Managing employeesʼ health is delivering business growth
“Health and safety is our priority” has become a slogan to most business managers when in reality, employees’ health is often overlooked, little management involvement, no effective health risk assessment, no monitoring of exposure to toxic or dangerous substances, developing disease in the environment, at the workplace etc…In some cases, employees health is considered to be the responsibility of nurses, visiting doctors and also subject to the usual cost cutting programmes.
At the time of writing this piece, the covid 19 had caused hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world, shutdown and put to bankruptcy hundreds of businesses as early as the second week of March 2020 and leave as a result hundreds of people without jobs. This pandemic will impact businesses’ growth for a long time. In order to achieve their growth objectives sustainably, there is a need for businesses to define and implement a minimum health management standards to proactively manage the health of employees with focus on the work environment, people health risks prevention and protection measures in most critical projects, decisions.
The covid 19 pandemic showed how widespread health is essential for global prosperity and the same applies to business growth over time. There is nothing new to the fact that prevention plays a key role in delivering health benefits but only few companies have a documented policy that explains or defines the stand of the business on this and what is really to be done to protect the health of their employees and translate this into concrete actions. How do we constantly scan and assess the work environment, office and factories, the processes, chemicals used, the emerging diseases , symptoms building up at and around the sites? How do we screen our people for issues, early warning signs or provide ways and tools that promote or push them to constantly check themselves ? An effective employeesʼ health ecosystem is made up of health risk assessment, employees fitness to work standards, health in project policies, products and substances exposure monitoring together with a new approach in health care delivery leveraging data constantly gathered at the workplace via available modern wearables and connected devices.
Portable wearable devices are available today to monitor heart health and fitness information over a long period, engage workers , their colleagues and families while providing a wider range of data to enhance clinical decision making. Connected devices can also be used to continuously monitor chronic diseases development where for example an employeeʼs glucose level or blood oxygen and other vital signs and data shared as per company policy. AI-powered apps are available or could be developed by companies to enable behavior change by helping their employees adopt and sustain health behaviors. These apps should embed analytics capabilities to determine insights from the collected data from the wearables and connected devices, and feed those insights to employers, health care practitioners and employees patients to improve care outcomes, experience, and treatment efficiency where needed.
Focusing on employees’ health is an investment that yields a good return at the end of the day the same way preventive care saves lives in the long run. The gains achieved more than offset by productivity gains in healthcare delivery.
Employees in good health mentally, physically are more focused and deliver good results and at the same time poor health employees instead are a burden and cost a lot more to companies. An adaptive approach is needed to take care of employees’ health as their age and health risk profile increase.
We have seen recently that a variety of long-term health conditions not treated can have a devastating effect on an individual once in contact with an ordinary inoffensive germ or virus. Taking care of our health and people around us is the challenge of our time and this should be on executives’ success agenda. Managing employees’ health and the energy in the organization with a minimum health management standards is a leading indicator for business results and growth over time. It’s more than critical today to start controlling the in employees health with a digital set of tools that collect and analyse effective relevant health impact data on the environment and workers conditions. You can only effectively manage what you can measure and health is no exception.