Author: Rebecca Vesely

In an effort to inspire employees to take charge of their health, Kaiser Permanente in May launched an online nutrition program to encourage employees to eat more fruits and vegetables every day.

Called Mix it Up, the program has a database of more than 120 possible fruits and vegetables to choose from. Employees signed up with the goal of eating at least five servings of produce per day. They have logged in to the site through their computer or a smartphone application, clicked on images of the produce they ate, then dragged them over to a virtual blender. Mix it Up then added up the number of fruits and vegetables eaten per day and tracked progress over time.

Mix It Up is just one example of team wellness challenges that are catching on at companies nationwide. Team-wellness challenges at the workplace are relatively new, says Steven Noeldner, principal and senior consultant at Mercer. It’s part of the “gamification” of workplace wellness programs, he says.

Indeed, wellness gaming companies such as Keas of San Francisco and Kairos Labs of Seattle are harnessing mobile technology and online social networking to get people to change their behavior.

A total of 13,350 employees participated in the six-week Mix It Up challenge. Registrants could sign up individually or as a team with colleagues. Forty-four percent chose to work as teams, while the other 56 percent took the challenge as individuals. Seven hundred teams participated in Mix It Up over the summer.

While Kaiser Permanente did not specifically encourage team participation, it found that teams ate more fruits and vegetables than employees doing the Mix it Up program on their own, says Nancy Vaughan, vice president of national accounts at Kaiser Permanente.

More than twice as many people on teams completed the challenge as those who competed individually. And though more people registered as individuals, team participation success was about double that of individuals. Overall, 32 percent of all participants increased their fruit servings, while 29 percent of participants increased their vegetable servings, the Oakland, California-based integrated health system says.

While there is little research on team versus individual outcomes in wellness programs in the workplace, anecdotal evidence suggests that team challenges can be an important motivator, Noeldner says.

“More people tend to participate on team challenges; people do like competition,” he says. “It’s not inconsistent from what we know from behavioral economics.”

However, Noeldner cautions that employers should view team challenges as just one aspect of their wellness offerings.

“These activities are typically short in duration,” he says. “I think there’s some limits to it.”

While most people would benefit from adding more fruits and vegetables to their diet or walking several times per week, other aspects of their health status also need to be addressed, Noeldner says. For instance, a diabetic would benefit from a tailored, ongoing program that could include a personal coach, he adds.

Challenges can lose their novelty as well. “Any organization that uses these types of campaigns has to think about changing them regularly,” Noeldner says. “There’s a clear drop-off in the number of participants in repeat campaigns.”

And some team challenges can have unintended consequences. Team weight-loss challenges have spurred the use of diuretics, laxatives and crash dieting at some workplaces, he says.

“Often times, short-term contests don’t support long-term healthy behavior changes,” he says.

Rebecca Vesely is a writer based in San Francisco. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

Employers in Hawaii are in the midst of implementing one of the nation’s toughest laws protecting workers who are victims of domestic or sexual violence.

The law, known as Act 206, requires all employers in the state to provide “reasonable safety accommodations” to workers who are being harassed by their partners and on the job. This includes offering them flexible work schedules and changing work extensions or phone numbers, transferring shifts, desks or work sites.

Employers with an employee who is being harassed must also provide security such as training a front desk staff to bar an abuser from entering the workplace. Employers are exempt if the accommodation would cause “undue hardship.”

The law, which was enacted in October 2011 and went into effect Jan. 1, stems from a case on Maui of a female restaurant worker who was fired after a restraining order against her abuser was faxed to her workplace.

Although employers in Hawaii are largely supportive, some are seeking more guidance and clarification on its provisions.

“A lot of members were already providing reasonable accommodations for their workers prior to the mandate,” says Sheri-Ann Lau Clark, general counsel for the Hawaii Employers Council, which has about 800 members on the islands. “Many felt that it didn’t need to be required.”

