Towers Perrin released its latest Health Care Cost Survey today and the news is about as pleasant as a heart attack: U.S. employers will see a 7% increase in medical benefit expenditures in 2010 and the average annual per-employee spend will exceed $10,000.
In short, with business profits down and many employees facing reduced family incomes, we’ll all be working our tails off just to pay for a fundamental life need.
But I have to give credit to the folks at Towers Perrin. They don’t just leave us shell-shocked by the numbers; they also identify proactive actions being taken by companies that are “high performers” in managing health care costs. Those companies, the report indicates, will save up to $1,800 per employee – paying 16% less than “low performers.”
Business Week’s “Health Costs: Steeper Still” article crunches the numbers in the Towers Perrin report and others and identifies wellness programs as a key initiative for high-performers. According to the article, “Among this group, 52% will offer wellness programs in 2012, up from 30% now.”
As a company that provides wellness services, this is no surprise to us. The employee assistance program (EAP) services we offer already help increase productivity, decrease costs related to absenteeism and turn-over, and act as a gateway to the mental health benefit. Likewise, fully integrating wellness services significantly mitigates the need for increased usage of the employee health benefit.
It is not, however, without challenges. Employers launching wellness programs need to do more than just “purchase” a wellness service. Wellness has to start from a strategic base with engagement and employee education as critical goals.
(After all, you don’t want to throw a party and have no one show up because you forgot to send out the invitations or tell people what the celebration was about.)
The moment to act is NOW. Your employees will react to the pinch in their pocket books more than any amount of lecturing. And this pinch is a big one.
Show them real numbers – what you are paying on their behalf, and what being unhealthy costs them, you and their coworkers. And tie your incentives to their benefits so that they realize that good health and lowered costs is their responsibility.
Give them ways to engage in wellness at work. At our company, and for our customers, we offer in-building yoga studios that employees can visit at lunch and after work at NO COST to them.
Understand your workforce and what motivates them. What works for your employees may not work for others. We do a lot to understand employee workforces – whether it means surveying them electronically, or going in to talk to them. Get their feedback on what works.
We’re all in this together. Wellness works, but it works differently for every company and its success is based on engagement. If we all get the skinny on how wellness programs work best for each organization, maybe we’ll start seeing better cost configurations for healthcare.
Tags: Business Week, EAP, Employee Assistance Program, Health Care Costs Survey, healthcare costs, Towers Perrin, Wellness, wellness statistics, workplace
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