There’s a very expensive ailment plaguing businesses. It’s difficult to diagnose, and even more difficult to cure. There’s no pill, procedure, surgery, or diet that can cure it. And it affects a whopping 77% of employees at one point or another. It’s burnout. Talent Management’s Lois Melbourne provides a few employee burnout recognition clues, including: Avoiding/skipping meetings Absenteeism Irritability Lack of attention to details Once it affects a few employees, the malaise can spread faster than the flu, leading to adverse organizational trends such as higher voluntary turnover, increased absenteeism, and productivity losses.  Those are business killers, particularly in the shaky post-recession economy.  The hidden costs associated with voluntary turnover alone can reach crippling proportions – for example, the average 100-person IT firm spends in excess of $4M per year in direct replacement costs and lost productivity (view our extensive turnover research here). Prevention is clearly preferable to cure, but the problem is widespread.  Stress is a major contributor to employee burnout, and three out of four employees describe their job as either “stressful” or “very stressful.” While employees’ direct supervisors are the first line of defense against burnout, and effective leadership goes a long way toward alleviating the problem (read more here), there is something that human resources employee benefits folks can do to help the team avoid the negative consequences of burnout. Help employees take vacations. Three out of four executives view vacations as an important tool in burnout prevention.  Yet two out of three American employees gave back vacation days last year, and 43% have no vacation plans for this year. Why? Three reasons: Employees need help affording vacations. Employees don’t relish the hassle of planning vacations. Employees don’t believe that management really wants them to take vacations. Here’s where the employee benefits folks come in, with a program called Vacation Wellness™ (watch a short video here).  It’s designed to remove all three barriers to the healthy practice of employee vacations. More than just avoiding burnout, regular destination vacations also play a key role in overall employee health, which can give your employee health and wellness programs a boost.  It seems almost too simple to work, but the research shows that Regular vacationers are up to three times less likely to suffer depression, the most expensive employee health problem. Regular male vacationers are up to 32% less likely to suffer heart attack, and female vacationers are up to 53% less likely to have heart problems.  Heart disease is the second-costliest acute employee healthcare issue. Regular vacationers are eight times less likely to suffer premature morbidity. Isn’t it fantastic to have a bucketful of legitimate business reasons to take vacations?  Just make sure you’re providing your employees the best opportunity to get away.  It’s not the silver bullet for burnout, but it’s darn ... Read More

We’re fortunate to serve a number of healthcare providers, which is interesting for two reasons. First, healthcare professionals understand the benefits of stress reduction. That’s not a surprise, as the medical research on the link between stress and adverse health outcomes is impressive and growing by the month (download a white paper here).  Stress plays a significant role in all five leading causes of employee death, and costs American businesses over $300 billion every year.  It makes sense that human resources employee benefits teams in the healthcare field would be at the vanguard of employee stress mitigation as business strategy. The second important point is that the healthcare field is a high-stress environment. Employee wellness programs (VacationWellness™ among them) and other stress mitigation efforts are gaining traction exceptionally quickly due the pressure and stress inherent to many careers in the healthcare industry.  Several factors contribute: Healthcare professionals often work long hours, which is a double-whammy.  Long days at work increase fatigue, which lowers immune function and mental stressor coping capacity.  Long days at work also represent the loss of opportunity to spend time in other valuable life pursuits, such as taking care of household needs, spending time with family and friends, exercising, and resting.  The cumulative effect elevates stress levels. Healthcare professionals have enormous emotional investment in their work. Many of us consider our work to be important, and strive to be at our best while performing our jobs, but emotional and cognitive work investment are at a completely different level for many in the healthcare field.  Those providing patient care are often witness to tragedy, suffering, pain, and struggle, and many see families during their most desperate hours.  Hands-on providers are participants in both miracle and tragedy, an emotional roller-coaster with fulfilling highs and devastating lows.  The emotional and mental strain has a very real physical side effect in the form of stress and its many associated maladies. Healthcare professionals work irregular schedules. Patient care is often a 24/7/365 business, requiring providers to work ever-changing hours that often conflict with their natural sleep schedules.  