working for Nationwide Planning Associates Inc.

There, the Seinfeld slacker supreme—who once hired a carpenter to craft a secret napping area under his desk in the New York Yankees front office—would actually be encouraged to catch a few winks during the workday.

Indeed, employees at the investment firm’s Paramus, N.J. headquarters can sign up for blocks of time—20 minutes, twice weekly—in a remodeled closet that now serves as the company’s “rejuvenation center,” complete with a recliner, fountain and bamboo rug.

The company designed the area for its 20 employees to use for taking quick naps, with the idea of helping them ultimately be more productive on the job. Just don’t call it a nap room.

“We call it the ‘rejuvenation center’ to put a more positive spin on it,” James Colleary, a compliance principal at Nationwide Planning, recently told NBC Today. “People associate napping with laziness.”

According to the NBC piece, Colleary urged company executives to create the sleeping space, and leadership has since seen happier and more productive employees.

Nationwide Planning could be on to something, according to Steven Feinsilver, director of the Mount Sinai Center for Sleep Medicine in New York. He told Today:

We all get sleepy in the mid-afternoon, and it looks like our body clocks are winding down a little bit then. If you need an extra two hours of sleep, getting a half-an-hour is good, and it helps.”

Arianna Huffington seems to be of the same mind. The Huffington Post president and editor-in-chief had two nap rooms installed in the news website’s office about two years ago. Companies such as Google and Proctor & Gamble, however, have done her one better, purchasing “EnergyPods,” chairs specifically designed for napping at work. The chairs, which resemble chaise lounges, can cost anywhere from $8,900 to $12,900.

That’s a hefty price tag for a place where employees spend 20 minutes recharging their batteries. But for workers and their employers, the payoff from quick snoozes may prove to be well worth it, says Mike Karalewich, Nationwide Planning Associates chief compliance officer.

The nap for me, personally speaking, really allows me to approach the second half of the day with a lot more force,” Karalewich told Today. “I firmly believe that napping breaks will become the new coffee break eventually.”

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It’s pretty much impossible to listen in on a benefits panel without hearing the term ROI.  Maybe a lot more than once.

Certainly, as might be expected, that was the case during the opening panel at this year’s 2013 Health & Productivity Forum at the Fairmont in Dallas. (The event is jointly sponsored by the Integrated Benefits Institute and the National Business Coalition on Health.)

I strongly suspect it won’t be the last time the topic of ROI will be raised before the Forum concludes on Wed.

The one-hour panel, featuring three benefit leaders and one CEO (Sam Gilliland, chairman and CEO of Sabre Holdings), covered quite a bit of ground, including some of the ways benefit leaders are wrestling with metrics.

When benefits people are asked to identify the key metrics that affect business performance, IBI President Tom Parry said they respond that they don’t know, almost without exception. (Parry and NBCH President and CEO Andrew Webber jointly moderated the panel.)

Parry suggested that benefit leaders need to start to close the gap between what they are doing and what business leaders are doing, remembering as they do that they’re competing for scarce dollars.

During the panel, R. J. Paczkowski, director of benefits for Capital One, pointed out that his benefits team regularly uses pilots to test the effectiveness of new wellness initiatives; just as the company wouldn’t think of launching a new credit card without first doing a pilot.

Paczkowski added that Capital One has established a “health score” so business leaders would have some insight into the health of their respective organizations.

Because many initiatives involve changing behaviors, Greyhound Director of HR Tyneeta Morris said that “sometimes it could be two or three years down the road [before a company might see a return].”

On occasion, she added, some expenses may initially go up.

Chris McSwain, vice president of U.S. benefits at Walmart, told those attending that he believes benefits professionals have an unprecedented opportunity to change the conversation from one that’s focused on “cost” to one that’s focused on “investment directly tied to the business.”

At Walmart, he said, the benefits team has worked closely with the operations side of the business to better understand how they measure the performance of their businesses and determine how its work fits into that.

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Figured flu season makes this infographic from Best Choice Reviews a viable post, even though much of the information is stuff you already know about germs at work.

