The Solution to Employee Wellness: Personalized Approach

What an amazing event Onward: Breakthrough Solutions was a few weeks ago, expertly designed and hosted by WELCOA! The resilience and ingenuity attendees demonstrated over the past couple years was apparent. Their respective employee population approaches or innovative business solutions in response to the VUCA circumstances were on full display! Despite the challenges, we see the commitment to employee wellness with personalized solutions leading the way in driving outcomes.

Population-wide Challenges

We know employers face significant challenges when it comes to employee health. The state of population health in the US is at crisis levels. Although the issue has been growing over time, the pandemic has exacerbated it. The numbers are alarming:

• Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US.ⁱ
• In 2020, 20% of adults in the US experienced a mental illness.ⁱⁱ
• 73.6% of American adults are overweight, 42.4% are obese.ⁱⁱⁱ
• 61% reported undesired weight gain during the pandemic.^iv
• In the US in 2020, there were 4 million medically-consulted workplace injuries, and 4113 preventable injury-related workplace fatalities.^v

These statistics present significant health and mortality risks associated with high blood pressure, cancer, renal disease, mental health and substance use disorders, as well as many quality-of-life issues. Further, chronic health conditions and unhealthy behaviors, which include high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking, physical inactivity, and obesity, cost US employers over $36.5 billion annually^vi. A 2020 study by the National Institute of Health (NIH) found that “adults with obesity in the US compared with those with normal weight experienced higher annual medical care costs by $2,505.00 or 100%.^vii” The mental health statistics, along with the workplace injury and fatality numbers are similarly concerning. While the causes of these challenges are large and far reaching, the proven solutions remain highly personalized health approaches.

Employer Approaches to Social Determinants of Health through Corporate Social Responsibility

In recent years we have come to acknowledge the role that the environment and other factors beyond personal lifestyle choice and behavior play in individual health. These factors are commonly referred to as social determinants of health (SDOH), which, according to the CDC, are “conditions in the places where people live, learn, work, and play that affect a wide range of health risks and outcomes.^viii” SDOH include food insecurity, food access, education, genetics, activity levels, occupation and others. Because work is identified as a social determinant of health, it is becoming increasingly prevalent for employers to incorporate employee wellness programs as part of their offerings.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is now the norm, and employee population health and wellness take priority. According to Harvard Business Review, “Wellness will become the newest metric that companies use to understand their employees.^ix” Through CSR, companies cultivate a culture of good corporate citizenship with respect to the community, the environment, and the economy. The term is evolving; “corporate” implies that the trend is limited to corporations, but the reality is that employers of all sizes and types are undergoing a shift toward this mindset. Increasingly, the term Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) is becoming a more common way to describe these trends, but regardless of the term, it is unquestionably a positive development. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that in 2019, 84% of large employers (200 or more workers) that are providing health benefits offered a workplace wellness program which included services such as weight loss, smoking cessation, and lifestyle coaching.^x

Trends in Employee Wellness Programs

The recognition of Social Determinants of Health along with the commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility has led the majority of companies to implement wellness interventions for entire employee populations. Unfortunately, while intentions are good, the efforts are not yielding in moving the needle on employee health. According to Harvard Business Review, “wellness programs, offered by 80% of large US companies, yield unimpressive results.” This leads to frustration for both employee participants as well as those organizing and implementing the program and ultimately lack of return on investment…money, time, energy down the drain while the population health continues to decline.

Proven Solutions

There is hope! While many employee health solutions thus far have not proven fruitful in moving the needle on employee health outcomes, there are evidence-based health solutions that if deployed in an employee population can make meaningful change. Those proven solutions marry together the innovative employee wellness approaches with the healthcare industry who has decades of proven health solutions along with an evidence-based methodology for improving those solutions over time. What we know from the evidence is that the most impactful and cost-effective solutions to chronic disease prevention, management, and treatment is lifestyle modification. Lifestyle modification includes nutrition, physical activity, tobacco cessation, alcohol moderation, and stress management. These each require individual behavior change.

Individual behavior change is most effective when the approach is personalized. How do we reconcile personalized approaches with trying to implement population-based solutions? To do so, we must offer personal healthcare structured in an easy to access and scalable manner deployable to entire employee populations.

Personalized Employee Wellness

The gold standard in healthcare is referred to as the triple aim of healthcare. The triple aim aspires to healthier people and better care with smarter spending. Targeting the triple aim in employee wellness requires stratifying an employee population to offer employees the specific care they each need based on their individual health risk. When implemented strategically, this results in employees receiving the right care based on their current health needs and smarter spend.

The health needs, and as a result the appropriate solutions to address those needs, will vary from one employee to the next. Therefore, blanket solutions that lack the ability to target individual needs often fail. Think about diets in eating. While diets and meal plans abound, we know attempting to strictly adhere to a generic diet often fails. This is commonly due to the solution’s lack of customization to an individual’s nutritional needs, food preferences, cultural food beliefs and memories connected to food, food budget, and preferred food preparation methods.

Our health behaviors are tied to a host of factors that run deep. The most effective solutions are personalized and take the entire person into consideration. Whole Health has become the new gold standard approach to overall health and wellness. Depending on who you ask, there are different metrics and categories that illustrate the concept, but generally it references a holistic, proactive method of managing health that comprises physical, mental, emotional, and social well-being. Whole Health is a proactive, preventive, integrated approach that infuses all aspects of life rather than a reaction to an acute symptom or injury.

Wellness Coaches Approach

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