THE WELLNESS AUDIT

AUTHOR: YW STAFF

In any given work situation, trouble may be brewing. You may have a worker at the beginning stages of diabetes, another one dealing with full-blown depression, and still another whose workstation or load-lifting technique is primed to promote back injury. How do you monitor these potential risks to productivity? How do you keep workers healthy and engaged so that staff turnover doesn’t add to your costs? And how do you check for these conditions without invading your employees’ privacy?

It takes expertise and foresight to recognize health problems that compromise employee well-being before productivity takes a downturn. The use of wellness audits is becoming increasingly common for organizations striving to anticipate and combat rising disability and insurance costs and employee absenteeism.

The wellness audit usually is conducted by an outside team of experts who assess employees’ health and sense of well-being in a standardized, confidential manner. Steps are taken to ensure cooperation with the process by engaging workers and building their confidence in the security of disclosure. Though a wellness audit may not pinpoint which individuals in a workplace have a particular condition, it will enable an organization to get a clear picture of the well-being of groups and to make plans for accommodating the needs of its employees.

There are various approaches to the wellness audit. Some involve the individual workers in a process designed to promote awareness of their specific needs. Others examine how the wellness needs of the workforce in general can be met. Some audits prescribe changes that will benefit the workers, while others take steps to implement those changes.

Individual Approach

This type of wellness audit involves confidentially harvesting very specific data about a worker’s well-being in order to predict future health risks based on the employee’s current habits, environment, and access to wellness resources. Wellness Checkpoint conducts an individualized audit via interactive software. Workers go through a questionnaire process that responds to their answers by following up with questions that make sense for the individual user. Key factors that increase or decrease the user’s health risk are identified. Zorianna Hyworen of Infotech, the creator of Wellness Checkpoint, explains, “What we know is who is in the pre-disease pool. They have a pattern of predictors. We have that data before the company has the problem, before you have the drug claims.”

Using the individual approach does not necessarily mean that companies have access to detailed information about their employees’ health. In the case of Wellness Checkpoint, it “was designed to provide a confidential, respectful, private way for individuals to understand what their risks are and to identify ways that they can improve so that they can mitigate their own risk and track their success over time,” says Zorianna. To protect privacy, there is a minimum group size in the configuration of the software that prevents employers from narrowing the data to the degree that an individual could be identified.

Aggregate data supplied to employers from individualized audits can forecast potential health risks for the general workforce. However, an auditing program can also be designed to provide data directly to the individual being assessed. Wellness Checkpoint makes recommendations to the employee regarding steps to take to improve health, and prescribes available resources to assist in the process. The workers’ data is tracked and compared to benchmarks to enable employees and companies to monitor changes in employee wellness, and to anticipate health needs.

Some audits prescribe changes that will benefit the workers, while others take steps to implement those changes.

The data accumulated through wellness audits can yield exciting correlations between what were once considered disparate factors affecting health. “Employers are finding that the causes of disability related to mental health are probably the most significant growth area and the most significant cost. It’s known that there is comorbidity, which means that people with chronic diseases like heart disease and particularly diabetes tend to be very vulnerable to clinical depression,” Zorianna explains. “What research is starting to show is that there may not be just a comorbidity… but there may be a causal relationship.

The individualized approach can be used as an ongoing self-monitoring process for workers keen to improve and maintain good health. In the case of Wellness Checkpoint, users can tap into the program at any time. “And we see their pattern of tapping. And we see that the more issues they have, the more likely that they are to come back repeatedly,” concludes Zorianna. For companies that wish to spur on their workers to better health by giving them the opportunity for direct, detailed feedback on their own well-being, the individualized approach may be the best choice.

Custom Group Approach

Some companies prefer to take a more generalized view of the wellness audit. This approach compares groups of individuals in order to discover discrepancies between the different groups. For example, if the workforce at one plant scores significantly higher than another, that result can be a signal to take a closer look at the reasons for the difference in scores. Many factors can be at play from the building structures themselves to the degree to which healthy and safe habits are cultivated by the workplace culture. One company that uses a custom group approach is Safety Frameworks, a designer of confidential audit packages tailored to an organization’s particular needs.

A custom group approach can place more emphasis upon the employer to foster employee health by creating programs to address potential risks discovered in the general workforce population. In the case of Safety Frameworks, the audit is just the beginning of a bigger process. Safety Frameworks programs can address workers’ needs from a nutritional perspective and concentrate on lifestyle, exercise and movement, stress management, and emotional health, among other topics. “We do a very comprehensive program,” says Consultant Christy Bicks. “We have someone who comes in and actually sits in your workplace and sets up, and all your employees know that between certain hours, they can come and go and do yoga for free and learn about their body. We’ll actually have that all prearranged and planned out.”

A group approach to wellness auditing still entails the protection of individual privacy. Christy explains, I wouldn’t tabulate the results and specifically list that condition or disease. What’s helpful is what kind of stuff feeds that problem. So, for someone who is obviously obese, but as a result of his or her obesity has massive health problems, we would talk about things to do more with healthy lifestyle habits.”

This group approach can take the guesswork out of the audit and ensuing program implementation. Auditors such as Safety Frameworks create the programs to address a particular company’s needs and onduct a follow-up to ensure that the programs are accomplishing the goals set out for them.

The use of wellness audits is becoming increasingly common for organizations striving to anticipate and combat rising disability and insurance costs and employee absenteeism.

Wellness audits can play a significant role in creating a work environment where people come each day to be productive and to feel good while doing so. An individual approach may place more onus on the worker to improve his/her health while encouraging participation in whatever programs the organization already has in place. The custom group approach makes it easy for the employer to take charge of workplace wellness by taking the guesswork out of deciding what programs and strategies to implement. While companies who use wellness audits generally find them to be a great cost-saving measure, what are less measurable monetarily, but of equal importance, are the spin-offs in improved morale and a culture of heightened health awareness—aspects of work life that tend to attract new recruits who are already health-conscious. A wellness audit is one investment that just keeps paying off.