SuperManager Podcast: Does Your Office Promote Positive Employee Health and Wellness?
Christine: You’re listening to SuperManager, the podcast for people who manage people and business with ideas, trends and expert interviews to help you be a SuperManager.
Sam: Alright, so we are talking about wellness and wellness programs in the office and I have my regular partners in Zen with me, the HR collaboration group. We have…
Tara: Tara Gregor, Breakwell, a workplace wellbeing resource and partner.
Natalie: Natalie Meyer Group, insurance benefits and investments.
Jerry: Jerry Richardson, I’m a lawyer at Evans and Dixon. I work with employers. I help them manage their relationships with their employees through the courtship, the marriage and the divorce.
Rod: Rod McCann, McCann Consulting, dealing with self planted employee benefits, specialize in prescription benefit management.
Sam: And Samantha Naes with CN Video, we do corporate video production, onboarding, training, corporate communication… So we’re talking about wellness I guess at home and in the office. What does that really mean when we talk about wellness? What does that really mean?
Tara: Well I think wellness means a lot of things to a lot of different people. So kind of defining that in the office and for that company or that workplace culture is really the first step because wellness is so broad. Are we talking about financial wellness? Are we talking about physical wellness? Are we talking about emotional wellness? Are we talking about biometrics screenings? So what does that really mean?
Sam: I think, doesn’t it all boil down to physical wellness though? Because if you don’t have financial wellness, that can cause you to not have emotional wellness, and that can cause you to not have physical wellness. So I think they all kind of tie together, don’t they?
Natalie: We have an in house wellness program and I helped start it years ago, and not everyone’s always open to that. But in doing so, I think we found some of the more effective things because you’re not always going to get people to change their whole lifestyle. That’s not possible, as you know, it’s hard to do. So finding the things that can make a difference without having to turn everyone into a marathon runner or everyone you know, doing a Keto diet or is it Paleo Diet or something at that point is so…
Sam: Your state of wellness can really affect your performance in the office and I think everybody to some extent has some issues somewhere. Whether it is things going on emotionally, things going on, financially, things going on, you know with your physical wellness, everybody’s going to have kind of their ups and downs, but all of those can really affect your performance, your safety, the performance of the overall company. And I’m glad to see that more companies are starting to take that into consideration or starting to take it a little bit more seriously. I’ve heard of companies that have real high stress situations that will bring in massage therapists to give shoulder massages and things like that.
Natalie: Over the years we’ve done all of them, weight loss challenges, in house yoga….
Sam: Do a lot of people do those weight loss challenges. Do you get a lot of good responses to those?
Natalie: You know what, I think they’re good for community kind of involvement, and I think do help to change people, especially if you do them in the spring or summer or something like that,
Sam: Because you’ve got like accountability?
Natalie: Right. And people also, it’s a great way for them to sometimes get to know their coworkers. They get the chance to say, Hey, let’s go get lunch or after work or something of that sort. So I think that can be great. But we’ve always found the most effective tool is to always start at least both doing biometric screenings. That’s going to be something if you’re actually trying to drive down costs for healthcare and start actually identifying things, people just knowing their numbers.
Sam: What is a biometric screening and what does it tell you?
Natalie: So you’re going to do things like blood sugar, blood pressure, cholesterol, identify things that could be possible major health risks.
Sam: You wouldn’t do these in the office, right? You would send them to a medical professional or is there a way for you to do this on site? Or how does that,
Natalie: There’s a variety of different ways and I know you help to orchestrate these so maybe if Tara wants to jump in and say,
Tara: So my company does things a little differently. So we actually don’t focus in on the biometric screenings. We bring in programs to the workplace that is employee driven. So we find what the employees really value and then what to focus on. And then we start to build in the mental, physical, emotional, and the social wellbeing of those employees with those programs. So last year I had spent the year, I probably had 300 meetings between employers and employees. And what I noticed was there was a big gap of what wellness and wellbeing programs actually were. So when I talked to the employers, they had talked about we offer all of these things and then that it’s under utilized. So why are we doing this? When I talked to the employees, they had said they didn’t even know half of the benefits were there and they didn’t know why the company was offering those. So is it to drive down healthcare costs? So there was this underlying tone of mistrust or what the agenda was behind it.
Sam: So poor marketing?
Tara: Yes.
Sam: Poor marketing for your wellness program.
Tara: Absolutely. And all those things are great. The biometric screen, great baseline and it serves another purpose. Sure. For the healthcare costs of it. But when we’re talking about that individual wellbeing of those employees, and why is the employer bringing in these programs? Is it just about money? Is it about the bottom line or are they trying to show their employees that they genuinely do care about them as an employee and as a human and as an individual.
