The Wellness Corporation
Address: 512 West Main Street, Shrewsbury, MA 01545
Phone: 508-842-2780
Fax: 508-842-6068
Website: www.wellnesscorp.com
Number of Employees: 25 full-time, 3,000 affiliates
Top Executive: James Carbone, CEO; Hamish Blackman, President
Product or Service: Employment Assistance Programs
Year Founded: 1984
The business of prevention
In an office filled with Guatemalan art, Wellness Corporation CEO James Carbone sees his business as a "human asset management company." Talented, creative people are critical to the success and growth of any organization, and expertly managing them sometimes calls for outside assistance.
"We use our expertise in dealing with human beings to help managers with their direct reports," explains Carbone. Since 1984, when he began offering employee assistance programs (EAPs), The Wellness Corporation has evolved into a risk management company. "We limit an organization’s exposure to harmful and costly events by helping to resolve or prevent problems."
Carbone trained as a registered nurse in Minnesota, Boston and Worcester, working in emergency, intensive care and burn units. He later became an insurance executive. In both careers, he learned the value of preventing crises. "I decided early on to get involved in prevention," he recalls.. "An EAP is a way to do that."
An EAP "helps senior management focus on profitability and manage low morale," he explains. Senior-level executives are valuable company assets, yet some possess "terrible interpersonal skills." Without intervention, they could cost their companies dearly as a result of lawsuits from disgruntled employees. "Many of the calls we get are people who feel undervalued by management," Carbone notes.
"Companies want mentally healthy people," he continues. Through an 800 number, employees can reach therapists through some 15,000 international and national affiliates.
To maintain confidentiality, employers only get aggregate reports on numbers of employees using the service. When a company signs up, employees and managers receive training on using an EAP. Employees can access The Wellness Corporation’s proprietary website with thousands of articles and videos on many issues.
Services go well beyond typical EAPs. The Wellness Corporation creates strategic partnerships with companies, colleges and municipalities, offering executive coaching, training and organizational development. It has pioneered many new services to help solve the daily problems that employees and managers face, including most recently "Just in Time Care" for those who need back-up care for elders or children.
Such programs are proven vehicles for cost containment. Helping a problematic manager relate better to female coworkers, for example, could head off a sexual harassment claim, which typically runs about $50,000.
After a sudden employee death, a Wellness Corporation team arrives for a "critical incident stress debriefing," a form of group therapy. Companies often lose 20 percent of their workforce after such an incident, says Carbone. Intervention reduces that figure to 5 percent. The money spent to replace those lost workers far exceeds the fees involved.
Wellness also boasts many college clients, including Yale, Wellesley College and Clark University. One unique service is organizational development projects that follow departmental reorganizations and or other changes that can trigger issues for administrators and faculty.
This spring, Wellness also introduced Student Assistance Programs as a response to troubling statistics on college suicide and depression. Here, counselors are available on the phone 24/7 and can connect students to local clinicians and pay for cab fare to their offices. From a risk management perspective, students need help after most counseling centers close, Carbone points out.
The Wellness Corporations’ mission is also philanthropic. In 2001 the company raised $200,000 and built a medical clinic in the western highlands of Guatemala. Ten percent of the company’s profits are used annually to maintain and stock the clinic with life saving medicines.
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