Chronic and acute sleep deprivation reduce coping skills, decrease immune system function, hamper critical thinking and reaction times, and lead to greater aggregate and acute stress. Healthcare professionals are subject to increasing bureaucratic encumbrances. The demands of healthcare legislation, insurance documentation, and haggling with insurance companies over payment for services and procedures, have all added exponential complexity to the professional environment over the past several years, and new medical records requirements promise to provide even more red tape.  Bureaucracy diminishes individual effectiveness, which increases employee stress levels. Human Resources professionals in the healthcare field often see the effects of employee stress in the form of increased workforce turnover, higher absentee rates, increased accidents, greater interpersonal conflicts at work, more employee family difficulties, and even elevated suicide rates.  It’s a challenging environment, and looking after healthcare professionals takes significant effort. Through our interaction with a large number of hospital HR executives, we’ve compiled a list of employee stress reduction best practices to help: Make time off mandatory. Don’t allow healthcare professionals to bank their vacation days.  Force them to get away from work, leave the cell phone and pager behind, and unwind.  As you might have guessed, Vacation Wellness™ can help them make the most of their time away, but the important point is that employees need to take dedicated time to relax.  One to two weeks consecutively is recommended. Offer a robust wellness suite. Healthy behaviors, such as diet, exercise, smoking cessation, talking with professional counselors about difficult life issues, etc., all serve to reduce stress, lower risk of disease, and reduce likelihood of burnout and depression. Stabilize employee work schedules. This is not always possible, but to minimize physiological stressors, employees should not be forced to switch frequently between day, mid-, and night shifts.  A rotation is often required in order to “share the pain” of late night work shifts, but the rotation should last long enough for employees to recover from the change to a new schedule.  One month should be considered the bare minimum. Remain vigilant for adverse signs of stress. Missed work or tardiness, errors while on the job, irritability, difficulty with coworkers, family difficulties, increased smoking or alcohol consumption, or significant changes in diet and mood can all provide clues to an increased stress condition.  Intervene early. Helping the healers is a tough job, but a concerted effort to reduce employee stress through robust employee health and wellness programs, EAP offerings, and old-fashioned care and concern, can go a long way toward keeping your healthcare providers healthy and ... Read More

Employee stress is a big deal.  Many of us understand the concept anecdotally and generically, but with employee healthcare costs rising at ruinous rates (12% per year over the past five years – read more here), it’s probably time to understand the problem a bit more scientifically. The impacts of stress are well documented: One million Americans miss work every day due to stress-related conditions. Stress costs American businesses $300 billion every year. Stress adds 46% to the average annual employee healthcare cost. Stress is a factor in all five leading causes of employee death. When job stress and employee depression team up, company healthcare costs skyrocket 146%. If your company isn’t yet convinced that it’s time to do something about aggregate employee stress levels, we’ve put together a few more arrows for your employee health and wellness quiver. The scientific information comes from a set of unlikely sources:  baboons, monkeys, rats, and government workers (Seriously.  You can’t make this stuff up). Dr. Robert Sapolsky, professor of biology, neurology, neuroscience, and brain surgery at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, has spent 30 years studying baboons.  Baboons are a nearly-ideal parallel cohort to humans – which is a nice way of saying that we really do behave like baboons, so we can learn quite a bit about our own behavior and stress responses by studying our genetic cousins.  Dr. Sapolsky discovered two extremely useful facts: Nearly all baboon stress is socially-induced.  In other words, baboons spent a great deal of time stressing each other out. Chronic Stress Sufferer The level of stress hormones running through a given baboon’s blood depends on his or her social rank within the highly status-sensitive baboon culture. The dominant male doesn’t have much stress.  The lowest baboon on the totem pole, however, is a wreck.  He gets picked on all the time, and enjoys very little control over many significant aspects of his existence, including his access to food and mating partners.  Not surprisingly, the “little guys” – those occupying lower rungs of baboon troop social ladders – have significantly higher levels of cortisol and norepinephrine, the stress hormones responsible for all sorts of systemic maladies.  Status and stress are inextricably linked in baboon society. It’s not just baboons.  Wake Forest University’s Dr. Carol Shively has conducted similar research on a cohort of macaque monkeys, with striking results.  She found strong rank correlations that should give us pause: Despite eating exactly the same foods as their higher-ranking neighbors, lower-ranking individuals developed more midsection body fat.  