Sam: I’ve tried to implement several wellness programs here just because I definitely see the value of it and I’ve had a little bit of a hard time getting started for I think different reasons. I had a company, I used to work for Sigma Aldrich’s, a larger company that I used to work for several years ago and I was talking with a friend of mine that’s still there and asked how things were going and he said, oh, it’s interesting, they just implemented a yoga during lunch program. And I said, that’s weird. And he said, no, not really, because people would come back less tired from lunch and more energized, they’re more productive, it’s healthy. And I was listening to him and then I kind of changed my tune. I thought, what a great idea. We have this big studio upstairs and we’ve got television monitors that we can hook up to the cameras and one of them has a DVD player and I thought, you know what, I’m going to implement yoga at lunch in the studio. And I got some yoga DVDs, and I got some yoga mats, and we’ve got the whole studio open. And I’ve talked with, you know, people that have been here, interns, employees, you know, what do you think? And everyone’s like, yeah, yoga at lunch, that’s great, this is going to be awesome. Nobody’s ever done it. And I like brought in a yoga mat and I’m like, okay, let me show everybody where it is. And I even came up one time at lunch and I turned on the DVD so that it was running. And it’s like a, you know, kind of busy maybe later. So I don’t think it was a marketing thing or, or a suspicion thing. Maybe it was, I don’t want to look silly in front of my coworkers or I’m not sure what the problem was with that, but we weren’t able to successfully launch that.
Tara: Absolutely, and so that is the key point right there. So how do we get people to actually change behaviors so we can give them gym memberships, we can tell them to eat healthier, we can tell them to exercise in the morning, but how do we actually get them to make those changes? So sometimes it is a little handholding and to,
Rod: Where’s the motivation?
Tara: Exactly.
Sam: But define handholding? In my situation, how do I get people up here to do yoga at lunchtime?
Sam: Are you up here doing yoga at lunch?
Sam: I am not.
Natalie: I think the biggest thing is… One of the biggest things with wellness that we found over and over, it starts top down
Tara: Top down.
Natalie: You don’t get that participation from the top down. People don’t think this is something that actually matters or we can get away with not doing it or it’s going to go away next week, something of that sort.
Sam: The funny thing about that is the wellness of management is probably going to cause more of an impact on performance than anything else, because that’s kind of where the problems tend to stem from as well.
Rod: You know, what if you have some type of fundraiser that you want to support and all, you could start it by having a group that would be training for running for a marathon or something like that and so you’ve got x amount that are runners and say, well here, this is a fundraiser we want to support. We’re putting a running team together. Maybe something of that nature as opposed to saying, this is for just to drive down the health care cost.
Sam: I’ve got to, I’ve got to pull Jerry into this just a little bit. I actually brought a bike in. Here in South City, I’m nestled in between several really nice parks and a lot of good bicycle paths and I thought, I’m going to bring a bike in. I can go bike riding at lunchtime, go to one of the nearby parks and I can have it here if an employee wants to go out for a bike ride at lunch, what happens if somebody gets hurt during one of these wellness programs? What if somebody borrows my bike and goes to the park and rides and falls over and injures themselves?
Rod: Or does yoga and gets stuck in the pretzel position?
Sam: Or gets stuck in the pretzel position, yeah.
Jerry: The closer the activity is related to work, the more likely it it’s going to be a workers’ comp claim if they’re injured. So when they’re in your premises at your encouragement doing yoga, and they slip a disc or something, that’s probably a worker’s comp claim right there. The bicycle gets a little more removed, but it’s your bicycle, it’s during the work day and you’ve encouraged the activity. So the claims came out of things like company sponsored softball and so there, there is now in at least the Missouri Workers’ Compensation Act, there is a specific exclusion of things like company sponsored softball teams. So we, you know, we know we can draw the line at these things outside of working hours, but when you start,
Sam: Are you liable? Are you responsible if someone gets injured during company Softball League, is that a worker’s comp,
Jerry: That’s not a workers’ comp claim just because it had been and the legislature, revised the law and said, no it’s not.
Sam: But could you be sued? Could you be responsible?
Jerry: Could you be sued? Anyone can sue you for anything. The likelihood of success is not very good when it’s a voluntary activity on the employees part. And if the employer was requiring people or we’re going to pay you overtime to play softball on our team. Okay, that sounds like work.
