Why your business needs a wellness program

Are your company's health care premiums outrageous? If you have noticed a large increase in your company's health care expenses it may be time to consider implementing a wellness program. What is a wellness program exactly and how will it be the solution to your company's expensive healthcare costs and other expenses? A wellness program is designed to help you and your employees focus on your health and to start working on getting your bodies in shape. When you allow an inactive lifestyle to combine with unhealthy eating, your risk of heart disease is pretty high but you also have other concerns that develop. If your entire staff is living in this manner it can leave you to struggle with higher health care premiums and expenses. The company will need to pay for being in a high risk insurance pool but they also have to pay for the cost of lost labor, lost production, sick leave, and also training of temporary employees to shoulder the workload of the sick employees can all increase your companies employee health costs.

The Benefits of a wellness program
The productivity of your workforce depends mostly on the health of your staff. If you have a lot of employees that are sick and taking time off work or ones that are not putting in all the right effort to their job, it makes the workload fall to the shoulders of your other employees. This will make them frustrated and stressed out because they not only need to do their jobs but the jobs of their co-workers as well. This is one of the fastest ways to reduce employee morale. Wellness programs will help your employees to stay healthier so that they do not end up taking time off work and making others complete their workloads. Here are some of the other benefits you can expect with a wellness program:

• Decreasing absenteeism


• Decreasing workers compensation claims


• Improving job satisfaction


• Reducing turnover


• Improving production


• Having a healthy and productive workforce

Financial impacts of a wellness program
As you can see the benefits of a wellness program through morale you will be able to see them through a number of financial improvements. Here are some of the proven statistics pertaining to the financial benefits of a wellness program:

• For every dollar you spend on a wellness program you can expect a return of $2-$10. It depends on the participation of your employees along with theprogram you have chosen to implement.


• Employees that smoke raise health care costs by 18-25% compared to their healthy co-workers. This cost is also growing higher for obese employees as they are frequently visiting the doctor and they have a higher risk of many health problems from heart disease to digestion concerns.

Employees that are in good health are less likely to visit the doctor and this will decrease your companies health care costs. You may be able to place your company into the lower risk insurance pool so that you aren't as likely to pay as much for health insurance. This savings is not only beneficial to your company but your employees will feel it as well since they are less likely to pay higher premiums for it.

Implementing a wellness program
A wellness program is very cost-friendly and easy to implement. You can start it within a few days just by scheduling a meeting to talk to your employees about it and to determine what type of things they would like to see happen with a wellness program. Begin by offering the employee's time to exercise on site or to offer them healthier eating choices. Initially you may need to start out small but the wellness program can easily increase over time and become quite successful.