Second in a five-part series. Read Part 1.
The best way to become indispensible (and unshoppable) with your clients is to become a problem solver. When you save or make money for your clients, they view you as a necessity and not a budget item to be cut. This series presents five problems you can solve for clients that will position you as an expert and boost your business.
Last month, we examined the high cost of declining morale and disengaged employees, and suggested steps to take to specialize in employee engagement. This installment examines another problem your clients may be facing, and how you can transition from “eh” to expert by becoming a wellness program specialist.
Problem No. 2: The annual price tag on occupational injuries and illnesses is $250 billion.
A study by University of California-Davis puts the annual price tag of U.S. work-related injuries and illnesses at $250 billion—a figure substantially higher than the indirect costs of illnesses such as cancer, diabetes and strokes.
Specifically, an average work-related injury incurs an average direct cost of $38,000, according to the National Safety Council. Included in the direct costs are the emergency room, doctor visits, medical bills, medicine and rehabilitation. The indirect costs, however, can amount to four times the direct cost of the injury. These include administrative time, increases in insurance costs, replacing the employee’s lost hours, hiring a replacement, unwanted media attention and negative publicity among employees and customers.
This brings the total average cost of an injury to $190,000. For a business operating
at a 10-percent profit margin, the company will need $1.9 million in new revenue in order to offset the loss of just one work-related injury. The cost of one typical injury is far more expensive than the cost of a safety program.
This is a problem that you can solve for clients. Your solutions will allow your clients to make smart business decisions that will make them more competitive in their marketplace, and will save them money and make them money.
Poor Lifestyle Choices Cost Companies Billions More In Lost Productivity
A Gallup poll estimates that 86 percent of employees are above their ideal weight, which causes them to miss 450 million days of work per year compared to workers at their ideal weight. The cost of overweight workers alone to American businesses is estimated to be between $150 and $225 billion in lost productivity.
Add to this the cost of smoking, excessive alcohol and drug use, sedentary lifestyles and other poor lifestyle choices, and the costs are staggering. Employers also pay higher health care premiums for workers who make these life choices. Combined, the cost to American businesses may exceed a half a trillion dollars.
Katherine Baicker, professor of health economics at Harvard University, reports that medical costs fall by $3.27 for every dollar spent on wellness programs, and that absenteeism costs fall by about $2.73 for every dollar spent. How’s that for return on investment? She concludes that, based on her findings, wider adoption of disease prevention and wellness programs could prove beneficial for budgets and productivity as well as healthier lives for employees.
You can help your clients solve the problems related to poor lifestyle choices by motivating better habits, rewarding employees for increasing activity, losing weight, quitting smoking, getting preventative exams and eating healthier.
Promotional Products Reinforce Healthy Habits
Safety programs and wellness programs objectives are best met by rewarding the right behaviors. On an annual basis, one of my clients offered a desirable promotional product valued at $25 for each employee who participated in a health screening that included a lifestyle questionnaire, and cholesterol, blood pressure and body weight assessment. About a quarter of all of employees participated and about 20 percent made positive life changes. The company estimates they received a 400-percent return on their investment based on these results.
Promotional products can be used for both safety and wellness programs to:
• Promote the program
• Maintain interest in the program
• Provide a sense of ownership and participation among participants
• Provide a reward for positive behavioral changes
• Create a sense of peer affiliation with a cause.
Elements Of An Effective Safety And Health Program
An effective program should include four main elements, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA):
• Management commitment and employee involvement
• Worksite analysis
• Hazard prevention and control
• Safety and health training
As your clients’ problem solver, you can help implement all of these elements. Create incentives that encourage employee involvement and encourage employee input in identifying potential hazards. No one knows better than the workers where the potential problems and safety threats occur in the workplace. Create an environment with positive messages and incentives that allow your clients to make management and coworkers aware and willing to share these warnings.
Training is an essential component. Suggest including signage, apparel, journals, calendars and other communication tools in order to educate and reward positive safety behaviors. Training should include both supervisors and employees. Do not suggest negative incentives or anything that might create an environment of non-reporting of accidents or incidents. Your client can violate OSHA rules and lose the deductibility of their program if you suggest a program that has the unintended consequence of rewarding non-reporting of accidents.
An example of a negative incentive might be offering a group or team incentive for days of injury-free work or for no lost days of productivity. In this situation, an employee may feel pressured to not report an accident for fear of causing the group to fail. Instead, structure the program so that peer-to-peer or supervisor to employee, workers are recognized for working safely and making smart accident-prevention decisions.
Provide rewards for positive suggestions and for identifying potential hazards in the workplace too. A best practice may be to create a recognition card or other vehicle that can be redeemed for incentives. The key to wellness programs is to recognize when people are doing things right. What gets recognized, gets repeated.
Your program should also encourage positive interactions between supervisors and employees. Employees should be encouraged and rewarded for reporting unsafe conditions to their supervisors. Supervisors should be encouraged to listen and act on employee suggestions. All of these practices create a sense of team and a culture of cooperation and working toward a common cause that benefits not only the company but every individual within it.
Wellness. It’s More Than Diet And Exercise.
The ultimate goal of health and wellness programs is to encourage lifestyle choices that create happy, productive and engaged employees. Wellness programs often go beyond employee engagement to employee enhancement. Many companies are also providing personal trainers, health coaches, gym memberships, massages and more to set the stage for employees who care about themselves and their own well-being.
A wellness program has one goal—to improve health in order to prevent or eliminate health risk factors and future chronic diseases. The keys are to keep healthy people healthy and to teach unhealthy, at-risk people how to reduce or eliminate risk factors in their lives.
