1. Introduction
Interest is growing in strategically implemented staff health management, addressing the subject from a business perspective. This “health management” means health promotion activities targeting staff and initiated by management based on the idea that good health provides the wellspring from which people can be creative and productive.
Health management has in recent years become one of the essential elements of sustained corporate growth. A major objective is to assess employees’ state of health and help them improve it as a way of improving corporate performance. One of the factors behind this is a shrinking workforce. This is an inescapable reality, with more than 70% of small and medium-sized enterprises already said to be short of staff. Large companies can be sure of facing the same fate in the near future.
1. Benefits of Health Management
In this time of workforce constraints, managers expect the following three benefits from health management.
The first is to increase productivity. Specifically, they are seeking to minimize the problems of absenteeism and presenteeism. Absenteeism refers to when staff are unable to go to work and do their job because they are absent, on leave, late to arrive, or early to finish. Whereas most measures in the past were targeted at preventing absenteeism, people have recently come to understand that presenteeism also has a major influence on corporate performance. Presenteeism means that, although the person is present at work, they fail to perform well due to physical or mental health issues. It is anticipated that productivity could be significantly improved if something could be done about this and adequate performance achieved.
The second benefit is to attract staff. Companies that promote themselves publicly as good places to work, with employee health a priority, are viewed favorably by younger workers who value work-life balance, making it easier for such companies to attract staff.
The third benefit is to control healthcare costs. The higher costs that will come with future increases in the number of older workers pose a problem. For example in the case of preventing diabetes, a condition that causes a sudden increase in medical bills, proactive measures to deal with metabolic syndrome from a young age are important. Health management will help with this. Physical and mental health plays a part in achieving high levels of productivity in such creative work. As a consequence, health management is set to become more important than ever before.
1. Using Data Analysis for the best results
One of the crucial parts of health management is indeed collecting and analyzing data points linked to health and wellbeing. Companies that will participate in such activity can in the span of few years better understand the challenges, inside their workplaces and optimize their health management to perform more precise and effective.
Companies have to actively seek the way to track and analyze overall health and wellbeing. The process should be easily understandable and interesting for participants (e.g. employees).
2. Challenges
1: One of the challenges with these health programs is a lack of motivation among young people in their 20s and 30s. The way one pharmaceutical company sought to overcome this was to hold workshops where staff could devise their own programs, enabling a bottom-up approach. In response to comments from these workshops about people wanting to choose how they want to promote health inside their workplace. What type of health support they find interesting and how they think company should approach this challenge.
2: Another problem is lack of information, many companies are trying to build a solid health support program, but with a lack of professional support and assistance these programs tends to be ineffective and resource wasting. In such diverse and complicated area it is best solution to find a professional assistance with insight and dedicated team to analyze the work place and workforce for the best possible result.
3. Evaluation and Improvement
Implementation is not the end of the process. To reflect the evaluation of current measures in the design of future actions, it is essential to make good use of the plan, do, check, act (PDCA) cycle. As mentioned above, it is crucial to track data linked to health and wellbeing inside company to better understand the obstacles and challenges on the workplace. After analyzing these data points we can clearly see if is the plan working and where are the weak points which can be optimized to achieve even better results. Regular assisted PDCA sessions are best possible method how to improve health support programs.
Generally it takes at least a year or year and a half to fully understand all the variables and to maximize the effect of strong health support program. After this period of time sustainable program should be implemented and optimized to fully support standards in set company.
4. Conclusion
The difference between companies that make a success of health management and those that get stuck is that the former understand the obvious point that a company is nothing without its staff. It is no exaggeration to say that the only companies that can resolve health issues are those who understand that these issues vary from company to company, and who face up to their own staff rather than duplicating what other companies do. It can also be noted that those companies that appreciate the links between health issues and corporate performance take these issues more seriously.
In this way, it is the role of our company PUFFIM organics, to shed light on what companies are doing about health management and thereby to show the way to success.
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