Some companies are working with victims groups to implement the law and communicate it to workers. They are building on awareness campaigns and Domestic Violence Awareness month, which was in October, to ensure that more employers and employees know about the law.

Other states have laws protecting workers from violence, but Hawaii is among the most stringent, says the Washington-based group Futures Without Violence. For instance, Illinois has the Victims’ Economic Security and Safety Act, which since 2003 has provided workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to seek medical or legal help or safety assistance planning if they or someone in their household is a victim of domestic or sexual violence. The law also prohibits employers from discriminating against employees who are victims of domestic or sexual violence.

Jody Moran, a partner with employment law firm Jackson Lewis in Chicago, says such laws are important. “Part of what these laws are trying to do is foster communication between the employer and the employee,” she says.

More states are passing laws that protect domestic violence victims in the workplace, says Maya Raghu, policy and program attorney at Futures Without Violence, who called Hawaii’s new law “very comprehensive.”

Maryland passed a law in April that allows victims of domestic violence who must leave their job for safety reasons to collect unemployment insurance, Raghu says. Maryland Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, whose cousin was killed by her estranged boyfriend in 2008, backed the measure.

Hawaii already has a leave law for victims on the books, which provides up to 30 days of unpaid leave to workers at companies with 50 or more employees, and up to five days of leave at companies with fewer than 50 employees. Employees must have worked for the employer for six months before being eligible for the leave.

Still, Nanci Kriedman, CEO of the Domestic Violence Action Center in Honolulu, called Act 206 “stunning.”

“It means employers can’t discriminate against victims of domestic violence,” Kriedman says.

It’s not uncommon for women being abused to lose their jobs, she says. “Domestic violence programs get inquiries from survivors who face employment discrimination, are dismissed or terminated.”

Act 206 doesn’t specify whether workers could receive time off as a “reasonable accommodation” and, unlike the victims leave law, there’s no waiting period for newly hired workers.

“There’s a little bit of conflict and confusion here,” Lau Clark says. “It seems to cover leave, but how much? And who is eligible?”

Workers being harassed can substantiate their situation through a police report or court restraining order or letter from an attorney, counselor, health care professional or clergy member, the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission says.

However, Act 206 doesn’t require harassed or abused workers to notify their employer when they no longer need protection.

“One frustrating aspect to this is that employers provide training and resources and sometimes the victim of the domestic violence won’t leave their abuser,” Lau Clark says. “There’s no requirement of notice in the law that the employee no longer wants protection.”

She cited the case of one large employer in Hawaii that had trained security guards to ensure an offender would not come on site, but the employee would not leave the abusive situation at home.

“That’s frustrating for employers,” Lau Clark says. “They want their workers to be safe and they want them to come to work and be productive.”

Act 206 states that employers cannot require workers to prove their victim status within six months of providing documentation. In other words, employers can’t continually ask workers to prove the abuse is ongoing.

The Domestic Violence Action Center in Honolulu is rolling out a program to educate employers in Hawaii about Act 206. The program will teach benefits managers, supervisors and other leadership to assess domestic-violence situations and respond appropriately.

“We want companies to convey to employees that this is a supportive workplace and that they want workers to retain their jobs,” Friedman says. “The expectation is that when companies start talking about this, employees will come forward.”

Rebecca Vesely is a writer based in San Francisco. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

The 1980s marked the rise of the “yuppies”—a new generation of ambitious young men and women entering the workforce seeking wealth and status. With it came the glamorization of corporate culture by the likes of Donald Trump and Michael Milken, later dramatized in the 1987 movie Wall Street, starring Michael Douglas, whose corporate-raider character Gordon Gekko coined the phrase, “Greed is good.”

By the end of the decade, the country was in recession and Milken was in jail. The Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall fell. The country as a whole ended up rejecting much of what came out of the ’80s—from big hair and dyed mohawks to the synthesizer rock found on the new cable station MTV.