Like just how germy your mouse, phone and keyboard are. Or just how much rhinovirus sits on surfaces in restrooms and lunchrooms. Or just how filthy co-workers’ hands really are (indeed, the graphic — based on 5,000 swabs of office surfaces and corresponding interviews with several thousand of the folks who touch them — shows 15 percent of workers avoid shaking hands to avoid germs … wonder how that plays out in sales meetings??).

Surprising as some of the new stats are (79 percent of vending buttons are dirty, 1 in 3 office workers have witnessed people leaving restrooms without washing their hands, 53 percent of workers don’t wash their hands after exchanging money), there’s not much more you can do with them beyond communicating the importance of hand-sanitization and making sure dispensers are strategically placed throughout your company.

What I found more troubling were Best Choice’s findings that 72 percent of Americans typically go to work when they’re sick and 55 percent of workers feel guilty when they call in sick.

I wonder how many HR departments out there are seriously and aggressivley communicating the importance of staying home when you don’t feel well, considering all the work that needs to get done today with fewer resources and less money. And surely, it doesn’t stop there. Training managers and supervisors to respond to “I’m sick and staying home today” calls – or ”I’m sick but I’ll be there around noon” calls – so health is being promoted just as much as, or even more than, productivity has to be the next and necessary step.

Considering how prevalent and scary the currently spreading flu bug is, this may be something worth thinking harder about and taking up with your powers that be.

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About a month ago, during one of the numerous, hour-long meetings we have here at HRE, several of my colleagues decided they would stand up for the entire meeting rather than sit at the rectangular conference-room table. Soon they were joined by everyone else in the room (except me, because I’m a self-styled iconoclast and OK, I’m lazy). At the end of the meeting, the standees remarked how good they felt, how much energy they had … yada-yada-yada. Curiously, however, the stand-up meeting scenario has not been repeated since.

The employees at ProMedica will need to be a hardier bunch. The Toledo, Ohio-based healthcare provider has just implemented 425 “sit-stand workstations” for employees whose jobs involve working at a computer all day. The workstations include height-adjustible desks that make it easier to work while standing up. ProMedica purchased the workstations after a 12-week study it conducted last year at its offices involving 26 desk-bound employees, who were given sit-stand workstations and asked to stand for at least one hour during each workday. At the study’s conclusion, 85 percent of the participants said they would recommend the workstation to others.

There’s no denying that sitting all day can have some serious health repercussions over a lifetime–after all, our bodies weren’t designed for us to be sedentary.  Despite my love of sitting while working, I can’t ignore recent research, such as a report from the Centers for Disease Control which finds that alternating sitting and standing at work reduces upper back and neck pain, and leads to improvement in mood and less depression and confusion. A number of options are available for companies that want to encourage their employees to stand more while working, including desks that allow one to walk while working. Of course, true behavior change is much more likely to come about when it’s modeled by an organization’s leaders, and — judging by the enthusiasm among members of the C-suite for extreme endurance events such as the Ironman competitions, as documented by this BusinessWeek story — they just may set the standard for the rest of us.

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A reassuring moment occurred at Tuesday’s CHRO panel discussion on “Benefits in a Time of Uncertainty” during the 15th annual HR Technology^® Conference in Chicago.

To a person, every panelist — Artell Smith, CHRO at Aon Hewitt; Brian Johnson, executive vice president of HR at Fidelity Investments; Norbert Englert, CHRO at Mercer; Gail McKee, CHRO at Towers Watson; and Tom Maddison, corporate senior vice president and CHRO at Xerox Corp. — agreed their companies would not be casting their employees off, across the board, into healthcare exchanges under the impending healthcare-reform implementation.

And this despite prevailing research showing between 2 percent and 20 percent of employers are expecting to drop employer-sponsored benefits and release their employees to the exchange system come reform-enforcement time, said Mark Stelzner, principal and founder of Inflexion Advisors, and moderator of the HR Technology^® Conference session.

Nevertheless, also to a person, panelists shared new strategies and approaches they’re taking to help their workers embrace the coming healthcare-change monsoon.

“My charge,” said Smith, “is to help employees see what they can take charge of in this uncertainty.”

Or, as Maddison agreed, “Uncertainty is an enabler of change.”

