Knowhow: Well Being | The importance of worker wellness programs
Executives, managers, supervisors, and workers as well as union leaders generally agree that employee wellness proves pivotal to competitiveness, productivity and profitability.
Often grudgingly accepted as a cost of doing business — especially in manufac-turing — absenteeism, transitional duty assignments as well as short- and long-term disability impede progress on company timetables and overall growth.
Employee morale often suffers when people are literally limping around.
But those seemingly endless drains on dollars can be reduced, even dramatically so.
Environmental, health and safety professionals understand the interrelationships in manufacturing plants and offices that produce higher quality work in less time as well as savings, and which, in turn, make companies even more competitive and profitable.
Always desirable in its own right, a consistently high level of worker wellness can support a company’s marketplace promises, which, especially in the current demanding economy, can also position a company for swifter progress when customers begin to place more and larger orders.
Where Worker Wellness Can Go
A comprehensive worker wellness program goes far beyond leaving stacks of a flyer in a break room, and it is more than a once-in-a-while seminar.
It only barely begins with a nod toward merely avoiding physical problems in the workplace. And don’t forget that an employee’s off-hours injuries produce on-the-job problems.
The most superior formal employee wellness programs succeed by eventually becoming unnecessary, as their strong educational component drives sound workplace practices into the bedrock of operations. Worker wellness eventually develops into standard operating procedure.
A strong underpinning of corporate-wide continuous improvement is a healthy, productive and value-added workforce. That kind of progress requires proof, including long-term cost reductions.
What To Include
Those reductions, viewed as opportunities in a wellness program, include job hazard analysis; cross training in jobs; identification and correction of painful symptoms in workers; ergonomics for workstation evaluation, posture, body mechanics, stretching and strengthening programs as well as home exercise programs; and, where appropriate, recommendations for medical intervention.
The very finest worker wellness programs perform all of those activities right on the job, around the clock, if necessary.
Then there are a tiny number of wellness programs that develop and deliver definitive documentation detailing cost control and resulting increases in productivity stemming from stepped-up worker wellness.
Even among those few wellness programs are a handful of specialists who provide employer administrative assistance by accelerating the bureaucratic handling of employee conditions and their paperwork.
The outcomes? Process-wide ergonomic efficiencies, behavioral-based and cooperative culture changes, company progress toward continuous improvement and lean manufacturing milestones, and employer-employee enthusiastic involvement in the fundamentals of the superb wellness programs.
Elite wellness programs are proactive, promote early detection of issues rather than late reporting of claims, encourage a zero accident mentality and further the job coaching concept.
More productivity and lower costs, resulting in less down time and a healthier workforce — all documented — summarize the value of the best business-sensitive wellness programs.
Carol Tschirpke is the managing partner of Quality Physical Therapy/BioSynchronistics of Sturbridge. She can be reached at info@biosynchronistics.com.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments