Today’s businesses are looking to adopt a proactive approach to healthcare, understand the devastating effect that chronic illnesses can have on workplace productivity.-By Donna Chan
Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been a number of significant crises related to work, employment, productivity, supply chain management, and more. This has brought home the lesson that people are at the center of everything in business, and when people stop being able to work, everything around them stops working as well.
As a result of this “refresh” in business awareness of human health, it is necessary to take a new look at the ways in which chronic health conditions can impact not only productivity but profits as well. Workers may be re-entering physically shared workspaces, but the effects of long-term systemic chronic health problems resulting from viral infections, lifestyle, and stressors remain present in the workforce. Once a clear link between chronic health issues and costs to employers has been established, it is possible to look at that actionable steps that business leaders can take to help employees stop chronic health issues before they ever begin.
A 2019 study published in the Health Promotion Journal of Australia looked at the ways in which chronic health conditions negatively impacted organizations. The results of the study were shocking. They found an undeniable relationship between the health (physical and mental) of a workforce and massive losses in both revenue and productivity for the organization in question. The findings led the researchers to recommend that a health-conscious workforce should be a prized asset among organizational leaders, and should be robustly invested in by any organization that wishes to remain competitive in the years to come.
The major benefit of studies such as this one is that they can provide a useful tool for HR and other organizational leaders to measure the extent to which health is a particular concern for their organizations. It can also show them how and when they need to implement strategies to forestall chronic health issues before they begin to impact productivity. Such tools, when used appropriately, can lead to an organizational cultural shift towards promoting workplace health practices including both day to day practices such as breaks and access to exercise, as well as organizational benefits, such as robust health insurance offering access to preventative care.
The tool in question looked at some 897 employees working for an Australian mining company. Self-reporting was used to access the overall health risks and adverse behaviors experienced by the workforce and to estimate its overall monetary impact on the organization. Details are spelled out below, so that organizations can begin to get a sense of how tools can be effectively translated from one environmental context to the other, while retaining high quality results.
Reviewing the Methodology
Reviewing how the tool used in the 2019 study reveals critical information about how its metrics might be replicated to glean important information about the costs of chronic health problems in any organization. The tool in question used a 69 question survey designed to be taken by workers themselves; they answer the questions on the survey, and their answers provide direct information about demographics, productivity, and their own health risk factors. For instance, questions about diet, exercise, hydration, and productivity were all used to assess the overall capacity of individuals to feel energized, focused, and ready to work when in the workplace.
Other variables measured by the tool designed in this study included the straightforward numerical assessments of the number of hours that given employees worked, the numbers of days they missed due to health problems, and the number of days they reported to work despite suffering from health problems. All of these variables were measured in accordance with the Worker Productivity and Activity Impairment General Health scale, a tool used because of its low cost, and which gives an immediate indication of the relationship between health-related habits and the most important measurable productivity outputs.
The results obtained by the tool were subjected to an analysis informed by prevailing research on the topic of major health risks. For instance, the categories of “high risk” and “low risk” for chronic health problems were informed by popular scientific assessments of the role of BMI (body mass index) in overall health, as well as the impact of specific health-related behaviors such as drinking, smoking, and frequency of exercise. Due to the mass of research available on such topics, there was a high level of empirical support for the assignation of certain survey responses to one category or another.
Having used these standards to process and categorize the survey results from all the participants in the study, it was easy to calculate the cost to profitability, productivity, and safety as correlated with employees who either had chronic health problems or who faced a high risk of developing them. The results found that the majority of the behavioral health risks as well as the chronic conditions studies bore a correlation to massively reduced productivity among workers. Specifically, chronic health issues were found to cost an organization of this size an average of $30.1 million in lost revenues per year.
It’s astonishing to think of such losses, and how they might be mitigated by forward thinking organizational leaders willing to employ such tools to measure the risks in their own companies and implements strategies to improve physical and mental health before it becomes a devastating chronic problem. Concrete solutions such as incentive programs to overcome problematic behaviors, and increased access to preventative healthcare through benefits packages are just two proactive steps that leaders might wish to consider taking before its too late.