If yours is a typical workplace, chances are there’s at least one person who’s vowed to lose weight, exercise more, eat more healthily, maybe quit smoking. The new year inspires such healthy resolutions; how often they’re kept is a whole other story.
But smart employers, says Michael Samuelson, will do their best to make those resolutions stick. In fact, they’ll encourage and support workers to make them and keep them.
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Promoting health is good business, says Samuelson, head of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island’s health and wellness division and a national expert, because it reduces health care costs and it makes workers more energetic and efficient.
“When you have a healthy employee, you also have a productive employee,” Samuelson said in an interview. “So it’s not only the right thing to do – it’s the economically right thing to do.”
Of course health is about more than the hours you spend each day at work. An employer can’t control what workers eat for dinner, or make them go for a walk instead of watching TV, or ensure they go to bed early enough.
Yet employers can do a lot more than most realize, Samuelson said.
Take healthy eating. Many large workplaces have their own cafeteria, and a smart employer will make sure workers who use it have access to “healthy choices.” That doesn’t just mean having salads, Samuelson said – though it’s a good first step; you also want to make sure the salads and other healthy options are affordable.
Most often, the opposite is true, Samuelson noted: burgers are cheap, and healthier foods are more expensive. “There should be a premium associated with the unhealthy choice,” he said, “so if you want a burger, it will actually cost you more.”
Vending machines are also important, Samuelson said. Most workplaces have the usual offerings: soda, chips and candy – junk food. But you can replace those things with healthier snacks and juices, especially in the most heavily used machines.
“Then you put the one with the Snickers bars on the third floor, or somewhere less accessible, so you really have to make an effort to get your Snickers bar,” Samuelson said.
To promote exercise, he said, a large employer can set up an in-house gym, and any employer can provide incentives such as gym membership discounts or reimbursements.
To help workers quit smoking, a “campus-wide” smoking ban is most effective, Samuelson said. “It’s one of the best things you can do for your environment, for those who don’t smoke and for those who are trying to quit,” he said.
A campus-wide ban goes beyond the standard indoor smoking ban: It means no smoking outside your building, or in the parking lot, no more easy cigarette breaks and no clusters of smokers next to the doors. At Kansas City Airport, smoking was banned within 50 feet of the property, Samuelson said; to smoke, you would’ve had to stand in the highway.
Samuelson won’t deny that from a smoker’s perspective, this is brutal. “It does touch a nerve, there’s no question,” he said. “There is this perception, and it’s a ‘How dare you?’”
It helps to set up a hotline for a couple of weeks before and after the ban, so workers can get their questions answered and vent their frustration, Samuelson said. That’s also an opportunity to hook smokers up with tobacco cessation programs. And ultimately, he said, “I know a number of places where afterward they have said how much they appreciated it.”
These are all things employers can do to help individuals keep their resolutions. But Samuelson also encourages employers to look at how their behavior, their policies, and the way they set up the workplace, affect workers’ health.
For their own good, Samuelson tells them, they should aim to create “a healthy culture,” not just physically but emotionally and intellectually healthy.
Physically, a workplace is healthier when it has lots of natural light, and workstations are safe and ergonomically sound, Samuelson said. But a healthy culture is also about respecting workers, ensuring they have a voice, and managers set clear expectations and encourage workers to make the most of their talents and skills.
“One of the biggest concerns we see from an economic standpoint and a productivity standpoint is stress in the workplace,” he said. Some stress is actually good, he said – the stress of having a demanding, challenging job – but stress from being overworked, or from poor management, is not good.
One of the best things employers can do, Samuelson said, is encourage workers not to work too late, to go home and spend time with their families, to have a personal life. “As a manager, I have to set an example: I need to be fresh. I need to be healthy. I need to have balance in my life, so I can be productive.”
At the end of the workday, he said, he often goes around the office prodding his staff to go home. “You have to make it clear that you gain no points if you’re a workaholic,” he said. “You’re not going to get promoted; you’re not going to get the bonuses. In fact, I’m going to be worried about you. … It’s about the quality of the work, and they also work a little bit harder for you when they understand that you care about them as a person.”
