Employee Health and Wellness Become a Bigger Priority for Companies

By Rieva Lesonsky

Does your small business have a strategy for promoting employee wellness? Whether it’s offering health insurance, promoting health and wellness through your policies, or offering financial assistance to employees for things like health club memberships, a strategy to encourage a healthy workforce is an idea that more companies are embracing.

In a recent study by Towers Watson reported in CFO Zone, three out of four global companies said workforce health will be a higher priority this year and next, and 87 percent said it will be a higher priority in the next two to four years. While currently 32 percent of survey respondents had a global workforce health strategy, 47 percent plan to implement one in the next two years.

As “global” might imply, these are huge multinational corporations we’re talking about—making it easier for them to promote health care and wellness than it typically is for small business. But it’s no less important for you—especially if you’re competing for employees with bigger firms that will offer these benefits.

Companies had a range of reasons for implementing these new programs, which interestingly enough, varied by region. The majority of companies based in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) cited employee well-being and stress management as key motivators. The majority of those based in Asia cited “providing competitive rewards” as their reason. And the majority of North American companies wanted to implement the policies to control costs.

Controlling costs may not be as noble a rationale as the other two, but it’s an unavoidable factor. Not only can healthy employees cut health insurance and health care costs, but a healthy workforce also suffers less absenteeism and injury and is more productive.

All of these are good reasons to encourage employee health and wellness, whatever means you choose to do so.

Image by Flickr user Rance Costa (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Monday, May 30th, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Small Business, Uncategorized, Workforce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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