A healthy helping hand: Corporate health and fitness programs
Investing in the health of your employees can increase productivity, reduce time lost to sick leave
and deliver significant health and safety benefits. Larissa Bannister reports on how Australian
companies are tackling the issue of corporate health
Australians as a nation are getting fatter. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 16 per cent
of men and 17 per cent of women are now classified as obese while a further 42 per cent of men and 25 per cent
of women are overweight.
Although no figures are available for this country to link obesity with productivity at work, research in the US has
estimated that companies spend as much as US$61 ($78) billion on direct health care costs and US$56 ($71)
billion in indirect costs due to loss of productivity as a result of obesity.
Curtin University of Technology
Australian organisations are beginning to realise that investment in the health of their employees can bring real
business benefits. Obesity, for example, can be tackled through nutritional and exercise advice and according to
Jillian Woolmer, healthy lifestyle program coordinator at Curtin University of Technology, has a big impact on
employee productivity.
“People work much more effectively when they are healthy and happy,” she says. “We focus on increasing
employees’ physical activity, improving nutrition and on encouraging them to stop smoking.”
Curtin runs a variety of classes offering everything from mediation to Tai-Chi to belly dancing. The program is
inexpensive to run as the university benefits from resources including counselling services from the School of
Psychology and massage practitioners from the School of Physiotherapy.
Last year, Woolmer decided to focus on a specific weight-loss initiative and, on the advice of the staff dietician,
chose to implement the Weight Watchers ‘At Work’ program.
“I wanted to introduce a weight loss group so that people could get extra support from each other – often people
know what they should be doing but don’t apply that knowledge,” she says. “I considered running it myself but
I’m not an expert on weight problems. We chose Weight Watchers because it focuses on a healthy lifestyle and is
easy to fit into your life – it does not promote drastic weight loss and it teaches some cooking skills too.”
Meetings take place once a week and this year Curtin plans to run two courses of 12 weeks each to match
university semesters. If members miss a company meeting due to work pressures they can go to their local
community group instead.
“It’s run as part of our nutrition segment and we’ve had some great results from it,” Woolmer says. “We’re a big
organisation and as an added bonus it has been a great way for employees who would never have met otherwise
to get to know each other.”
But it’s not just obesity that results in loss of productivity and increased incidence of sickness and injury. The key
to developing an effective all-round corporate health program is, as with any HR initiative, to assess your
company’s individual needs and work from there.
The CALM experience
In some cases, corporate health programs can be a necessity, as was the case for the Department of
Conservation and Land Management (CALM) in Western Australia.
According to CALM health officer Alicia Taylor, the current extensive corporate health program started life eight
years ago purely because staff needed to be fit to do their jobs properly. “It came about because of our role in
fire fighting,” she says. “Our employees had to be able to cope with long periods of very hard physical work to
fight fires effectively.”
The program began with testing employee fitness levels. HR ran health and fitness days to test blood pressure,
cholesterol levels and lung function. “I came into this role three years ago,” Taylor adds. “I realised straight away
that there was so much more we could be doing.”
There are now two health officers in place, both of whom spend a lot of time talking to employees to find out
what they want to receive from the program. Currently, CALM has gyms in most offices which are paid for by
fundraising activity, runs regular exercise classes for employees and offers yoga and massage as well as a
number of health initiatives like skin and mole scanning.
“We also try and promote all the national health initiatives as much as we can,” says Taylor. “So, for example, in
National Healthy Bones Week we ran osteoporosis workshops. We also run health and wellness expos once a year
where we invite people from places like the Heart Foundation and Diabetes Australia to give talks to our
employees.”
The healthcare initiatives at CALM are made available on a voluntary basis, but there is a powerful incentive in
place to encourage staff to spend time on their own fitness. “We have a fitness policy that says that for every 15
minutes of your own time you spend on exercise, you can use 15 minutes of CALM’s time,” Taylor explains. “You
can earn up to a maximum of one-and-a-quarter hours per week.” Although CALM has no exact figures on the
number of people who are using the program, Taylor says that it is easy to see that popularity and participation
is increasing every year.
Many of the initiatives in the program cost CALM very little, and in some cases nothing aside from the salaries of
the two health officers. “For a fitness testing day you are looking at the cost of equipment like cholesterol testing
strips for which you pay about $80 for 25 strips,” says Taylor. “But that’s really about it as we try and do all the
research and presentations internally and run classes ourselves.”
Some of the most popular initiatives are provided at no cost to the business. “The mole scan clinics are a great
example. We provide staff with a voucher which can be bulk-billed – it costs us nothing and the health companies
get the business so everyone wins.”
Management is very supportive of the health program, Taylor says. “We had one manager who said that he
would pay for a massage for every member of his staff who regularly used the new gym we had set up…
managers can clearly see the benefit of having healthy staff.”
Taylor can also point to some compelling statistics to demonstrate return on investment (ROI). Since the
program was introduced in 1995, lost time due to injury has been reduced by 27.5 per cent and injuries requiring
medical treatment by 38 per cent. “We’ve also seen increased productivity and reduced sick leave,” she adds.
The AMP experience
AMP has operated corporate health initiatives for almost as long as CALM has, but introduced a company-wide
program in 2000. Sharon Davis, HR director for AMP Financial Services, says the program has the dual purpose of
enhancing value to current employees and of attracting new talent to the business.
“The program has two main rungs,” she explains. “One is to offer health clubs and gyms and the other is to
provide a variety of health clinics for things like skin cancer screening or management of stress through seminars
with qualified organisational psychologists.”
The format changes from year to year depending on staff needs and on responses given in annual staff surveys.
All components are either partially subsidised or cost AMP nothing. “It’s a value proposition and our employees
appreciate the economic benefits they receive due to our purchasing power. Everything we offer is optional but
the courses are always full and the gyms have a waiting list for membership,” Davis adds. There are gym
memberships available for more than 30 per cent of employees in Sydney CBD, Melbourne and Parramatta.
Davis says that she had no problem getting management buy-in for the health program when it was rolled out
across the whole business. “As an organisation our two main assets are people and IT, and management
understands that people are key. I needed to prove positive ROI though, as although the health clubs are selffunding they use expensive CBD office space as they are all onsite.”
Davis worked with a wellness consultant and drew on empirical evidence from other organisations to prove her
business case. There are real business benefits to be had, she says. “In our industry there are three main areas
of work-related injury of which stress and repetitive strain injury are two, so we run the chill-out for performance
[stress management] and posture at work clinics to address them.”
She says that measuring ROI is difficult as there are so many initiatives in place which contribute to improved
performance. “But as we’ve moved to a self-funding model there has been less need to continually prove ROI,”
she adds.
The company originally provided gyms on a fully subsidised basis but moved to a self-funded model at the time
of the rollout across the company. “It was a cultural thing, we felt we needed a more adult relationship with our
employees,” Davis says. “It also helps to create some supply and demand – and we found that people tend to
value what they have to pay for, even if it’s as little as $8 per week.”
24 February 2004