Midsection body fat has long been linked with other adverse health indicators, such as blood cholesterol, reduced organ function, and increased arterial blockage.  If everything else is equal, does stress make you fatter, and with more adverse fat distribution patterns?  The answer is yes. Lower-ranking individuals had more atherosclerosis, or arterial plaque buildup, than their higher-ranking counterparts.  Stress translates directly to decreased cardiovascular efficiency and resiliency. We’re not terribly different, genetically speaking, from monkeys and baboons.  The lessons about stress should be fairly clear from these two examples alone, but a third study really strikes close to home. The UK’s Whitehall Stress and Health Study followed over 10,000 government service workers since 1985, documenting a number of sociological and health factors to discover correlations.  Because each participant is a government worker, with equal access to the same healthcare programs and facilities, and subject to the same professional stratification structure, the researchers are able to make very clear conclusions without having to adjust findings for significant variations in work environment and healthcare access. Any guess as to what they found? Yep.  More rank equals less stress, which translates to better health.  Less rank equals more stress, leading to worse health.  In fact, the results correlate disease rates and healthcare usage costs as a function of employee rank with alarming precision. It’s bad enough that stress causes health problems.  But there’s significant research indicating that stress dramatically reduces employee productivity as well. Acute stress, such as the approach of a big deadline, a major project proposal, a performance review, an important sales presentation, a corporate inspection, etc, has been shown to reduce cognitive capacity.  Norepinephrine and cortisol (those pesky stress hormones designed to help us fight or flee) actually reduce the brain’s ability to think analytically, synthesize information, and come up with answers to questions that would otherwise be easy and well within our capabilities.  We’ve all experienced this phenomenon in an academic setting, but we’ve called it “test anxiety.”  In reality, it’s the brain’s natural response to stress hormones. When we experience many stressors over time, something much more sinister happens.  Our brain cells actually shrivel and die.  In laboratory experiments, rats subjected to elevated stress hormone levels over prolonged periods of time experienced a reduction in the number and length of dendrites, the “connectors” between brain cells that allow cognition.  This dendritic dilapidation occurred most acutely in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for enabling memory function. Stress, quite literally, kills brain cells.  Stressed employees do not produce nearly as well as non-stressed employees, and a chronically stressed workforce becomes permanently less capable of producing profitable output than a healthy workforce. What does all of this mean?  If you’re an employee health and wellness benefits coordinator, or if you’re in charge of administering an employee wellness program, it’s of paramount importance to address your employees’ aggregate stress level.  You’ll never be able to eliminate rank-based stressors entirely, but you can implement programs that reduce your entire workforce’s stress.  Vacation Wellness™ is one such program (our favorite, in fact, but you probably guessed that already).  It’s effective because it targets stress directly. How effective is stress reduction?  Read a case study here for more information, but it’s fairly clear from the medical research that attempting to reduce your company’s healthcare cost burden without addressing employee stress levels just won’t work. Our stress response is hard-wired.  If we want to reduce the costly effects of excess stress on our workforce, the research certainly points us in the right direction:  we need to simply reduce the amount of stress our employees experience.  It isn’t difficult or costly.  It just requires ... Read More

So you’ve just booked your next Vacation Wellness excursion.  Congratulations!  You’ve joined tens of thousands of savvy travelers who have found a better way to enjoy the world in style, without spending an arm and a leg, and without an ounce of planning hassle. Whether you’re ready to hit the beach with a mai tai and a good book, or excited about indulging your photography passion in Europe’s elegant, historic cities, or anxious to see nature’s splendor in New Zealand’s breathtaking outdoors, we’d like to help you make the most of your time away.  After all, Vacation Wellness is all about better living, and better working, through life stress management.  Your human resources employee benefits folks have provided Vacation Wellness as part of your employee health and wellness programs suite to help you stave off the negative effects of cumulative stress.  So it makes sense to plan a stress-free vacation experience. While you’ve paid up to 2/3 less for your four- or five-star vacation experience than otherwise possible without our Vacation Wellness program, you still want to get the most for your vacation dollar.  So here are a few tips to maximize your enjoyment and relaxation: Plan your packing.  