In the past few years, interest in the business value of worksite wellness has grown substantially with the hope of seeing lower healthcare costs. However, there is more to evaluate than just looking at healthcare costs. If an employer accepts that a healthier workforce is likely to be more productive, then improved productivity with the potential for greater business profitability is a reasonable expectation.

Within the past 10 years, health-related absence and “presenteeism” (at work, but not fully productive - https://hbr.org/2004/10/presenteeism-at-work-but-out-of-it/ar/1) have been recognized as additional sources of health-related business expenses. Organizations with worksite wellness programs have the potential to reduce this lost productivity, but this contribution to cost savings hasn’t recognized. As a result, employers have continued to focus on healthcare cost containment as the primary and, sometimes, sole outcome as a basis for evaluating worksite wellness initiatives.

Several reasons may be attributed for this. Perhaps, most importantly, many employers don’t have measurement or tracking systems to record work-related absence and productivity. Presenteeism is not a typical organizational measure and can be difficult to analyze. Additionally, increasing numbers of employers have implemented paid time-off (PTO) programs that make attempts to quantify health-related reasons for employee absence very difficult. http://www.nmshealth.com/blog/presenteeeism-vs-absenteeism-which-costs-the-employer-more/

For many organizations, many of the necessary data elements are likely already available to highlight the relationships between workforce well-being and performance. Most human resources personnel have some level of quantitative performance evaluation for the workforce. Some can also utilize data from the wellness program - health risk assessments or health scores. Integration of this data should be merged to better understand links between the individual’s health status and manager’s performance evaluation.

CONCLUSION:

Employers can also link reports to business performance data. Almost every organization collects some type of performance data including quality metrics, customer satisfaction, revenue, or other variables. Human resources personnel can identify which of these are perceived as important to senior management, and generate reports to link health/well-being with these business measures. The results are likely to cast an entirely new light on the business value of a worksite wellness program….beyond just trying to lower healthcare costs.