What The Figures Say, is a corporate wellness program worth the investment

Let’s start with a Harvard Business Review that was conducted in 2008 by the esteemed professor Leonard L Barry.Let’s start with the big hitting facts and move on to see if these translated into real cost savings for real companies.

Johnson and Johnson by initiating its corporate wellness program reduced the amount of staff that smoke by two thirds, yes you read that correctly, two thirds! They have estimated that the savings have added up to 250 million dollars, in total the program cost them 97 million dollars, that’s a net return on their investment of 2.71 times.

The common misconception of corporate wellness program receive in the press is often due to the fact that the returns are hard to measure.

Elements like employee happiness, productivity and increased work/life balance that impacts a company’s bottom line is hard to quantify apart from results from questionnaires, the problem arises when you try to translate these paper results into dollar returns.

Out of a poll conducted on 200 companies with over 150 employees that ran a corporate wellness program the top benefits that they received in ascending order were:

1. Less sick days per 100 employees.
2. Reduced medical insurance costs by 20% or more after one years implementation.
3. The average number of risk factors per 100 employees reduced by 0.5 within 1 years successful corporate wellness and corporate fitness programs integration.
4. Smoking among employees reduced significantly.
5. Alcohol use among employees reduced significantly.
6. Enjoyment and satisfaction at work increased by 35%, especially among the companies that ran their wellness programs with small groups of competing employees.

The thing that blurs the line of being able to judge if a wellness initiative is worth the per dollar investment is the fact that a lot of SME’s don’t benchmark their fitness, rest & repair and wellness programs. They go into the program headstrong but don’t clarify where they started with something like a company health appraisal questionnaire and resulting score or checking for team members health risk factors like high blood sugar levels, high cholesterol etc then they obviously can’t track the participants progress throughout.

If they set the program up correctly initially they would surely see massive improvement to hard facts like reduced medical insurance costs and increased employee productiveness.

So in conclusion the figures clearly show that properly set up company wellness programs provide the team with a huge return on allocated capital.

If you need to know how to set up a corporate wellness program that works get in touch today.

Kind Regards,

Tim Garrett.

Corporate Wellness Co founder.

info@corporatewellnessco.ae

052 699 3955