The professional travel agent who planned your Vacation Wellness experience has probably already been in touch with you to email a planning guide for your unique destination.  Use those information gems to start a list of things to bring along with you.  Start the list as soon as you book your trip, and you’ll be able to add to it as you think of things to help make your vacation experience relaxing and enjoyable.  That way, when it comes time to load your suitcase, there won’t be any last-minute stress or panic, and you’ll arrive at your destination with everything you need. Don’t plan redeye travel! Take a day on either side of your planned excursion to travel in a leisurely pace during normal waking hours.  Plan to arrive at your destination at a reasonable hour with plenty of time to get settled, relax, and enjoy your first evening in paradise.  Do the same thing on your return leg, leaving plenty of time to take care of the little things at home before you return to work.  This will prevent a stressful transition from your vacation back to your everyday life. Pick an excursion or two. Adventurous?  Ready to zip-line through the rainforest in Costa Rica?  Excited to snorkel or scuba dive to see the amazing coral reef habitat?  Contact the agent responsible for planning your trip to help you book your excursions in advance.  You’ll often save additional money by booking early, and you’ll ensure your place on the trip.  Don’t worry if you forget this step, as our travel partner’s on-site host will steer you in the right direction and help you make the most of your Vacation Wellness experience. Make plans to do nothing. The research shows that an important part of vacationing is just spending unstructured time with loved ones in a fun, relaxing environment.  Don’t over-plan your vacation time, or you risk returning more tired than you left! DO NOT, under any circumstances whatsoever, bring work with you. Don’t bring your laptop, blackberry, files, or projects, even to work on during travel to and from your destination.  This point can’t be overemphasized – do not succumb to the temptation to even “check in” with work.  While it may take just a few minutes for your boss or colleague to describe the new crisis-du-jour, your mind will spend the rest of the day ruminating, robbing you of the vacation joy and relaxation you sorely need.  We promise that the world will not end while you’re disconnected for a week. It’s really that simple.  We make it as easy as possible to enjoy your time away, but a little bit of planning on your part will take your vacation to the next ... Read More

We talk to hundreds of human resources managers and C-level executives across a very wide swath of industry sectors.  A few interesting and widespread executive delusions have become apparent recently, generally surrounding the topics of best practices for employee retention, current healthcare cost and wellness trends, and today’s employee engagement climate in the “post-meltdown” economy. Some of you will recognize these statements, because you say them.  You might even believe them.  My hope is that if you continue to believe them after reading further, at least you’ll know the magnitude of suspended disbelief you’re indulging.  It’s Hollywood-esque. We’ll start with a good one. Delusion Number One:  “Yeah, healthcare costs are a problem.  But we don’t have an employee wellness program and aren’t considering one.  Money is just too tight right now.  We’re really trying to cut back on our expenses.” Huh?  We’re so busy cutting expenses that we can’t afford to…cut expenses?  The average company spends over $13,000 per employee, per year on healthcare.  That number has risen by 12% per year for each of the last five years.  It’s kind of a big deal for most companies. A benefits manager happily reported that she had expended herculean effort to successfully hold her company’s total healthcare expenditure increase to just under 11% for the year.  Another reported an increase rate in the low 20’s – their plan was more than one fifth more expensive this year than last.  A third benefits coordinator lamented the additional administrative overburden required to unbundle their company’s health plan in order to find piecemeal savings in individual program elements – again to hold their rate increases near 12%. Newsflash:  the supply side of healthcare holds all the cards.  There’s a reason many medical companies are (very quietly) posting record profits.  They’re riding a wave of regulation and demographic influences that might, as some suggest, propel the industry to destruction – but its death will be by gluttony.  Yours will be the opposite fate.  Employee heart surgery and depression costs aren’t going to get cheaper any time soon. Obviously, not everyone is taking the ostrich approach to the healthcare dilemma.   I spoke recently with a benefits coordinator who stood on her CFO’s desk to implement a holistic and comprehensive wellness initiative.  The factual arsenal that won the day?  Just the small item that her personal cost to the company dropped from over $21,000 two years ago to under $700 last year.  How did she reduce her personal healthcare burden to her employer?  Diet, exercise, and relaxation.  Compelling.  Simple.  Profitable. But it’s more than a little surprising – and altogether too common – that it took a William Wallace-like effort to convince the chief bean counter that saving money on healthcare is a good thing.  