Stay Stress Free
It is known that physical disorders can affect a person’s mental health. But it also stands true for the vice versa. Psychological states like depression and stress can lead to poor health state. This will reduce your confidence in managing problems, and hence, affect your productivity.
Today our lives run at super speed. Twenty four hours of a day are not sufficient to complete our errands. Today’s work left is an added work for tomorrow. All these give you nothing but mental anxiety. This mental stress can also put you into addictive habits like smoking, alcohol consumption, increased caffeine intake or overeating. These addictions will further add to your health worries. All this will ultimately drain you, and will affect both your health and work.
It is rightly said that stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness. So, why accept it and make yourself ill? Why become a slave of your own demands? Why suffer when you can do the same work with relaxed mind with the help of a little planning? Work can not be delayed and all demands have to be met. Life has to keep going on, and to keep it running this way you will have to keep your body engine perfectly energetic.
Stress is an every day word today. You are stressed, your spouse is stressed, your kids are stressed, your parents are stressed… all and everyone can get stressed out. There is no age limit to get stressed. But yes, there are solutions to keep yourself and your beloved away from stress. Click on to learn more.
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SMOKING – A Suicide & A Homicide
We all are aware of the fact that smoking is injurious to health. This statement is printed on the cigarette packs but still the packs are sold. The increase in the sales of these cigarette packs is because smoking is an addiction. Some common reasons for getting involved in smoking are peer pressure or following examples of siblings and parents, employment outside the house, stress, homesickness or just as a fashion. May it be any reason for smoking, the bottom line that ‘Smoking is injurious to health’ remains the same.
According to World Health Organization, about 4 million deaths occur in a year from tobacco, which is expected to rise about 10 million by 2030. Tobacco is responsible for about 30% of all cancer deaths in developed countries. Other ill effects are diseases like stroke, myocardial infarction, aortic aneurysm and peptic ulcer.
There is evidence that the earlier a person begins to smoke, the greater is the risk of any life threatening disease to develop, and hence, the life expectancy reduces by almost 25 years as compared to a non-smoker. Smoking brings environmental pollution and the environmental tobacco smoke causes diseases even amongst the non-smokers. Smoking is extremely harmful during pregnancy. The babies of mothers who smoke weigh on an average 200 grams less at birth than those of non-smokers.
WHO has organized “Tobacco Free Initiative Programme” to galvanize global support for tobacco control, and to heighten the awareness of social, human and economic harm caused by tobacco consumption. But no program can be successful without mass participation.
Tobacco is a killer and it should not be advertised, subsidized or glamorized. Smoking is suicidal and homicidal. Suicidal because smoking will leave you vulnerable to several life threatening diseases, and homicidal as by polluting the environment, you are threatening the health of others around you. And no one wants to be criminal, right?
So, dear readers, if you are a non smoker then never fall prey to this addiction anytime in your life. And if you are a smoker then quit smoking. Withdrawal sounds scary and difficult but it is not impossible. By doing so you are not just helping yourself, but also, the nation and the world. Always remember ‘Where there is a will, there is a way!’
Employee Wellness : Should we be monitoring the RoI
Investment in wellness programs is not the self-starter that many would like to believe when it comes to implementation in corporates all over the world. HR managers seem reluctant to adopt despite the benefits being there for all to see based on the implementation in some companies.
As a case in point a recent article , talks about implementation in Lincoln Industries in a 565 employee blue -collar plant environment which has seen a savings of $2 Million for an investment of $400,000 including three full-time employees dedicated to health and wellness. They have also monitored other benefits that accrue and while productivity and morale are difficult to quantify the savings that they have seen in safety witnessed in Worker Compansation claims which have come down from $0.5 Million to $10000 signify the tremendous benefits this offers.
With the advantages of this being obvious, it is difficult at times to understand the reluctance of HR managers and Management teams to implement such programs. One wonders, if industry and country specific data were to be made available would the case for these implementations be stronger.
Right to Health Information
The Right to Information Act (RTI) is arguably the most powerful piece of legislation passed by the Indian government. It is designed to ensure transparency in the working of public organisations and allows citizens access to information about what government bodies are doing – and not doing!
Don’t you think we should also have a Right to Health Information Act, just like we have a Right to Information Act, to help patients to get access to their own medical records. Sometimes these are locked up and hidden away from patients – so that doctors and hospitals block patient access to something as basic as to what their diagnosis is and what treatment is being given for this.
Patients, and their family members need to know that they have a legal right to access their own records. And that no one can refuse to share this with them. Unfortunately, the big hospitals often act as bullies, and refuse to provide this basic documentation to patients.
We had a similar case with one of our corporate client, who got their annual health checkups for employees done at a leading hospital in Mumbai. Since the corporate wanted to provide the Healthizen platform to their employees for managing their and their family’s health, they wanted all their medical records uploaded and accessible on the website. To the HR manager’s utter disbelief, the hospital refused to provide the records to the HR manager on the pretext that it is a policy issue.
So much so for people thinking that their medical records are safe and secure at the healthcare providers!!!
