The realities of post-modern living prompt more and more governmental institutions and commercial organizations to pay closer attention to the physical well-being of their employees, as a way of increasing their professional adequacy and as a method of reducing operational costs. The report âState Employee Wellness Initiativesâ, available on the website of NGA Center for Best Practices, provides us with the insight on the fact that the rapid pace of deterioration of peopleâs physical condition in Western countries, can no longer be ignored: âAccording to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2001, 21 percent of adults in the United States were obese, a 5.6 percent increase since 2000 and a 74 percent increase since 1991âŠ
Twenty-six percent of adults were classified as physically inactiveâthey reported no leisure time activities that cause increases in heart rate or breathing.4 In addition, more than 22 percent of adults smoke every day or a few days a weekâ (NGACBP, 2005). This, of course, has direct social implications.
Apart from the fact that people with health problems, induced by their physical inactivity, contribute to the process of this nation losing its biological vitality, their very existence can often be discussed in terms of social burden. The reason for this is simple â employees who continuously whine about their poor physical condition, for Workerâs Compensation Board to make their employers pay them for nothing, rarely stay employed for a continuous period, because no organization wants to have employees who think of exposing âorganizationâs inadequate treatment of workersâ as their foremost priority, while at work. Thus, it is only natural for the corporate sector to strive to encourage employees to choose in favor of a healthy lifestyle.
This, however, is often met with resistance, on the part of those who think that the corporate practice of making office employees get away from their computers, every once in a while, and do some physical workouts, represents a transgression against the dogma of political correctness. Liberal wackos now seriously discussing the elimination of health education classes in school, because they think that the practice of forcing obese kids to indulge in physical activities is âintolerantâ.
The more physically inadequate every particular employee is, the more he or she is being considered capable of âcelebrating diversityâ, as its professional priority. While understanding perfectly well the sheer insanity of the Liberal approach to employment practices, organizations cannot criticize it openly, because it will automatically result in these organizations being labeled as âsexistâ, âracistâ and âfascistâ.
At the same time, companies cannot afford to have utterly useless workers employed on a permanent basis.
The realization of this fact, on the part of management, often prompts organizations to seek ways to encourage employees to lead a healthy lifestyle, without giving them an excuse to accuse these organizations with attempts to undermine workersâ âfreedom of expressionâ. It is needless to say that, despite politically correct rhetoric, on the part of corporate entities, which refers to employersâ popularization of the concept of physical wellness, as something that has value in itself, the reason why employers want to see their workers being physically fit is purely pragmatic. In this paper, we will discuss the main Stress Management and Wellness Programs that are being utilized by the corporate sector in America and Canada.
In her article âWellness Programs Could be the Cureâ, Amanda Milligan suggests that more and more companies decide to expand the range of wellness programs they offer to employees. At the same time, the author says that a considerable number of managers still fail as recognizing a direct link between employeesâ physical well-being and organizationsâ economical success: âAs grim forecasts tell of the ever-ballooning cost of providing health care benefits, some frustrated employers have sought savings through wellness programs.
Such programs aim to curb future treatment costs by targeting unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking and alcohol abuse, as well as by addressing general health factors, including nutrition and stress management⊠Approximately 80% to 90% of employers offer employees at least one wellness program. The number of employers offering a comprehensive wellness program, however, is closer to 35% to 40%â (Milligan, p. 12). This article also helps us to understand what constitutes the main âbehavioral incentiveâ, when it comes to encouraging employees to choose in favor of healthy living. It has been realized long ago that employees will be more likely to quit smoking, for example, when being assured that such their decision will considerably improve their financial standing.
As practice shows, the bulk of wellness and stress management programs use the principle of monetary motivation. People are quite capable of adopting a healthy lifestyle, without having to resort to the help of psychologists, once they can associate such a lifestyle with immediate practical benefits. It also appears that nothing can be as effective as offering people some money when it comes to helping them to deal with their work-related depression. In her article âIncentives Drive Employee Wellness Programâ, Maggie Wolff illustrates the effectiveness of monetary incentives, within the context of promoting health wellness among employees, with the example of Valley Health System, which pays $120.000 a year to its employees in incentive bonuses.