The common characteristics of an effective wellness program are:
• The establishment of a supportive work environment that encourages positive lifestyles
• Risk reduction through cessation of tobacco use, encouraging exercise and fitness, improving nutrition and stress reduction
• Modifying health risks such as obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and, anxiety and depression
• Encouraging cancer screenings and preventative exams, flu shots, immunizations, and dental and vision exams
• Using coaching, training, tools and incentives (promotional products!) to help individuals make behavioral changes to enhance quality of life
• Requiring voluntary employee participation.
Selling A Solid Return On Investment And Saving Lives
When you become an expert in producing safety and wellness programs, you literally become a
lifesaver. If that’s not reason enough to want to learn more, try this on for size. That little wellness program referenced earlier in this article was a $250,000 to $500,000 sale that repeated year after year. When you provide programs and solutions that save your clients’ money, improve their corporate culture, increase productivity and provide proven ROI of 200 to 500 percent, you develop loyalty and move from being a commodity to being a valued consultant.
Sidebar:
Visit www.osha.gov for guidelines and suggestions, and to learn more about opportunities for safety programs.
Ask your favorite suppliers for wellness and safety program-related case histories and resources.
Spend one hour a week researching the topics online.
Ask current clients what they are doing for employees in this area and suggest ways to enhance their programs with the one marketing and communications tool that creates interest, affinity and engagement—promotional products.
Many of the largest insurance companies are already in the wellness market. See what they are doing and where opportunities might exist to help them expand their efforts.
Paul A. Kiewiet, MAS+, CIP, CPC, is an industry speaker, writer and consultant and the executive director of the Michigan Promotional Professionals Association. He is a former chairman of PPAI and was inducted into the PPAI Hall of Fame at The PPAI Expo in Las Vegas in January.
Next month: Do your clients suffer from lack of loyalty from their customers? Paul Kiewiet identifies opportunities to help you solve that problem in part three of this series.
Sidebar: (These could be very visual: perhaps run copy for each campaign on top of a weight scale; inside a curled jump rope, on the bottom of a running shoe and/or on a label of a clear water bottle)
Winning Wellness Campaign Ideas
These PPAI Pyramid Award-winning campaigns, pulled from PPAI Idea Source, will get you started on developing healthy programs for clients.
Goal: Motivate Employees To Join A Wellness Program
Strategy: Would employees of a Texas school district walk 90 miles for a t-shirt? That is, 90 miles over a five-month period? District administrators were betting they would. The district’s wellness program was announced in newsletters and flyers. In this way, teachers, administrators and maintenance and service workers learned of the various organized activities-aerobics, walking and jogging, seminars, smoking cessation classes among others- that were available to them. As incentives to join and continue in the wellness program, promotional products were awarded to employees as they completed various activities. Displaying the promotion slogan, ”Enjoy Life…Be Well,” the items included sports bottles, nutrition booklets, mugs, golf towels and insulated lunch bags.
Results: The estimated 20-percent participation by district employees was double the projection set for the program. The promotional products, reported the wellness supervisor, were an “essential element in increasing participation and motivating our employees.”
Goal: To improve overall employee wellness through an increased awareness of health risks.
Strategy: In this health awareness promotion, a private healthcare system established an employee wellness program called “ECHO”―Employees Choosing Healthy Options. To start the program, embroidered t-shirts were given to all employees who filled out a personal health profile. Comprised of a series of seminars and health screenings, the program awarded employees with a stamp for each event they attended. When they acquired enough stamps, they received fitness-related incentives such as sunscreen, sweat bands, digital runners’ watches, motivational journals to record their progress and safety strobe lights. After reaching the first level of the promotion, employees who continued to participate chose incentive premiums from $35, $50 and $75 categories. Individuals participating in smoking cessation classes received imprinted rubber wristbands they could snap to remind them not to smoke. Imprinted bubble bottles were also distributed during stress management seminars.
Results: Although “ECHO” is strictly a volunteer program, 5,100 employees actively participated. Two years after its launch, the program was still active in 23 facilities.
Goal: To emphasize employee appreciation while branding the firm; also, to create a competitive environment to encourage healthy behavior, and remind employees of their $350 yearly wellness benefit.
Strategy: Items had to be useful, tangible and allow organizers to quantify the amount of individual physical activity. Products were selected that encouraged multiple interactions rather than the “get-and-forget” mentality. This is where the idea for the Grab-and-Go workout kit was developed. The kit included a branded work-out t-shirt, a branded water bottle, a bag to keep all items together and a pedometer to track daily physical activity.
For the company’s staff appreciation day, Grab-and-Go workout kits were given to employees along with a handout describing an inter-office competition called the Move It Challenge. For the latter, employees were asked to wear the pedometer inside and outside of work for the duration of the competition (over a six-week period). Keeping the target market in mind, the pedometer was the best way to record physical activity since it rewarded employees for strenuous activity as well as activities such as gardening and walking. Employees were asked to record their steps every day throughout the competition. The employees with the highest number on their individual pedometers at the end of the competition would be announced at a major company event and would receive gift certificates from company sponsors. Participants were encouraged through weekly motivational emails as well as inter-office competition.
The client wanted to show its employees they truly cared and were willing to spend extra money on quality goods. Therefore, a majority of the budget went toward purchasing promotional items and the remainder was spent on other costs associated with the event. A total of $20,000 was spent on the employee appreciation day with the Grab-and-Go workout kit costing approximately $19,000.
Results: The client’s expectations were exceeded and all objectives were accomplished. The branded Grab-and-Go workout kit showed the employees that the company had invested in their well-being and they should as well. The greatest success for the objectives, however, was showing the employees how much they were valued. Recognizing the winners at the company event was the highlight of this program validating in everyone’s minds the sincere concern the company has for its employees.
Find more winning campaigns by subscribing to PPAI’s IDEA Source at ideasource.ppai.org/idea.