But some things were here to stay—not just MTV, but a new awareness about fitness and health. C. Everett Koop, who served as U.S. surgeon general under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, was one of the first to sound the call. Early in his term, Koop wrote a scathing report on tobacco that likened the addictive properties in nicotine to those found in heroin and cocaine. Koop challenged Americans to “create a smoke-free society in the United States by the year 2000.”

In April 1984, Boeing Co. took up that challenge and became the largest U.S. corporation to ban smoking in the workplace.

A Personnel Journal feature story titled “No Smoking,” which was written by William L. Weis, an associate professor at Seattle University, covered the news. In the article, Boeing’s then-president Malcolm Stamper ushered in the workplace wellness movement declaring that it is a company’s responsibility “to provide the cleanest, safest and most healthful environment possible for its employees.”

The Boeing campaign started with select buildings. By 1994, smoking was effectively banned in all Boeing facilities, though other forms of tobacco were allowed, a company spokesman says. In 2004, smoking was only allowed in designated areas on campuses, and by 2009, Boeing’s entire workplace was tobacco-free. Today, Boeing invests about $30 million annually on wellness programs for workers, and works in partnership with the American Cancer Society to encourage employees and their spouses and domestic partners to quit tobacco.

Employer intervention in the health and wellness of workers has over the past 35 years evolved from a hunch that a healthier population could lower health care costs to a science of studies and sophisticated data-based research. What started as a single program aimed at a specific group (like smokers) has become, for many U.S. employers, a philosophy that adopting a culture of health is a pillar of overall corporate success.

David Anderson, senior vice president and chief health officer at StayWell Health Management in Minneapolis, recalls that when he started working on wellness programs in the late 1970s, it was still commonplace to see ashtrays atop conference-room tables. “Smoking was the first major shift we saw at the work site,” Anderson says, calling the Boeing announcement in 1984 a “pretty big step at the time.”

The first workplace wellness interventions involved building on-site gyms for top corporate executives in the 1970s. This coincided with Congress creating in 1976 the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, which set benchmark goals for improving the health of U.S. citizens through programs such as the Healthy People 2000 and 2020 campaigns, science-based national objectives to improve the health of all Americans, and has raised national awareness about population health.

Some early corporate adopters in the late 1960s and 1970s began ordering full physicals on employees, including chest X-rays. DuPont Co., Kimberly-Clark Corp. and several major life insurance companies led this trend, veterans of that era say.

“But that was recognized as probably overkill in terms of costs and predicting disease,” says Steven Noeldner, partner and senior consultant at Mercer, who entered the workplace wellness field in the 1970s.

Early efforts to instill a culture of health at work were typically driven by a single corporate executive who had a personal interest in fitness, experts say.

But by the time of Boeing’s announcement, a larger fitness craze had seized the nation, spurred in part by Jane Fonda’s blockbuster 1982 exercise video Jane Fonda’s Workout. Employers caught this wave by building on-site fitness centers for all employees and implementing health promotion programs.

“It was about encouraging people to become more involved and engaged in their physical health,” Anderson says. “That was characteristic of the programs at the time.”

Also driving enthusiasm for workplace wellness campaigns in the 1980s was the rising cost of health benefits. This accelerated in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the nation’s employers saw double-digit premium increases. In 1988, for instance, the average cost of employer-based health coverage jumped 18.6 percent over the previous year, Noeldner says.

“This ushered in an era of more rigor in the science” of studying and assessing the quality and effectiveness of wellness programs, he says. “There was more retrospective review of the effectiveness of programs.”

In 1987, StayWell, along with actuarial firm Milliman & Robertson (now called Milliman Inc.), released a study showing for the first time that common health-risk factors such as smoking, obesity and not wearing seat belts were strongly linked to higher health care costs. Subsequent studies backed those findings.

“It got employers very interested in costs,” Anderson says.

Prior to that, fitness centers and wellness programs were just perks. “There was no compelling data that fitness centers could attract and retain employees,” Anderson says. “It was a kind of free-for-all.”