The payment of these bonuses is based on a very simple principle: âEmployees are given a year to improve their health status, at which point all the measurements are taken again. Employees meeting eight of ten criteria receive a cash award of $250 for the first year, and higher amounts for each successive year that the criteria are metâ (Wolff, p. 35). As a result, the percentile rate of healthy employees at Valley Health System is the highest in Oregon.
Along with so-called âpositiveâ financial incentives, within the context of encouraging employees to look after their health, the ânegativeâ ones also appear to gain recognition among employers. In his article âUsing Cash Bonuses and Penalties To Enhance Weight Loss In Obese Employeesâ, Daniel Costello helps us to understand how the application of these incentives work: âClarian Health Partners, an Indiana-based hospital chain, will, beginning in 2009, charge employees up to $30 every two weeks unless they meet weight, cholesterol and blood pressure guidelines the company deems healthy, i.e., employeesâ pay will be docked if they fail to meet certain weight ratios, cholesterol, blood pressure or if they smokeâ (Costello, 2007).
Clarian Health Partnersâ initiative sparked a public controversy, because lawyers were able to turn it into the issue of âviolation of human rightsâ. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 does suggest that organizationsâ health promotion programs must be based on the principle of âsufficient reasonablenessâ, but it is only when employers try to prevent workers from eating greasy French fries and smoking cigarettes with the mean of making them to face the prospects of punishment, if they continue on with their bad habits, that hooked-nosed shysters begin to scream bloody murder.
As practice shows, many people are simply incapable of adopting a healthy lifestyle, unless they are being forced to do it by objective circumstances. Moreover, many employees have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that being grossly obese, does not necessarily make them âspecialâ and âuniqueâ, in the way they were being indoctrinated in high school. There is only so much oil, gas, and food in the world, but the human resources are fully renewable, especially given the fact that the population of Earth continues to grow rapidly. Therefore, employers have the right to choose among workers, to offer jobs to those who deserve it the most.
As we have mentioned earlier, about a third of employers incorporate sections in the U.S, and Canada utilizes a so-called âcomprehensive approachâ to turn workers into health-conscious individuals. The practical methods of utilization of this approach vary to a significant degree. Nevertheless, it is still possible for us to define its very essence.
Many employers believe that, for them to be able to increase workersâ professional efficiency by the mean of convincing them to adopt a healthy living, the financial incentives must be combined with psychological ones and with the prospects of advancement through their careers. Such an approach has been particularly gaining popularity in Canada, where Liberals have almost succeeded in building a âsocialist utopiaâ, with the majority of Canadians being deeply convinced that it is a society that needs to be blamed for peopleâs existential inadequateness.
In their article âHealth Promotion Policy in Canada: Lessons Forgotten, Lessons Still to Learnâ, Jacqueline Low and Luc Theriault go as far as suggesting that it is conceptually wrong to encourage people to take control of their own lives: âWhen the vast majority of health promotion initiatives are aimed at the individual it fosters the allusion that a personâs health status is entirely under his or her control. As a result, responsibility for what are population health problems, and thus our collective responsibility, is assigned solely to the individual; effectively blaming the victim of ill health for what are socially produced health problemsâ (Low, Theriault, p. 201).
In other words, if someone consumes French fries by tons, simply because lacking the strength of will to change its eating habits, it is a âsocially produced problemâ. Thus, we can say that comprehensive wellness and stress management programs are aimed at helping people to choose in favor of a healthy lifestyle, without causing them to experience emotional discomfort. In her article âHealthy, Wealthy and Wiseâ, Raizel Robin talks about corporate wellness programs as such are being in the state of constant transition because employers continuously strive to improve them: âToday, you could say the hottest trend is capitalizing on a little bit of them all under the banner of âworkplace wellnessâ.