Employees with Greater Health Risks liklier to enroll for Health Programs
Research (of nearly 1.3 million employees, from more than 125 employers) conducted by Gordian Health Solutions, a leading national personal health coaching company, and Memphis-based Health and Performance Resources (HPR) reveals that the common belief that healthier employees are the ones to use employee wellness programs may not be accurate.
This will reassure employers who are questioning whether their programs are targeting and reaching the right individuals.
The result gave the same result even if health status was measured in terms of life stressors, behavioral health problems, acute health conditions, or chronic health conditions. For example, compared to the total study population, Gordian’s health coaching program enrollees had profiles that showed:
- a 5 percent higher rate of acute conditions
- an 11 percent higher rate of behavioral health problems
- a 12 percent higher rate of chronic health conditions
More Employers Offer Incentives for Health
A recent survey (of 225 major U.S. companies employing 7.6 million employees) by the ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC), the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and IncentOne shows that the number of major U.S. employers using incentives to promote employer-sponsored health and wellness programs rose from 62 percent to 71 percent between 2007 and 2008.
The average value of incentives per person per year ranged between $100 and $300, with an overall average of $192 per person per year.
Employers are experimenting with the types of incentives they offer, sometimes offering different incentives and amounts for different types of programs.
The survey also delved into employer expectation for ROI for health and wellness programs, finding that 83 percent of those who have measured are seeing program returns of better than break-even. Employers are using other measures to evaluate program success, such as completion of health risk assessments and program participation. When it comes to incentives, employers are much more likely to reward program participation and completion than to reward employees for meeting specific program goals, such as smoking cessation or losing weight.
This survey shows that employers are serious about understanding the business case for incentives for employee engagement and participation.
Keeping the New Year resolution
Was employee health & wellness on your company’s new year’s resolutions list? Here we are a little over midway into the fourth month of 2008, the time when resolutions start to falter if they haven’t lost momentum completely. Has your employee wellness resolution fallen by the wayside? If so, there are still ways to get back on track.
Healthizen has launched its corporate membership program (CMP) to help organizations keep the workplace healthy. Apart from creating individually personalized health profiles, the Healthizen platform helps organizations structure their workplace wellness programs by providing metadata reports and recommendations based on employee health concerns.
Did you want to facilitate a stress management workshop for your employees? How can you be sure that stress is the top-most concern of your employees?
In the absence of hard data, such decisions are always difficult to make. With the personalized health profiles of each employee on Healthizen , it is now easy to reconstruct hypotheses and draw conclusions.
Health is a prime concern for a lot of employers, what with rising premia, increasing abseenteeism and presenteeism, and increasing lifestyle-related diseases and we have had reasonable success with our CMP program.
What are your views on employee health and wellness? Does your organization care for you?
Health And The Indian Economy
In an interesting article, an IT veteran points out the health ills that are plaguing the Indian IT/BPO industry and makes a case for investment in healthcare for employees wondering if it not already too late…
Excerpts Below…
To many around the world, the Indian IT and BPO industry is the face of the current boom time, of India Rising or of whatever shorthand appeals to the reader or the writer. The industry is represented by NASSCOM, which has lost, through unfortunate coincidence, two of its leaders in their prime. First there was Dewang Mehta, who died at the relatively young age of 40. Dewang Mehta was at the helm of NASSCOM when I worked with a leading IT services provider first in India and then in Europe. He was energetic, enthusiastic and apparently in good health, a description which has also been applied by commentators to Sunil Mehta, a former head of research at NASSCOM whom I never met. Sunil Mehta also was by all accounts in his 40s, when he passed away in late 2006.
To an observer with experience in the nascent heady days of the Indian IT industry, but now with a health hat on, these two untimely demises appear to be more than coincidental. They are probably indicators of the general working practices of the industry, and their long-term health consequences. Such is my interest in the matter that recently a consulting prospect in the IT industry told me, jokingly I was assured, that if I were to get any consulting projects with Indian IT firms, I should keep a firm rein on my desire to make their employees aware of their rights as human beings and as employees, and the need to take stock of their health periodically. Not a good sign of management commitment, is it? But since one swallow does not make a summer, lets examine some trends.
In the 1990s, the industry was characterised by long work hours, even longer during industry jamborees, fuelled by a lot of testosterone and alcohol, never punctuated by exercise or recharge time. Those who left work at 6 or 7 pm were described as part-timers, albeit jokingly and most found it hard to take days off. Women in management roles in the IT industry – not including HR, accounting and software development – were few and far in between, some of whom are now at the helm of leading technology firms in India and elsewhere. Either we played the game by these rules, or we didn’t; but some of us struck hard bargains about working to different rules and were supported by our managers. Many of my colleagues from that time are still in the industry but experiencing, despite being relatively young, chronic problems such as overweight, neck and back pains, high blood pressure and cholesterol, and in some cases, the need for untimely bypasses.