Johnson & Johnson also published one of the first comprehensive studies on employer health and associated costs, tracking employees from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. By intervening and encouraging workers to adopt healthier habits, Johnson & Johnson was able to show annual health care cost savings, grabbing other large employers’ attention. Johnson & Johnson then packaged their health promotion strategies into a product to sell to other companies under the Live for Life brand, still in existence today.

“It was a breakthrough,” says Ron Goetzel, research professor and director of the Institute for Health and Productivity Studies at Emory University.

In the 1980s, research on wellness programs was very basic, but gradually more sophisticated researchers got into the field and started conducting studies that controlled for outside factors, Goetzel says.

For instance, some early studies showed that wellness programs saved employers money when comparing the health care costs of participants vs. nonparticipants because participants spent fewer health care dollars. However, these studies didn’t control for other factors. Typically, participants in health interventions are healthier and more motivated to begin with, so they cost less even without wellness programs, Goetzel says.

“You were really looking at two different populations,” he explains: the motivated and healthy and the less motivated and unhealthy.

By the 1990s, researchers were able to parse out some of those subtleties and give employers more nuanced information about programmatic success.

The ability to track changes in employee health status and costs also revolutionized the research, Goetzel says.

The use of health-risk assessments to evaluate and track employee health became commonplace in the 1990s. Today, annual health-risk assessments are routine at many companies, with 70 percent of large employers and 34 percent of small employers offering them in 2011, according to Mercer.

Health-risk assessments are a valuable tool to track behavior over time, but just one in the arsenal that today includes insurance claims data and other measurements that allow employers to get a clearer picture of their workforce’s total health over the years.

The more rigorous research grabbed the attention of employers. In 1998, a study of 50,000 employees published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine indicated that a quarter of total employee medical costs were associated with three areas: tobacco use, diet and exercise, and stress. The study also found that behavioral issues such as stress, depression and anxiety have higher associated medical costs than traditional risk factors. Goetzel and StayWell’s Anderson were the study’s lead authors.

Known as the original HERO study, short for Health Enhancement Research Organization, it made waves among employers, and garnered front-page coverage in the Wall Street Journal.

But a shift happened in the 1990s that threw the burgeoning wellness industry onto the wrong track, Anderson says. Employers began using health-risk assessments to identify and target only the sickest and unhealthiest workers for interventions, putting all resources into this subset of employees. “I sort of liken it to bailing water from the Titanic,” he says.

Research has since shown that if employers zero in on only the 20 percent of the population costing the most, some of the 80 percent of healthy people will slip into the unhealthy category. “The learning from this was: You can get high-risk people to change, but unless you pay attention to the whole population, you are just going to get more high-risk people,” Anderson says. “You need to always be working upstream to keep the healthiest people healthy.”

Dee Edington, founder of the Health Management Research Center at the University of Michigan, couldn’t agree more.

“After 30 years, we know the real advantage is helping healthy people stay healthy,” Edington says.

Employers can do this by transforming the workplace into a culture of health, research shows. Edington points to smoking as an example.

“What really changed is that we made it an environmental issue. We started talking about second-hand smoke,” he says. Engaging the total population instead of just targeting the hard-core smokers helped shift the entire culture away from smoking, he says.

Boeing appeared to be trying to do that in 1984. The then-Seattle-based airplane manufacturer (it has since moved to Chicago) started in 1981 to pay for smoking-cessation programs, offer reduced gym memberships, on-site exercise classes, and softball and volleyball leagues. Boeing also gave $200 to every smoker who quit.

Edington says research shows that incentives should get into the hands of the healthiest. “Don’t give $100 to the smokers,” he says. “Give $100 to the nonsmokers.”

Companies are increasingly tying health care premiums to health status, where smokers pay more for coverage, Mercer’s Noeldner says.

This trend will likely accelerate with implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, experts say. The federal health care reform law, recently upheld by the Supreme Court, gives employers more leeway in terms of tying participation in wellness and disease-management programs with health care cost-sharing between employers and workers.