One of those amazing human paradoxes, I suppose. We’ll move on. Delusion Number Two:  “Our company is a family.  We’ve been through downsizing and have had to cut our benefits and pay, but our remaining 500 employees are loyal and really sticking together and working extra hard to see the company through.  They know we’ll reward them when things turn around.” Not so much. The reality is much different away from the corner office.  Anonymous surveys done by Salary.com reveal that two thirds of employees are job hunting right now. If you’ve had to downsize, whatever sentiment of loyalty that might have existed toward your company before the layoffs was likely quashed by images of equally-tenured, equally-talented cohorts cleaning out their desks or lockers.  In their heads, employees might say “it’s just business, no hard feelings.”  In their hearts, however, there are definitely hard feelings – anger, survivor guilt, and a little bit of betrayal.  It’s human nature to feel those things.  It’s delusional to pretend they don’t exist in your company. Want evidence?  In a recent MSNBC.com poll following the now-famous flight attendant’s famously flamboyant resignation, ten percent of more than 91,000 respondents called him an “idiot.”  Five times as many employees called him a “hero.”  Over 45,000 people admired his “take this job and shove it” departure. That’s a statistically significant figure. If you believe that everyone in your battered, beaten-down, underpaid and overworked workforce is “happy to be here and glad to help the team win,” you’ve attended a few too many shareholder meetings.  You need to hire someone to hang out by the water cooler and report on the real situation.  Taking care of your folks suddenly won’t feel much like a luxury any more. Delusion Number Three: “Our employees have a real sense of duty right now.  They know we need them to work harder than ever and do more with less until we get through this rough patch.” Ask any soldier how the “more with less” program works.  But be sure you have a half hour to hear the angry reply. It’s no different for your workforce.  Making up for a lack of physical resources by overtaxing your human resources is a viable short-term option.  The problem is, if you’re like 98% of businesses out there, the “short-term crunch” is several years old by now.  Your folks are burned out, stressed out, and worn out.  There’s no doubt they put on a brave face for you, but it’s more than time to return to a sustainable employment arrangement. Or else what?  Simple.  They’ll leave.  Talent Management, the Wall Street Journal, HR Magazine, and several other sources have recently featured articles on the looming retention crisis.  To sum up, the “jobless recovery” isn’t actually jobless, and neighboring pastures look greener by the day. What are smart businesses doing about all this? Three things: Smart human resources departments implement employee health and wellness programs. Do it intelligently – be sure to target the two most costly ailments, stress and depression.  Learn more here. Smart CFOs spend a little bit to save a ton.  Take care of your people.  Many benefit programs are exceptionally affordable (many are free, like Vacation Wellness‘ voluntary option), and the research demonstrates that you can get a lot of mileage out of a little care and concern.  Learn more about turnover prevention and cost reduction here. Smart executives guard their employees’ life balance.  Just because your CFO is worried about the books doesn’t mean your employees’ families don’t need them to be present, rested, stable, and relaxed.  And the balance sheet actually does need your employees to be sharp, insightful, and on the ball.  Stop cracking the whip, help them enjoy their time off, and you’ll be amazed at how much better they perform on the job.  Recovering from the economic meltdown will be a marathon, not a sprint.  Better slow down a bit – now would be a rough time to learn about the turnover crisis firsthand. Any war stories of delusional execs?  Any victories in the War on Healthcare Costs?  Any wellness lessons learned?  Better yet, tell us about your summer Vacation Wellness experience!  Please comment below – we’d love to hear from ... Read More

It’s the busy season here at Zoescent as Vacation Wellness™ demand continues to surprise even us, and the demand on our staff’s time continues to rise right along with it.  There’s a mountain of work to accomplish, and not a great deal of time available to get it all done. Conventional wisdom would say that now is not the time for anyone at Zoescent to take a vacation. However, with apologies to Mark Twain, we try not to spend too much time trapped in majority thinking – it’s responsible for such evils as witch hunts and mullets. We don’t want busy, overworked, stressed out, tired employees.  We want productive, engaged employees.  There’s a huge difference. It may sound counterintuitive, but peak season is the most important time to look after employee life balance, for one extremely good reason:  focused relaxation produces sharper employees, who in turn produce better results and offer our customers a more professional, courteous, competent, and satisfying experience. Slowing down gets us there faster. Our folks are brilliant.  