Brown works with employers to ID best in wellness

So maybe you have started a Weight Watchers program at the office, or a lunchtime walking group. Perhaps an expert has come in to talk about stress management, or about nutrition. Maybe the candy vending machine has been replaced with a fruit basket.
Or perhaps your workplace is one of thousands in Rhode Island that haven’t tried any wellness programs yet at all.
Either way, you may wonder: Do these programs work? Are they worth the cost and effort? And which programs make the biggest impact?
Aided by a grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease – part of the National Institutes of Health – Kim Gans, a researcher and associate director of the Institute for Community Health Promotion at Brown University, has set out to answer those questions, working in partnership with two dozen local employers.
After spending a year and a half doing research on wellness initiatives and the data gathered so far on their effectiveness, Gans this fall began recruiting companies to be part of a two-year study that will test two sets of programs: one focused on weight loss, another on stress management, injury prevention, safety and self care.
For the companies, it’s a chance to get expert help for free. For Gans and her team, it’s a chance to go right into workplaces, deal directly with employees, and quantify results in a far more systematic way than she says has been done before – weighing each worker periodically, for example, to compare the outcomes for participants and non-participants.
“There’s been a lot of research done” on this topic, Gans said, “but not a lot of it has been done in a high-quality rigorous manner.”
“We’re trying to show that with the nutrition, physical activity and weight program, we’ll show lesser weight gain,” she added. “We’re also hoping to show that productivity is better, and we’re hoping to show cost-effectiveness.”
Gans’ approach is also different from most previous projects, she said, in that it will look not only at individual interventions, but also at how changing an entire workplace environment can affect people. That could be valuable for employers, she said, because efforts such as putting up signs to encourage people to use the stairs, and offering healthier cafeteria foods, may prove to be as effective or more effective than, say, paying for Weight Watchers.
“There are less-intensive interventions that are cheaper,” she said. “When this is over, this is all stuff that can be packaged and disseminated to workplaces.”
So far, Gans said, the project has recruited 14 employers in Rhode Island and Massachusetts – among them, Tiffany & Co., Honeywell Sensing & Control, Landmark Medical Center, B.A. Ballou & Co., Instron and Joseph Abboud. Another 10 are needed.
Most have just begun, and only three have hosted their first lecture or other program, Gans said. In general, she said, human resources managers have been “very enthusiastic,” but other managers have been afraid that the project could pull workers away from their jobs.
“So we need to explain and see how we will build it into the company culture,” Gans said, although “a lot of them do see the benefit of it.”
That was a big draw for Honeywell, which was invited to participate, agreed to enroll its Woonsocket plant, with about 150 workers, and is slated to have its first event Dec. 18.
Janice Pollock, human resources manager, said the workers involved are a diverse group – people of all ages, mostly in light manufacturing, but also engineers, and some workers in administrative support, purchasing and planning.
Honeywell doesn’t offer any wellness programs of its own at its facilities here, Pollock said, and “a number of my employees … had been asking what kind of programs could Honeywell provide – could they subsidize Weight Watchers, could they pay people to go to the gym?”
“I figured it was an opportunity to provide something to the employees that they could take advantage of, and there was really nothing to lose,” she said.
And the programming to be offered is really high-quality, Gans noted: lectures and self-directed programs on stress and time management, back care, food safety, home safety and self care for one group, and nutrition lectures and on-site food demonstrations, weight management programs, physical activity programs and walking groups for the other.
The Health & Wellness Institute at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island is lending its expertise to the project, Gans said, and so is Johnson & Wales University. Plus the Brown team will bring research and data-gathering expertise to the table, along with reams of information about wellness efforts in general. •
To learn more about the Working on Wellness (WOW) program, go to www.brown.edu/Research/ICHP/
wow.htm.