It’s a far cry from 20 years ago when Noeldner recalls observing smoking-cessation classes that showed participants a jar of used cigarette butts and pictures of patients with advanced throat cancer. Noeldner even remembers a class where participants were “smoking their brains out” while the instructor wore a gas mask.

Not only have the methods of interventions changed, but so have their delivery. Desktop computers and the Internet led to wellness programs in the cubicle with online coaching through chat rooms and instant messaging, computer games and social networking.

“As robust as the Internet has been, the health management arena is really just starting to pick up,” Noeldner says. “It’s only emerged in the past few years, not in the past 10 years.”

This is happening in the form of mobile apps especially, he says. “Everyone is trying to translate programs to portable devices,” he says.

Anderson agrees that the next decade will be about harnessing technological advances to engage and support employees in their health management.

“The last 10 years brought the strengths of the 1980s and 1990s together,” Anderson says.

In the ’80s, employers realized they needed to get involved in wellness. In the ’90s, they began using data to segment their workforce and target specific groups. By 2000, employers learned they had to work on total population health and target certain groups with appropriate programs, he says.

Interest in programs that aim to increase worker productivity has waxed and waned over time, Noeldner says. Today, there is renewed enthusiasm in productivity studies because of globalization. In countries where health care costs are fairly fixed or stable, multinationals are looking at productivity more closely.

“It’s still one of the tougher aspects to quantify,” Noeldner says.

What’s sure is, over the past three decades, workplace wellness has been embraced at the C-suite level.

“Thirty years ago, employers didn’t know what in the world we were talking about,” Anderson says, with some describing workplace wellness as “fluffy” or “New Age.”

But rising health care costs, tangible research results and sophisticated data-gathering techniques have changed their tune.

“Now wellness is integrated into the business strategy and mission statement,” Anderson says. “They are articulating wellness as shared accountability.”

In 2011, 87 percent of large employers described wellness as a leading corporate strategy, according to a Mercer report, Noeldner says. “It’s pretty much in the fabric of how employers deliver benefits today,” he says.

But the veterans interviewed for this article agree that workplace wellness still is evolving.

“Everyone needs to acknowledge that what we are trying to do is very, very hard,” Goetzel says. “Smoking is a great example. You can get the population to change. But look at the issue of obesity. We are going in the opposite direction. There are underlying factors driving all of this, and the employer plays an important role.”

Edington is more pessimistic when looking in the rearview mirror.

“We lost the 20th century in America,” he says, pointing to rising rates of diabetes and obesity. “We’re still No. 1 in terms of health care costs.”

Rebecca Vesely is a writer based in San Francisco. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

Employees are more distracted at work by personal relationships than they are by mobile phones or social networking, a new survey has found.

The findings are contrary to previous surveys that suggest workers are increasingly distracted by online communications such as Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging.

Some 22 percent of employees surveyed said “personal relationship issues” were their biggest distraction at work, the poll by ComPsych Corp., a Chicago-based employee assistance program provider, found.

By contrast, just 4 percent of those surveyed said personal communications tools such as a mobile phone, email, instant messenger or social media were the top distraction at the workplace, the poll of 1,236 workers found.

A far bigger distraction was “co-workers who want to chat,” with 19 percent of respondents citing this as the biggest reason they aren’t getting work done.

Sixteen percent said “challenges with work relationships” were their top distraction, and 15 percent said financial/legal problems were the issue most interfering with their ability to concentrate and get work done, the poll found.

Dave Pawlowski, clinical manager with ComPsych, says employees are using online communications at work, but many simply don’t view them as a distraction.

“They may be using these tools, but they are not seeing them as a distraction,” he says. “They see these things as helping them keep in touch. They are meaningful but not a distraction.”

By contrast, a marriage in trouble or a quarrel with a loved one can take precedence over work duties.

“Any time a personal relationship outside of work is not going well, that is a distraction,” Pawlowski says. “When it is going well, it gives people energy. They are better able to deal with anything going on in their lives. It works both ways.”