Sam: From my perspective, it’s all about what people understand up front. You know mess up being clear and things upfront. So maybe if you are starting one of these programs, being clear about safety and what’s important about safety and you know, what’s your responsibility and not to do stupid things and,
Jerry: Right, well setting the expectations is always the most basic and fundamental thing an employer can do with any activities for employees.
Sam: Right.
Jerry: And then following through with what you said you’re going to do that, those are two cardinal rules.
Sam: That’s your basic onboarding and training.
Jerry: And how you treat people and then they know what to expect in the workplace and it just works so much better than let’s make it up as we go along.
Natalie: In talking all these different aspects of wellness, I think you brought up such a great point cause it’s wellbeing versus wellness programs. A lot of these programs started to reduce healthcare costs, but I think when it was about doing some things that we never did in a workplace before we never walked around the building, we never,
Tara: Weight loss challenges.
Natalie: Exactly. People expanded the idea of wellness into wellbeing and things of okay, what is going to also make people happy? And you know, and that’s a big thing of driving down. Now it’s mental health and that’s can be also a very big cost driver these days. So you seem to do more on both sides of it and,
Tara: Focusing on the happier and healthier employees because we know that the byproduct of that is more productivity, better retention, better attraction of talent. So again, that wellbeing and focusing on the happier and healthier employees, we know that there are 20% more productive if they’re happy.
Rod: Are they still doing like prequalifying or setting up for the wellness programs at all, doing a survey, which is not signed with your name and an anonymous survey as to your lifestyle on some things that you’re doing and what you’re wanting to obtain as a goal for that as well. Maybe because in the past when they saw some of those programs may be identifying some disease management programs to kind of tailor in as well in behind. So how are they handling that identification of those members?
Tara: Absolutely. So on Breakwell’s side of things, we do internal surveys and we do interviews so the employees can see that the employer is hearing them and what they care about and what they value and that’s where we draw the programs from. That way they can stay dynamic and fluid and you kind of always change them with feedback with that. So you’re exactly right.
Sam: On these internal surveys, I’m assuming they’re anonymous, are they very personal? Because earlier Natalie you were kind of talking about from a more medical perspective, blood tests to determine kind of a baseline where we’re at right now and it almost feels like what you could be doing with the survey is determining more the emotional baseline.
Tara: Absolutely. And both of these things go in conjunction with one and the other. So it’s not one or the other. Breakwell’s program would be something complimentary to another type of program because it is focusing on more of the emotional wellbeing.
Sam: You find out what are the most common issues and what are people going through and better way to come up with a program to help people feel better is find out what the problem is in the first place.
Tara: Absolutely. Sometimes the company or the owner of the company, they may think that their employees are going to say one thing, but doing this, these surveys, they end up finding out something totally different. So any money that is invested is deliberate then in these programs.
Sam: What are some of the more interesting things that you found, obviously not mentioning any specific companies or names, but what are some common interesting things that people don’t expect to find that they find from these surveys?
Tara: Everybody thinks that their employees are gonna want chair massage and because, who doesn’t want a massage? But, um, one of the,
Sam: I don’t like strangers touching me.
Tara: So one of the smaller company that I had worked with that was actually the least important thing that the employees wanted. They wanted time management skills. They wanted to learn how to be more efficient. They were stressed about how, how spending their day in emails and getting back to clients. That’s what they struggled with. So that professional development piece is what they want it.
Sam: You’re talking about, in this case, for a wellness program, it’s really bringing in some time management training. That’s what they wanted. There’s not one solution that fits everybody. Right. You know, what is the population of that company? Do they work in an office? You have people that are come to a central place every day, or are they out in the field? Those types of things make a difference in how you’re gonna go about executing these sorts of things. It feels like more and more, a lot of the companies I’m seeing more and more, you’ve got people that are in less of a central location. What are some of the wellness issues that you’re seeing with people that aren’t all coming into the same office and working together?
Tara: Usually there’s a detachment then from the employee and the employer, so the more distance between them, there’s that disconnect there. So how can they bring in some social wellbeing programs to include those people so they don’t have to necessarily be there for their job that day during those hours and they don’t have to pick up a paycheck, but how can they get them to build that relation?
Sam: What’s an example of a social wellbeing program?
Tara: A yoga class.
Sam: So they would all come together for something?
Natalie: Softball…
Tara: A softball team, exactly.
Jerry: You might do training.
Tara: Yes, a training.
Jerry: Any number of work related,
Sam: Time management training. There you go, kill two birds with one stone.