Non-smoking support groups, company gyms, family-friendly workplaces, counseling, meditation, workshops in stress management and effective communication techniques, even personal coaches for CEOs–all of them fall under the catch-all phraseâ (Robin, p. 133). Employees subjected to comprehensive stress management and wellness programs are being encouraged to think of adopting a healthy lifestyle as not just the mean of increasing their salaries, but also as something that will allow them to fully realize their professional potential. These programs also strive to instill employees with âcollective consciousnessâ, for them to think of the state of their health as such that affects their co-workers.
Given the fact that comprehensive wellness programs are very costly, it is mostly large private establishments and state institutions that tend to utilize them. Measuring the effectiveness of such programs also represents a challenge, because there are just too many independent variables that need to be taken into consideration. Comprehensive corporate wellness programs usually consist of health screening and health risk assessment, counseling employees, follow-up with physicians, health improvement and disease prevention programs, and organizing worksite-wide wellness program activities.
Nevertheless, as practice shows, these programs often lack effectiveness, because psychological manipulation with employees appears to be their essential element. Under comprehensive wellness programs, workers are expected to become âhealth-consciousâ by the mean of psychological indoctrination. It is not a secret that hiring work-site psychologists accounts for 50% of all costs, associated with the implementation of these programs.
However, it appears that psychological consultation is the least effective method of forcing employees to adopt a healthy lifestyle. For example, according to various statistics, only 5% of those employees who resorted to the help of psychologists, to quit smoking, were able to put an end to this harmful habit. This is because, despite suggestions of âprogressiveâ sociologists that health problems are environmentally induced and that people are incapable of taking control of their lives, the truth is the opposite. It is the strength of an individualâs will that defines his or her ability to proceed with a healthy living.
Corporate wellness programs incorporate stress management as their essential element because only the employees that are being relieved of occupational stress can perform their duties with utmost efficiency. In his article Healthy and Productive Work: An International Perspectiveâ, Lawrence Murphy provides us with insight on issues that stress management deals with: â Stress management is concerned with taking action to modify or eliminate sources of stress in the work environment, and thus reduce their negative impact on the individual. The traditional approach to health promotion depicts stress as the consequence of the âlack of fitâ between the needs and demands of the individual and his/ her environment.
The focus of primary interventions is in adapting the environment to âfitâ the individual. (Murphy, p. 182). There are various methods of elimination of work-related stress: redesigning the work environment, establishing flexible work schedules, encouraging participative management, providing social support for employees, etc. However, as practice shows, for the application of these methods to affect, managers in charge of designing stress management policies, must be capable of defining the very essence of occupational stress, which they strive to eliminate. This is because the complete understanding of what causes employees to become stressed out establishes a conceptual foundation, upon which a particular stress management policy can be based.
The progressive wellness programs, utilized by the corporate sector, are meant to help employees get rid of the stress, as the logical consequence of them adopting a healthy lifestyle because physical inactivity appears to be the most important contributing factor of stress. Nothing can be as effective as 10-20 push-ups when it comes to dealing with stress. Unfortunately, many managers fail at realizing this simple fact.
In its turn, this causes them to invest a lot of money to provide workers with psychological counseling, which rarely proves to have any effect whatsoever. Nevertheless, it appears that the popularity of psychological counseling, as the method of relieving stress, has been steadily declining in recent years, with the popularity of work-site massage therapy being on the rise. This is because employees seem to benefit so much more from massage being performed on their backs, than from talking to some psychologist, who often make them even more depressed, by asking questions about workersâ childhood anxieties.
Many companies that specialize in designing wellness programs were able to realize this fact long ago. For example, the brochure âCorporate Wellness Solutionsâ from Fresh Fitness, describes the beneficial effects of massage therapy in great detail: âMassage therapy has many important benefits for health and proper physical functioning. Many people live with daily pain and stiffness that causes stress reduces function and decreases performance in all aspects of life.
Corporate employees have some of the highest incidences of physical dysfunction due to the prolonged sitting and repetitive motions often associated with the office environmentâ (Fresh, 2007). At the same time, Company does not feature âpsychological counselingâ on the list of its services, which allows us to conclude that the operational principles, utilized within a context of designing wellness programs, are being continuously redefined, to increase the effectiveness of such programs.