But they’ll never remain brilliant if we burn them out. So we locked the doors and cleared the calendar for a long weekend to enjoy mountain biking, hiking, and paragliding in the Tetons near Jackson, Wyoming. Fresh mountain air, incredible scenery, and physical exertion are a miraculous combination to alleviate stress and restore mental, physical, and spiritual clarity. And a little adrenaline does wonders as well – if you’ve never tried paragliding, it’s certainly worth adding to your “bucket list.” What’s our formula?  It’s fairly simple. Make time off a priority.  It’s a necessity just like food, water, and exercise, and your employees need to see YOU taking a vacation yourself, boss!  It sounds scary, but rest easy.  It really works to improve your bottom line, as our case study shows. Do something physical.  Exercise reduces cortisol (stress hormone) levels and increases endorphins, resulting in the feeling of well-being that follows physical activity.  Exercise is just as important for your brain as it is for your body. Get away.  Go someplace fun.  Don’t fool yourself into “staycationing” – it’s not a viable stress reduction strategy, particularly if you telecommute from your home office while taking “vacation” time (peek at our healthcare cost reduction white paper for more). Sleep.  If you’re like most of the planet, you’re not sleeping enough.  Proteins that don’t stack properly – a common biological occurrence inherent to the process of life at the cellular level – are purged from your cells only during sleep.  Translation:  literally every cell in your body is begging you to get some shuteye. Don’t over-schedule your time.  Allow yourself plenty of unstructured hours to do whatever strikes your fancy.  Wake when you’re tired of sleeping.  Eat when you’re hungry.  Be the master of your personal domain.  It’s good for the soul. Convinced, but having trouble getting the C-suite to see the light?  Send them a link to our video to help make the case.  The incredible economic benefits of relaxed employees – and the staggering cost of a stressed-out workforce – is a compelling argument to foster a culture of focused relaxation. Slowing down really does get you there ... Read More

I’m a visual learner with a ridiculously short attention span. . Pictures help. . Just in case I’m not alone, I thought it might be useful to tell the Vacation Wellness™ story in pictures. . Here goes. . . Traditional wellness programs have lots of this… . . . . . . . . and this… . . . . . . . . . and this… . . . . . . . . . . And also some of this…. . . . . . . . . . and a bit of this: . . . . . . . Those are all OK. They’re good for you. . They can help you get from Point A: . . . . . to Point B: . . . . . . Cool. . But not easy. . And sometimes not much fun. . Vacation Wellness helps with a different aspect of your life. Vacation Wellness takes you away from this: . . . . . . and this… . . . . . . . and this… . . . . . . . . . And Vacation Wellness transports you to someplace a little bit better. . Like here . . . . . . . . . . or here… . . . . . . . . Or maybe here… . . . . . . . . Or even here: . . . . . . . . . . So. . ‘How can that be a wellness program,‘ you ask? How can this . . . . . . . . save businesses a bunch of this: . . . . . . . . . . ? . Sound a little confusing? . It’s actually very simple. Vacation Wellness helps you here: . . . . . . . . And staying healthy there helps you stay healthy everywhere else. . We know that because we did a bunch of research, and then wrote one of these things: . . . . . . . . . . which you can read by clicking here. . And if you’d like to find out how much your business can save, we built this handy little guy to help: . . . . . . . . . . He lives right here. That‘s about it. . . We’ll look for you the next time we’re here: . . . . . . . . Until then, be ... Read More

Health Risk Assessments are popular wellness program starting points. They’re commonly thought to be an indication of the aggregate risk baseline of an employee population. Unfortunately, HRAs are usually an indication of the aggregate risk baseline for the wrong end of the health risk cost spectrum. Because they’re nearly universally symptom-based, and the solutions they point to are equally symptom-based, the risk reduction techniques employed rarely achieve the ROI available through attention paid to more causal factors. This is a natural outcome of the source of the wellness genre – which arose from the disease management model that underpins our healthcare system – that we are now understanding to be insufficient and inefficient. In short, we’re chasing horses after they’ve left the barn instead of “shutting the barn door” by creating more positive conditions for lasting health. What are those conditions? Nearly all have psycho-emotional roots. Stress and depression create adverse immediate hormonal and biological responses, and influence adverse health behavior as well, setting up a negative feedback loop. Those patterns eventually manifest in adverse HRA indicators, but they should only be treated symptomatically when acute. How does a holistic approach look from a business return standpoint? We’ve thoroughly researched the literature from both a healthcare cost reduction and work environment perspective, and discovered that even conservative holistic improvement estimates are startlingly significant. It makes sense though – the further upstream you address problem areas, the more effective your intervention can be. We’ve assembled a