Through the noughties however, with India being described as the world’s back office and increasingly the front office, the nature of work has changed slightly. And to already well-ensconced bad health habits – including lack of exercise, lack of regular health check ups, regular consumption of scrumptious but artery clogging foods – some new culprits have been added. To long work hours, we have added irregular work times, including night shifts, and an upward trend in eating out. The former does a lot more damage than just interfere with the normal circadian rhythm of the body. These ill effects are widely studied and well-documented. The latter, while almost always foods rich in sugar and fats, is made possible by good monies being made by young people too tired to cook or to relax otherwise after long work hours. There are some signs that more and more young people in urban areas are now taking to gyms, but with a greater focus on trendiness and appearance than on health and in the absence of solid data, it is moot whether actual exercise taking has increased.
Statistical data about India, that allow the examination of a correlation between working hours and chronic health problems, or even comparisons with data from other countries, are hard to come by. But the link itself is well understood.
In the interest of ensuring that the Indian economic boom does not become a one-time burst but remains sustainable in its growth, it is well-worth asking whether it is time we started investing in the health of the workforce today. Awareness, capacity and delivery mechanisms are all essential, but in a corporate context, what is required above all is management commitment. And to that end, I hope NASSCOM – and the Indian IT industry – bosses are listening.
$237 billion : Why do we not care
In a recent article, Indra Nooyi, chairman and chief executive officer, PepsiCo Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman, World Economic Forum have covered the impact of companies commitment to employee wellness in the workplace on a global scale.
The WHO estimates that China will lose $558 billion, India $237 billion and Russia $303 billion in national income from 2005-2015 due to heart disease, stroke and diabetes.
Professor K. Srinath Reddy, president of the Public Health Foundation of India, has said that “heart disease is the number one killer throughout India. By 2030, 18 million potentially productive years of life will be lost.”. Recent studies show economic losses in developing countries will threaten the stability of social security systems in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations. So while the problem is local, the impact will be increasingly global.
Yet, there are practical, tangible steps, which can be taken now. The role of the workplace, as integral to addressing the major causes of death and disease in adults, was first recognized by the international AIDS community. Their energy and expertise propelled workplace AIDS programs to the highest levels of government and corporate attention.
There is incredible potential for nearly 3 billion productive people in labor markets around the world to affect change in the workplace. We must now ensure that heart disease, diabetes and cancers – by far the largest contributors to ill health and premature death at work – receive the same attention as the AIDS epidemic.
The private sector has the tools and knowledge to address most major health problems in the workplace. Tobacco cessation programs and smoke free workplaces work; screening and treatment for high blood pressure and cholesterol works; stress management programs work.
The recently completed WHO/World Economic Forum joint report on workplace wellness indicates that workplace programs targeting physical inactivity and unhealthy dietary habits, are effective in reducing the risks for major non-communicable diseases in a cost-effective manner. Further, it highlights key elements for the development of sustainable wellness programs and includes examples of successful programs implemented in countries as diverse as India, Malaysia and the US.
Some steps are simple – such as providing affordable, nutritious foods and access to physical activity – but there are tough problems still to solve and answers will only come through collaborative innovation. For example, a relatively new frontier for wellness is obesity. There is no major success story of reducing obesity levels in a large workplace setting and sustaining it over time. We have yet to pull together our best efforts to simultaneously address the input of calories and working to drive calories out by engaging employees in becoming more physical.
A good company does more than focus only on short term profits – it makes products that responsibly nourish people and societies, minimizes the impact on the environment in which it operates and cherishes its employees. A work environment which enhances health and wellness demonstrates to employees their importance to the company by enabling them to live life to its fullest.
This is a challenge that cannot be tackled just by medical and health services. It will take a companywide effort to make a difference. And for us to sustain the impact it will demand full involvement of the community.
Employee Wellness: An Indian Survey
Indian Council For Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) in its study based on a survey of disparate companies across 15 states of India, showed 12% of blue-collar workers were at a high risk of getting a debilitating disease compared to 4% of the medium and senior-level employees.
While blue-collar workers are generally afflicted with acute as well as chronic infectious diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS, senior executives are more prone to lifestyle diseases, owing to lack of exercise and dietary control.
ICRIER’s survey corroborates what Apollo Hospitals found in its study ‘Health and Wellness Survey (2003)’. The study said more than half of the executives were prone to lifestyle diseases. And nearly 71% of the employees and 82% of CEOs were overweight. It had also found nearly 48% of the employees and 69% of CEOs were physically unfit.
The direct impact of employee sickness is reflected in man days lost. ICRIER’s survey shows almost a quarter of the companies lose approximately 50 man days in a year due to sickness. Another 34% companies lose between 10 to 50 man days. This translates into an equal percentage of loss in their productivity and bottomlines.
The survey notes that companies are aware of how employee sickness affects their bottomlines. To mitigate some of the cost, two-thirds of respondent firms have introduced preventive healthcare as part of their corporate governance strategy.
However, less than one-third make provision for the whole range of preventive healthcare measures for their staff. Many of them feel providing health insurance is good enough.
The report also suggests a well-designed employee wellness programme by companies could lead to 25% reduction in their health-plan costs, sick leave, disability pay and workers compensation. Reducing just one health risk increases an employee’s on-the-job productivity by 9% and cuts absenteeism by 2%.
The report sums up with some suggestions both for the government and India Inc. These include conducting a health audit of all employees at regular intervals, introduction of preventive healthcare benefits and vouchers.