Employee assistance programs, or EAPs, can help people with interpersonal problems and stresses at home and thus make people more productive at work, he says.

The ComPsych findings contrast with previous surveys that indicated that social networking, email and other communications are interfering with work productivity. Among the earlier surveys was a report from Harmon.ie in May 2011 that indicated that these tools are costing employers millions of dollars each year in lost productivity.

The Milpitas, California-based company’s survey of about 500 employees found that nearly 60 percent of work interruptions involve email, social networks, text messaging or instant messaging, or switching computer windows between tools and applications.

Some 45 percent of employees work only 15 minutes or less without getting interrupted and 53 percent waste at least one hour each day due to distractions of all types, translating to millions of dollars in lost workplace productivity, that survey found.

Nearly half of employees surveyed said their workplace had blocked access to social networks such as Facebook in an effort to curb digital distractions. Six percent said their workplace had instituted a “No Facebook Fridays” policy banning the social network one day per week, the survey showed.

During the next few months, salaries and perks that leading corporations pay their chief executives will surely make headlines again as publicly traded firms begin filing 2011 year-end financial statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Executive pay has become a hot-button issue as the gap between the average worker’s salary and that of the top boss continues to grow. But a new report suggests that corporate boards of directors are becoming increasingly wary of so-called golden parachute severance agreements.

While the average golden parachute has jumped 32 percent in value during the past two years, pressure from shareholders—as well as new SEC disclosure rules—are driving a trend toward performance-based executive compensation, according to Alvarez & Marsal Taxand, the tax advisory affiliate of global professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal in Dallas.

The firm analyzed current golden-parachute contracts, also known as change in control arrangements, at 200 top publicly traded U.S. companies. The average payout to top executives included in the study was $30.2 million in 2011, up from $22.9 million in 2009 but still down from $38.4 million in 2007.

However, the biggest factor driving up payouts today isn’t cash, but rather long-term incentives such as share performance. Long-term incentives comprised nearly 60 percent of the value of golden parachute agreements in 2011, according to the report.

“The idea is you get paid when shareholders are winning,” said Brian Cumberland, managing director of Alvarez & Marsal Taxand’s compensation and benefits practice.

About half of the 200 companies studied provide some form of excise tax gross-up to CEOs. But that is changing. For instance, 80 percent of top information technology companies that provide excise tax gross-ups have publicly disclosed their intention to phase them out, according to the report.

Golden parachute agreements are meant to align the CEO’s personal incentives with those of company shareholders, but they don’t appear to be achieving this goal, said Dirk Jenter, associate finance professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

In a December 2011 paper, Jenter looked at CEO age and company acquisitions and found that companies are far more likely to be sold when the CEO reaches retirement age. More specifically, the probability of a firm being acquired jumped by 50 percent when a chief executive reached 65 or 66 years old. Younger CEOs were much less likely to agree to a sale, Jenter said.

“The fact that we are finding this pattern suggests golden parachutes don’t work the way they are supposed to work,” Jenter said. “It doesn’t appear they are calibrated to give CEOs the right incentives.”

For younger CEOs, golden parachute contracts should be richer so there is more incentive to sell when the right deal comes along, Jenter said.

New SEC disclosure rules on executive pay mean golden parachutes might not be so golden in the future. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 requires companies to report additional disclosure on golden-parachute agreements in connection with mergers and to hold more frequent shareholder votes on these contracts. The SEC adopted the change in 2011.

For some shareholders, these changes can’t come soon enough. Since 2000, 21 CEOs received “walk away” packages in excess of $100 million, or a total of $4 billion, according to a new report by GMI, a corporate governance research firm. GMI said AT&T Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp., General Electric Co., Home Depot Inc., Merck & Co. and UnitedHealth Group were among those 21 companies giving massive payouts to exiting CEOs.

Rebecca Vesely is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. To comment, email editors@workforce.com.