Jerry: Some of the wellness programs would require the employees to essentially provide medical information and so they get regulated under the Americans with disabilities act and also the Genetic Information Nondisclosure Act, GINA. And those programs must be voluntary. There is an exclusion in both of those laws for wellness programs that are voluntary. It’s really up in the air right now to determine what a voluntary program is. The EOC had issued some regulations and they were challenged by AARP, and AARP went into court and the court agreed with AARP. What the program did was that if you got into these programs and if they were involved in medical inquiries about, you know, they did stuff like draw blood, not all those other wonderful things gives you data. Well you had to do that in order to qualify for a 30% discount from your health plan. And so what AARP went in and argued was well that means, they’re going to be some people that can’t afford the health plan unless they give up all of their medical information, and so that’s discrimination. And so the court agreed with that. So right now the EOC regulations are not in effect. And so you just have no way to market… What is voluntary? We know that 30% off of the medical plan is not voluntary, 5% maybe it is, 10% maybe it is.
Sam: And is it really voluntary if you have to choose to give up confidential medical information in order to participate?
Jerry: If your work population is a bunch of investment bankers, maybe 30% sure of, of whatever the healthcare costs is cause the health care, let’s assume it’s 1000 bucks a month. Yeah. But if it’s people that have, shall we say, more normal pay ranges.
Sam: We talked earlier about the different types of wellness, the physical and mental and financial and all the things. What’s the most common problem?
Rod: Probably health, isn’t it? You’ve got unhealthy behaviors. A wellness program may give you some parameters and guidance as to how to get back in shape or at least give you a way to, to step back into it and you’re doing it with other people. So it gives you a support group because usually those that are doing the healthy behaviors, if they’ve got diabetes or they’ve got asthma. If they’re participating in a wellness program, being compliant, then they’re probably going to be more compliant in taking their medications and keeping them out of the emergency room, keep them healthier, keeping the costs down, but also keeping them healthier and productive.
Sam: So other than me getting out there on a yoga mat in the middle of the street, what are other good ways to encourage people to voluntarily participate in these programs?
Rod: Financially? Some employers have said, well, if you participate, and not necessarily just financially, but by discounting their healthcare, but saying here, if you participate in any of these outside program, it would give you a gift card or something go to the movies or go to dinner or do something else.
Sam: Well and if it’s going to improve productivity, then I guess it’s worth it to the employer.
Natalie: Sometimes to the recognition, you know, having contests. Yeah. Letting people win, then they get to be recognized in front of their peers. And maybe the prize is just a gift card or whatever, but it’s something that makes people go, oh, okay. All right. I got recognized today.
Tara: Public shout out.
Natalie: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Sam: Do any of you have any examples of successful wellness programs that you’ve seen or witnessed or been involved in?
Natalie: Absolutely. Yeah. We’ve had people that… Why I say biometric screenings is because people have no clue. Sometimes. Do they have high blood pressure, things of that sort.
Sam: I’d like to know.
Natalie: Yeah, if you don’t have, you know, the need to go to the doctor on a regular basis or maybe it’s just one of those things.
Sam: Is that confidential to the employee though? So like as an employer, if I had someone come in and do this testing just to kind of get a baseline, I don’t see that information correct? That’s strictly for their knowledge?
Natalie: For people conducting or whoever’s running your wellness will contact that individual and let them know, hey, how they doing and may need to go see your doctor soon and here’s what we came up with. You are at high risk and that’s one of those things. We actually did find that someone had very high numbers, very much at risk. They were encouraged to get right to a doctor and sure enough they ended up having to go in for bypass surgery. But had they not, they may not have actually known and ended up having some sort of cardiac event.
Rod: I’ve got a similar example too. They went in and did the biometrics and immediately one of them they called 911.
Sam: Oh wow.
Rod: They took him to the emergency room… he was having a heart attack.
Tara: Good timing.
Sam: But is there a way for the company to use that information? If you’re trying to create a wellness program and you run this test and you find out a high number of employees have a high stress level or high blood pressure, you could use that information to put together a wellness program that benefits the biggest problem within the company. Do you get enough of that information may be confidential, but just numbers.
Natalie: Absolutely. That’s where I say it’s the first thing people should do with a wellness program to kick it off so that way you actually can get a baseline of what the group’s health is. I also do think it company that with surveys to get people’s mental health with it
Tara: And buy in, they want to be a part of creating the program, not just something they’re told to do.
Speaker 2: Maybe do the survey first and then the blood test so that they don’t feel like a lab rat.
Natalie: Absolutely. And again, you know, everyone that does it gets a $10 gift card or we usually tried to do healthy restaurants and stuff like that. So you’re not sending people,
Sam: Come in for your wellness test and we’ll give you a gift card for the cheesecake factory.
