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- 4 Questions With Donn Scroggins
Enterprise Minnesota Magazine - December 2010HELPING MANUFACTURERS GROW PROFITABLY |
4 Questions with Donn Scroggins
Position: Senior Benefits Consultant and Benefits Practice Group Leader, RJF Agencies Role: Providing custom benefits solutions to helpemployers offer comprehensive health insurance coverage for employees at a cost-effective price. In your experience, how have small business leaders' perceptions of work-site wellness evolved? Historically, work-site wellness used to take the form of simple programs -- a few healthy eating and exercise challenges, and maybe the company picnic and volleyball game. It then moved down the spectrum to include longer-term programs like pedometer-based walking challenges and more information about healthy eating and care management. At forward thinking companies today, employees' overall well-being is becoming the goal. This is a much more complex issue, in which work-site wellness becomes just a single component of larger concerns like a company's culture and the engagement of its employees. You're no longer implementing work-site wellness simply to save on your health insurance costs, but also to help you meet your business objectives of having a highly productive, highly engaged workforce. Employee well-being is a more holistic, longer-term approach than work-site wellness, with the understanding that the ROI is not always a specifically attributable dollar amount. What missteps do you see small business leaders make when it comes to wellness? Many times, small employers are looking for that quick fix -- that quick win -- because they have to be very nimble and cost-conscious in what they do. Because of this, they may lose sight of what they really want to accomplish. A lot of times, smaller businesses will go to the low-hanging fruit and say, "We'll just do this because it's fast and easy and it's cost-effective to implement." The return on investment, however, might be very minimal. Despite having no or low ROI, many seem to feel like they should be doing something around wellness. Rather than jumping in for the sake of jumping in, those small businesses would do better by taking a step back and deciding what they want to accomplish in terms of long-term business objectives. Then they can design some low-cost well-being initiatives that can help them to get where they want to go. What is the key for a successful workplace wellness activity? Employee buy-in is critical when creating a successful wellness effort because if employees believe they have ownership in it, they'll be more receptive to the things their business will put in place. This can be accomplished in a number of ways, such as having them participate in a wellness committee or contribute through a well-being or culture survey to help understand what they're really looking for. These first steps help to build a foundation of trust: that it's actually their program and that you're creating it with them as something you're doing for them, as opposed to something you're doing to them. What single piece of advice would you share with manufacturers who are just beginning a wellness movement? Make sure employees understand that your company's wellness effort is a benefit of employment versus a program or collection of programs. Programs come and go, so we're trying to get rid of the wellness program label. Simply changing the terminology a bit helps employees to see that work-site wellness efforts are a lasting benefit of working at your company. |
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