All discussed their slow-but-proven successes in consumer-driven-healthcare and health-savings-account initiatives.  They also elaborated on some of the bumps in the roads.

Are employees ready for the added responsibilities in determining their own care, adopting healthier lifestyle choices and taking additional steps to reduce costs?

“Yes,” said McKee, “they are ready to take control of their care. We’re already seeing results in dropped emergency-room visits [and other indicators], but it takes time … and it takes identifying and going after those pockets of resistance [that emerge]. It has to evolve.”

Making the successful transition from top-down to employee-owned healthcare, here and abroad, will also require more energy on the part of employers in setting up action plans for each individual. “We need more energy around the specifics,” said Maddison.

Englert agreed: “The way people decide is usually not as rational as we would like. It’s not easy to get people to really spend the time to manage health and cost consequences. We can’t just say, ‘Here is it, go for it and good luck with it.’ We need to provide guidelines and pointers.”

Johnson concurred as well. “Anything we can do to ensure, simplify, personalize, streamline, use vehicles of education — such as role-modeling — that we’ve never used before,” he said, “we should be doing.”

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The latest survey from the National Business Group on Health shows that, although healthcare-benefits costs are expected to rise another 7 percent in 2013, that’s still no higher that the increase projected for this year and smaller than employers experienced in the previous three years.

Perhaps part of employers’ abilities to hold the line on cost increases rests on the fact that, according to the NBGH, they “are eyeing a variety of cost-control measures, including asking workers to pay a greater portion of premiums [at the same time that they're] boosting financial rewards to engage workers in healthy lifestyles.”

Additionally, 40 percent of the 82 largest U.S.-based corporations surveyed by the Washington-based organization plan to increase in-network deductibles while roughly one-third plan to increase out-of-network deductibles (33 percent) and out-of-pocket maximums (32 percent).

Nevertheless, despite all these numbers and what they tell us about what’s going up and what’s being maintained a little better, costs increases are still cost increases, says Helen Darling, NBGH president and CEO. As she puts it:

Rising healthcare costs continue to plague employers at an alarming rate. Although cost increases have stabilized somewhat, they are still on a higher base from last year and are simply not sustainable, especially when our nation’s economy and workers’ wages are virtually flat and everybody is struggling.”

In this news analysis by Michael J. O’Brien that ran on HREOnline^™ in mid-July, Darling went even further in making these cost reports a clarion call for HR leaders to ignore the headlines and do everything in their power to not just reign costs in, but perhaps even turn them around. As she said then:

HR leaders need to keep the pressure on to control healthcare-cost increases, increase consumerism and individual accountability, use all of the tools and resources available to empower consumers to be wiser purchasers and support them to choose healthier lifestyles, which will – in turn – reduce the need for healthcare.

“They should also back physicians who are working to reduce overuse and harm [including death] of medical procedures and tests that add no clinical value to patients, but cost billions of dollars.”

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A somewhat surprising release showed up on my screen today suggesting physicians themselves could be helping employers’ bottom lines by engaging more in the overall wellness and healthcare-cost-cutting movement.

Huh, and here I thought they were all ready doing that.

But au contraire, says Dallas-based Medical Home Exchange.

Granted, MHE is a vendor that would love to help you through this process, but what it’s telling us about the need for a much stronger relationship between physicians and facilities, and between physicians and patients, is worth sharing here. The main contention in its release is that the disruption of these relationships ”has created a dynamic of runaway costs, disengaged patients and frustrated doctors, all of which contribute to poor health outcomes.”

By using MHE technology that changes physicians’ behaviors and simplifies the healthcare process by connecting them with more relevant patient and cost data, MHE says, “employers [could] realize 25 percent to 30 percent reductions over a three-year period by treating healthcare as a supply chain and taking control of the physician and facility relationship.”

In essence, MHE claims to be able to help employers change the behavior of doctors to focus less on billing codes that have nothing to do with wellness, and to become much more fluent in what their treatments actually cost.