Natalie: Exactly.
Sam: And I guess letting people know too, the reasons why you’re doing it because you care about wellness. It’s not… There aren’t any alterior motives or anything like that.
Natalie: You care about your employees. You want them to know that you’re there to actually help them and you want to make it a better place for them to work. But I think accompanying that with other things to bring on mental happiness and you know, more buy into where they work is essential to making all of it work.
Sam: What about emotional wellness programs? Physical, it’s obvious diets and yoga and things like that. Financial, you can bring in financial planners or advisors or whatever. What about emotional support? What kind of programs can you offer for something like that?
Natalie: I think you have one in your lap right now that’s, you know,
Sam: Let the record show for those of you that can’t see, I’ve got Mili is the studio dog we’re a pet friendly studio and she’s sitting in my lap. And she actually, she’s a She-chon, a Shitzu Bichon mix. And they are good emotional support dogs because they’re very good at sensing when someone is feeling stressed and she’ll hop up in your lap and I do find it very relaxing and calming.
Natalie: A lot of people do to have having an animal around. It kind of distresses things.
Sam: That’s funny that I would ask what can you do? And I’ve got a dog,
Natalie: I know, I was like, well one’s sitting right there
Sam: Look down.
Natalie: And we’ve had people, whether it be clients come in and they or people, even prospects have been like, oh well I see you guys have a dog because they see it on the website and it’s amazing how many people it attracts people in. It also lets them know, hey, this is kind of a welcoming environment.
Tara: Also flexibility. I know that’s been a huge topic lately,
Rod: You talking about physical flexibility?
Tara: Not to the yoga flexibility in scheduling or working from home or different things. People are torn and different stages of life, so,
Sam: If somebody has something going on in their life, or a doctor’s appointment, or a sick child or something like that, you need to be able to not have them stressed out about missing work and giving them the time to deal with things like,
Rod: Or if it’s single parent that may have struggles in a time area for the child, so they want to alter that time to come to the work, flex time.
Natalie: Well, that’s the benefits of working in the world who are working today with all the technology. People can work at a lot of different hours and in a lot of different places, so as long as they’re getting their job done,
Rod: Unless you’re building a car.
Natalie: Exactly, exactly. Depending on what you do, obviously, but if you have that flexibility, you work remotely and stuff like that, having that option I believe definitely does help. But then again, I guess it comes back around to then if everybody’s working everywhere else, how do we get everybody to come back together?
Jerry: Certainly can make supervision a challenge and it certainly can end up with productivity issues working remotely. Are you as productive when you’re in the home taking care of your kids while you’re working?
Sam: Now see this sounds like a vicious circle though because we were talking about earlier one of the big problems where people are feeling this disconnect because they’re not in one central location and missing the comradery and working from home and then now we’re saying well for emotional wellness, if you let people be more flexible, let them work from home and take care of their families. So aren’t you like solving one problem and causing another one,
Tara: But there may be parameters on there, so flex time meaning you don’t have to be there right at 8:00 AM you can be there between 8 and 8:30, those types of things, so,
Sam: Just don’t stress out in traffic to get there on time.
Tara: Exactly.
Jerry: To me that’s not truly flex time. That’s adjustment because flex time is, I pick the hours I want at work and I work ’em when I want to work them. And that is kind of a program for disaster from an employment discrimination point.
Sam: Any other suggestions for successful programs or ways to implement a successful program in the office?
Natalie: Stress a lot of health advocacy. So helping people to find a doctor, um, know when to go to a doctor. A lot of times people don’t go to the doctor just because they don’t have one or you know, understanding their benefits better, so they know what will be covered because that’s a big fear for people is they don’t want to go to the doctor because it’ll cost them so much money. So help guiding people through the medical process, finding the doctors. And then on the flip side when they get the bills, helping them review them, making sure they were done right. Those sorts of things, I think, distresses the whole experience of,
Rod: Education.
Natalie: Exactly.
Sam: We talked about in one of the previous podcasts, the the, how are you program that we’re doing on that we’re starting on Monday mornings where it’s just not just a, what are we working on today and what are our priorities? But how are you, right? Asking the simple question, how are you with people to find out, you know, how they’re really doing and what’s going on with them?
Tara: Sure. And transparency. Why are you bringing in this type of wellness program? Why are you wanting our feedback and buy in from it? So I think transparency is huge.
Christine: Thanks for listening to SuperManager by CN Video Production. Visit our website at cn-video.com for additional episodes and lots of SuperManager resources. Or give us a call at 314 VIDEO ME.