Corporate wellness programs and stress management now became an integral part of employment practices in Western countries. By striving to encourage employees to adopt a healthy lifestyle, corporate management increases organizationsâ operational efficiency. However, it would be wrong to suggest that these programs have the potential of turning employees into healthy individuals, in both: a physical and mental sense of this word.
The reason why many workers do not care about working out physically is that they lack the inner motivation to live healthy lives. The concept of self-indulgence lies at the core of Liberal ideology. This ideology continues to affect the existential mode of more and more people, as time goes by, which is the reason why many employees have a hard time while rationalizing their behavior. Therefore, in Western countries, the process of people losing their existential vitality is part of objective reality.
In her book âPromoting Human Wellness: New Frontiers for Research, Practice, and Policyâ, Margaret Jamner is making a very good point when she suggests that it is the realities of post-industrial living, which continue to turn many people into overindulged egoists: âSteady improvement in technology and living conditions, however, created an opportunity for increasing segments of the population – at first for the more affluent and subsequently most other people – to luxuriate in ways that induced other kinds of health damage.
Physical inactivity; excessive calorie consumption, especially in the form of fats and sweets; and access to new forms of tobacco eventuated in the 20th-century epidemics of cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, diabetes, and other chronic diseasesâ (Jamner, p. 39). In a time when people cannot be motivated to lead a healthy lifestyle by making such style appealing to their rationale, they nevertheless can still be prompted to do so on a subconscious level. Therefore, it appears that only the corporate wellness programs that provide punishment to the employees for failure to adopt healthy behavior, on their part, that can be referred to as potentially effective.
As practice shows, the âfear factorâ, associated with many wellness programs, cannot be overlooked, because it is only the prospects of losing their job or having to pay fines that cause employees to reconsider their bad habits better than anything else does.
Bibliography
Corporate Wellness Solutions. 2007. Fresh Fitness.
In this brochure, Fresh Fitness describe services, which company offers to corporate clients. It also contains a lot of factual information in regards to healthy living.
Costello, D. (2007). âMonetary Incentives To Decrease Obesityâ. Align Map.
In this article, author discusses monetary incentives, within a context of promotion healthy lifestyle at work place.
Jamner, M. (2000) âPromoting Human Wellness : New Frontiers for Research, Practice and Policyâ. Ewing, NJ, USA: University of California Press, p 39.
This book is about different practical aspects of corporate wellness programs. In it, Jamner also discusses the reasons why more and more Americans become affected by obesity.
Low, J., Theriault, L. (2008) â Health Promotion Policy in Canada: Lessons Forgotten, Lessons Still to Learnâ. Health Promotion International, v. 23, no. 2, p. 201.
In this article, authors strive to convince readers that managers need to exercise caution, while enacting wellness programs, as a part of professional environment at work place.
State Employee Wellness Initiatives. 2005. NGA Center for Best Practices. Web.
This report provides us with understanding of how government views wellness programs. It also contains an extensive statistical data, regarding the effectives of such programs.
Milligan, A. (2000) âWellness Programs Could be the Cureâ Business Insurance, v. 34, no. 4, p. 12.
In this article, author talks about what causes managers to remain ignorant of potential benefits, associated with utilization of wellness programs.
Murphy, L. (2000) âHealthy and Productive Work : An International Perspectiveâ. London, UK: CRC Press, p 182.
In this book, Murphy covers a wide range of topics, related to managing organizational behaviour, on part of employees.
Robin, R (2003) âHealthy, Wealthy and Wiseâ. Canadian Business, v. 76, no. 23, p. 133.
Robinâs article is about practical application of wellness programs at work place. Author promotes the idea that these programs are being constantly perfected, as time goes by.
Wolff, M. (1998) âIncentives Drive Employee Wellness Programâ. Quad – State Business Journal, v. 5, n. 8, p. 35.
In her article, Wolff suggests that monetary incentives motivate employees to adopt a healthy lifestyle better then anything else does.