In the words of MHE CEO Glenn Hibler, the system as it exists today insulates doctors from the true cost of healthcare and doesn’t incorporate “understanding the full continuum and cost of healthcare [into] their compensation or focus.” He goes on:

It’s a crazy way to handle a company’s third largest expense. Everything that is needed to improve health and reduce costs already exists. There are many effective tools [already on the market] such as health-risk assessments, biometrics, nurse coaching, health and disease management, claims data, pharmacy data, and so on … .

The problem is, the one person who needs this information the most is typically out of the loop. Physicians today do not have the right information, the right tools nor the right incentive to manage a company’s healthcare supply chain, but they are the ones who have the best shot at making a significant impact. Doctors today are like airline pilots flying big, expensive planes with no radar. It’s ugly and costly.”

 

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Came across an interesting perspective on treating workplace stress globally. Funny how invisible those obvious things you failed to contemplate before are until they’re brought to your attention.

In this recently published book, Work Stress and Coping in the Era of Globalization (here’s the release about it), three co-authors — James C. Segovis, Rabi S. Bhagat and Terry A. Nelson — raise the point that treating stress in today’s globalized marketplace has become a subject of increasing importance, particularly in the way it demands a more “holistic” approach, one less influenced by Western culture.

In the individualistic culture of the United States and other Western countries, “we see stress as ‘your fault, you should be stronger … you should cope better,’ ” Segovis says. According to him, westerners tend to treat symptoms of stress with exercises, relaxation techniques or medication rather than seeking an organizational int5ervention that deals with the actual causes of stress.

However, he says, 75 percent of the world’s labor force is collectivistic, and in such societies, stress is experienced and managed differently: One’s family, religion and spirituality play far more significant roles and one’s identity and resources for coping with stress depend on one’s community.

Western-style stress management, he says, has mixed results in such cultures, which means the ones crafting such programs — often HR professionals – need to be designing them differently. (The book purportedly offers research and suggestions for doing this.)

So … the need for cultural sensitization in today’s global-business spread now encompasses stress and how it’s treated and managed — in addition to language and religion and all the other aspects of cultural differences we’ve heard about and covered.

But of course. Why didn’t I think of that?

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I was reminded more than a few times at this year’s SHRM that employers are clearly worried about losing their top talent.

Yesterday, I stumbled across further proof: an overflow area, where audio and PPT for a session titled “Succession Management and High Potentials: How to Connect Your Most Critical Leadership Programs” were “streamed” to attendees sitting outside the packed workshop room. Best for HR professionals to be prepared, no?

Then, later in the day, I sat down with executives from Aflac, who shared with me the findings of their most recent workforce study, the 2012 Aflac WorkForces Report.

In the survey of 6,100 employees, Aflac found that nearly half of the workers (49 percent) questioned said they were  somewhat likely to look for a new job in the next 12 months; 27 percent indicated they were very or extremely likely.

The findings raise the question, “What are employers doing to retain workers?” says Audrey Boone Tillman, executive vice president of corporate services for Aflac.

Not surprisingly—especially when you consider Aflac happens to be in the business of providing group benefits—the study also shows a clear correlation between satisfaction with benefits and satisfaction overall. Seventy-three percent of the respondents who indicated they were extremely or very satisfied with their benefits were very satisfied with their jobs.

When employees were asked what their employers could do to retain them, nearly half (49 percent) said “improve my benefits,” according to Tillman.

Despite this, employee benefits hasn’t really budged all that much since the economy went south late last decade. Proof of that could be found in SHRM’s 2012 Employee Benefits Survey, which was released yesterday. The study of 550 HR professionals revealed that employer spending remained pretty much stable this year. Organizations spent 19 percent of an employee’s annual salary on voluntary benefits, 18 percent on mandatory benefits and 10 percent on pay for time employees didn’t work.

Companies, however, are apparently making an investment when it comes to initiatives aimed at promoting healthier behaviors among its employees, the SHRM survey found. For example, the percent of employers offering health and lifestyle coaching jumped from 33 percent in 2008 to 45 percent in 2012. Rewards and bonuses for completing a health and wellness program, meanwhile, increased from 23 percent to 35 percent over that same period. No question these are pretty significant changes.

Of course, no one knows what might lie ahead. But it’s safe to assume we’ll begin to see more movement on other benefit fronts as employers start to see more of their talent head for the doors.

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