What is this about?

A major challenge facing all U.S. employers is measuring the current status of their Health and Productivity Management (HPM) and the effects of their employee wellness/well-being intervention efforts over time. Without believable Return-on-Investment (ROI) evidence for their wellness efforts limited investment and priority will likely result.  These resulting “tactical” wellness activities have even been referred to by some as “minimalist” or “zombie” style wellness programs.  Repeating in a lock step manner the same few methodological steps (HRA, screening, lunch and learn events, etc.) resulting in minimal demonstrable effects or effectiveness.

If employee wellness is ever going to become “strategic” or vital to a work organization, it will need to have clear evidence of its positive effect on the organization’s HPM. Measuring employee HPM is how we document the economic evidence or ROI rationale for employee wellness.

The document in this edition of Connections newsletter contains a detailed set of instructions and a worksheet on how to measure current worker health and productivity-related costs of your workforce allowing you to document the Health and Productivity Management (HPM) status associated with your employee wellness/well-being initiative.

Why is this important?

This document is important because it provides a detailed methodology for measuring the economic and productivity effects of workplace wellness initiatives. If senior managers don’t understand or regularly quantify and track these economic metrics, they will usually not devote the resources, time and organizational priority to any activity like wellness programming.  That’s why at least three-quarters of current employer wellness/well-being activity currently conducted in the American workplace is under-funded, overly simplistic and relatively ineffective.  We believe that If we want to change that situation, work organizations will have to quantify their current HPM status and consistently track the effect that wellness activity has on their status.

HPM measurement should not have to adhere to an impossibly high academic standard of proof regarding attribution of causality for wellness but instead needs to meet a reasonable business standard for how we determine what activities benefit our work organizations.  Tracking basic trends over time and examining for plausible alternative explanations for the effects we observe makes much more sense than holding out for randomized controlled trial (RCTs) evidence.  The question is not…”do wellness programs work?” but rather..” how should we do wellness so that it does work for us?”  Also we need to consistently examine the widest possible set of relevant economic and productivity variables in our approach. This needs to include at a minimum, health plan cost, sick leave absenteeism, workers compensation costs, disability insurance costs and presenteeism costs.

We believe this measurement process is absolutely critical to the future of workplace wellness.

What can you do with this document?

• First, read the document to get a sense of what issues are to be measured.
• Next, decide which of those measurement issues are relevant for your organization.
• Then, determine what data sources and time periods you are going to use to derive the metrics.
• Then, perform your baseline measurement to find out your starting point for all the relevant metrics, either prior to the introduction of wellness programming or after its introduction.
• Then, begin a regular process of measurement for all the relevant HPM metrics and use the metrics to help refine the wellness programming that is planned and implemented in each annual cycle of activity.
• Periodically write up the evaluation of the effects of the observed changes in your organization and distribute it to key stakeholders.

In summary, this worksheet and set of instructions for measuring the HPM for your organization provides a pragmatic approach to help you move your employee wellness efforts from a minimalist or “tactical” position to one that considers the wellness initiative as a more “strategic” and organizationally relevant priority by your senior management team.