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Renew Your Commitment to Organizational Health and Wellness in 3 Simple Steps

Our workforce is aging rapidly, increasing the burden on our health care system. Chronic conditions such as heart disease, obesity, diabetes and depression have reached epidemic levels. The result is billions of dollars lost annually due to rising medical and pharmacy costs, lost productivity and wage replacement.

What value would you place on addressing these costs while creating a high performing workplace culture?

Blending employee benefits and wellness programs can accomplish these goals for your company and help establish a corporate culture that thrives inside and outside of the office. Shifting corporate culture by identifying and providing solutions for modifiable health risks will not only create a healthier workforce, but also help you leverage insurance carrier partnerships and drive down health insurance premiums over time.

These are lofty goals, but with incremental steps, you can move the needle.

The Wellness Councils of America recommend starting each wellness program with a commitment from senior leadership. This C-Suite commitment means dedicating resources, time and energy to developing an internal wellness committee and integrating wellness into the company’s culture.

The wellness committee is crucial to carrying out the leadership team’s main goals and objectives, as well as collecting informative data, understanding cultural influences and evaluating the effectiveness of any wellness plan initiatives. Due to the committee’s numerous impacts, the group needs to be engaged with the employee population and can start with something as simple as surveying the company at all levels to develop a baseline of needs and areas to address.

Knowing what resources are already available to you can give you a jump-start.

Another step in the early stages of a wellness plan is to understand what resources are already available to you and your company through your medical and ancillary carriers, as well as your employee benefits broker or consultant. More often than not, they have access to resources that can supplement your organization’s wellness strategy.

For instance, Digital can help you develop a strategic plan with measurable goals and target dates specific to your organization. Based on the identified objectives, our benefit consultants are able to develop a budget and intervention strategies. Carrier partnerships are leveraged to help fund these initiatives, which in turn drive down premium and can create a high performing culture with your wellness and benefit plan as the pillars. Culturally, our teams also provide our clients with a monthly wellness newsletter to address the employee education component of a successful wellness strategy.

The advantages of making wellness a priority in your employee benefits approach is multifaceted. There is the obvious potential to save costs in premiums and then there is the often-overlooked advantage of ROI and profitability increases of a healthy and engaged workforce.

Contact your Digital Advisor to learn more about how a focus on wellness can benefit your organization, your employees, and your bottom line.

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