Progressive Companies See Value of Investing In Employee Health and Productivity Management
Sean Sullivan
CEO, Institute for Health and Productivity (IHPM)
By Sean Sullivan
The health and productivity management (HPM) movement in the United States has gained considerable momentum among progressive companies that view their employees as true “human capital” assets rather than just “labor” costs.
Some think that enhanced health promotion and wellness programs comprise health and productivity management, but a fully integrated HPM approach also requires attention to disease and disability management, as well as measurement of the impact of such an approach on the functional health and workplace performance of employees.
Others focus their attention solely on absence management, when the big payoff from HPM comes from reducing the much larger cost of “presenteeism” – the performance losses every day in every workplace from health-related impairments. Dow Chemical Co., a global measurement leader, has calculated these losses at more than twice the total cost of medical care and absenteeism combined.
Where workers are still viewed in Marxian terms as pure “labor costs,” employers of a different ilk are moaning that their employees’ health is not really their business (as if they could succeed in their business with unhealthy employees) and shifting the cost of health benefits to those employees as fast as they can under the euphemistic semantic mantle of “consumer empowerment.”
Workers inarguably need to take more responsibility for their health and for the cost of their healthcare resulting from the use of services driven by the state of their health. Employers cannot realize anything like the true value of their human capital unless they apply management skills to improving and maintaining the health of their workers.
Some older employers continue to view their workers as labor costs and want to shift the cost of their health benefits to U.S. taxpayers through national health insurance. But more employers are seeing the business value of their employees’ health and investing in it to make those employees more productive. This is the big untapped source of competitive advantage for companies worldwide – the health and resulting functional capacity of their workers. U.S.-based multinationals like Dow, International Truck & Engine Corporation, Dell and Intel clearly see this and are acting on it. But so are purely domestic companies like Union Pacific Railroad and Bank Plus in Jackson, Miss., and so did former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who made the improvement of employee health a strategic objective to boost the economic competitiveness of his state. Huckabee recently keynoted IHPM’s Third Annual Health Management Conference, where he received the CEO Award for Leadership in HPM.
The future of HPM in the United States ultimately may depend on whether Dow or older employers provide the example for national health policy. If it’s the older employers, the United States could fall behind its most formidable global competitor – where the HPM model was endorsed by the vice minister of health at the First China Congress on Health and Productivity in Beijing last fall.
Sean Sullivan is co-founder, president and CEO of the Institute for Health and Productivity Management (IHPM), a global enterprise working with employers to improve their employees’ health and maximize its impact on business performance. He is also editor-in-chief of the quarterly magazine Health & Productivity Management.