conservative business savings calculator for our solution of choice based on our research. As can be expected with any mindset shift of significance, employee wellness benefit program managers, human resources directors, employee health and wellness consultants, and other stakeholders in the employee wellness and healthcare cost reduction sphere, are migrating slowly toward more cost-effective, integrative, “upstream” health solutions. Our contribution to the genre is Vacation Wellness™. It’s designed to target stress and depression directly by leveraging the power of destination vacations. It works, it’s inexpensive, and it’s easy to implement. By the way, employees love it. Vacation Wellness has an 89% organic (non-incentivized) participation rate. Click here to see why. While there’s not yet consensus surrounding health risk assessment utility (I think you’ve got a good feel for our opinion), one thing is certain: the information you receive about the state of your employee wellness affairs from any HRA is a collection of lagging indicators. Be sure that the employee wellness benefit package you implement tackles stress and depression directly. Otherwise, you’re in serious danger of paying for pounds of cure when an ounce of prevention is all that’s ... Read More

An existential mind-bender? A quantum riddle? Can an employee wellness program really be an incentive for another health and wellness program? When the incentive is Vacation Wellness™, the answer is a resounding ‘yes.’ Let’s set aside, for a moment, the substantial debate on the true efficacy of incentives as agents of meaningful employee health and wellness behavioral change. It is a significant debate (peek at the Employee Wellness Network, as well as LinkedIN discussions here and here), and opinions vary widely on the degree to which employee wellness programs ought to rely on incentives to elicit desired employee health behavior. On one hand, non-incentivized traditional employee health and wellness programs achieve historically poor employee participation rates – in the single digits for smoking cessation, obesity management, and chronic disease symptom alleviation (see our white paper for more in-depth analysis) – so employee wellness benefit program managers feel compelled to improve participation rates through all means available. On the other hand, incentives for employee wellness program participation have very mixed results, with relatively low average meaningful participation rate increases. Buck Consultants report that despite incentives, only 16% of executives consider their current employee wellness initiatives to be “effective” or “very effective.” IncentOne recently published a research review that examined the relationship between incentive dollar amount and meaningful employee participation via regression analysis of numerous employee wellness program studies published over the years. While the regression line sloped gently up and right (ie, spending more on incentives generally generated more participation), the statistical correlation was horrible – only 37%. For those lucky enough not to have suffered through multiple engineering degrees, that means the various incentivized employee wellness program results that IncentOne studied were all over the map. In other words, many programs without incentives performed better than other programs with incentives. SO, as an employee wellness benefit program manager, you have an important question to answer: should we incorporate incentives into our particular employee health and wellness program? The wellness community doesn’t have a definitive answer for you just yet, so you’ll have to use your best judgment. More than anything else, a successful employee wellness program depends on your leadership and management, and on your specific employee wellness offering itself. However, if you do choose to incentivize employee participation in your traditional wellness program (and by “traditional wellness,” I’m referring to programs that incorporate HRAs, diet and exercise support, smoking cessation, etc), it only makes sense to use an incentive that furthers your employee wellness objectives. Here’s why Vacation Wellness works extremely well to help advance your employee wellness program goals: It’s an effective wellness program in its own right. A large employer with 1,800 employees reduced their healthcare claim expenses by over $2M annually (over 25%) using a Vacation Wellness solution. It enjoys very high organic participation rates – in excess of 89% – because you don’t have to twist your employees’ arms to get them to take premium destination vacations at 30% to 70% discounts. See example employee vacations here. Because of its popularity with employees, Vacation Wellness is a highly effective employee retention technique. By reducing employee turnover rates by just 20%, the average 100-employee professional services firm can save over $875K per year. Learn more about employee retention by reading our employee turnover white paper. Vacation Wellness targets stress and depression directly. Together, stress and depression add 146% to your annual healthcare expenditure – by far the costliest employee health problem (yes, significantly costlier than heart attacks. But read on…). Vacation Wellness reduces heart attack risk. Regular vacationers are 32% (male) and 53% (female) less likely to suffer heart attacks (learn more here). Vacations are the third most-requested employee benefit, behind professional education opportunities and flexible work hours. So in this unique circumstance, it is possible to use a high-value employee wellness benefit as an incentive for your other, less popular employee health and wellness programs. “Great idea. How much does it cost?” You read our minds. We’ve put together an instant price quote engine that helps you compare costs to potential savings and returns on your Vacation Wellness investment. Prepare to be pleasantly ... Read More

Not to step on anybody’s toes, but seriously – this is stress management?!? I won’t name the source, but this tripe is sold and billed as “stress management” in someone’s world. Employees are overworked, underpaid, have had their benefits slashed, and feel relationship and financial pressures at home, and they’re supposed to “stand up and stretch” to relieve stress? Thanks, boss. Instead of patronizing your workforce, how about doing something about stress? No wonder there’s an employee turnover rate crisis developing. If this is the kind of crap that’s passing for stress relief programs at your company, you’re in for a nasty surprise as the economic recovery unfolds. Why is an effective stress management program necessary and essential to controlling employee healthcare expenses and employee turnover rates? Wolff states it pretty well: The stress accruing from a situation is based in large part on the way the affected subject perceives it: perception depends upon a multiplicity of factors including the genetic equipment, basic individual needs and longings, earlier conditioning influences, and a host of life experiences and cultural pressures. In other words, your employees’ perception of their life and work situation is a function of their previous experiences in life in general, but more importantly, their experiences with you as their employer in particular. The way your employees view their circumstances determines the impact of stressful situations on their health and wellness – and hence, on the degree of healthcare, absentee, presentee, and employee turnover costs your business bears. Perceived stress is not an abstract thing. It produces a systemic physiological response encompassing thinking patterns, hormones, muscles, arteries, joints, and internal organs. Wolff’s research suggests stress manifests changes in all of these physiological and mental processes: Appetite and digestion Mental alertness and cognitive function Arterial constriction, reduced renal (kidney) function, and hypertension Skin health Musculoskeletal health Pulmonary function Mental framework and expectation for the quality of the future (ie, positive or negative life outlook) Those are just the processes affected by an employee’s stress reaction to life stimuli. The outcome of repeated stress reactions is often pathological, and deadly. The six leading causes of death – widely considered preventable with appropriate behavioral choices – have been correlated to stress: Heart disease Cancer Stroke Lower respiratory disease (many smoking-induced) Accidents (mental distraction-induced) Diabetes Clearly, your employee benefits related to health/wellness must not only account for stress, but be designed around stress mitigation. Unfortunately, few employee wellness programs target stress directly, and instead struggle to target the side effects of stress, which manifest themselves in a litany of physiological indicators (blood pressure, blood cholesterol, destructive life habits like smoking and alcohol abuse, obesity, etc). Most employee wellness benefits attempt to close the barn door after the horse has left. So, what works? Certainly not a collection of trite, manipulative “Dudley Doright” posters. Among the most effective mechanisms for reducing the stress reaction to life stimuli is affording the opportunity to gain physical and mental distance from the daily routine. Taking time away from work, and away from the everyday home environment as well, gives employees the opportunity to gain perspective on life situations, restore primary relationships, improve physical health, establish new, healthier life habits, and reduce the risk of depression (by up to three times!) and burnout. There’s a term for what I’ve just described: wellness travel in general, and Vacation Wellness™ in particular. Why do you need a program to get your employees to take destination vacations? Because two out of three employees haven’t taken a vacation in over a year, and 43% have no plans to take a vacation this year. American employees leave a full third of their allotted vacation days on the table, which ends up costing American businesses over $532B every year. Why? Three reasons: Employees don’t believe they can afford a vacation Vacations are difficult and time-consuming to plan Employees don’t believe their employers want them to take any time off. Your employees need you to provide a vacation wellness benefit that allows them to take professionally planned premium destination vacations at up to 70% discounts, because doing so removes all three obstacles to the healthy practice of taking regular destination vacations. Sounds great in principle, but how does it work? See an example here. And calculate your approximate business savings here. Then get a quote here. Or have your questions answered here. In the meantime, tear down those patronizing ... Read More