So you want a Safety/Wellness Program

Employers of all sizes are always looking for ways to reduce the costs associated with absenteeism, injuries, worker's compensation claims, insurance claims, and/or poor morale. With our aging workforce and the natural risks associated with aging, time and efforts may seem fruitless. However, 40% health related issues are preventable.

Given this, you (the employer) decide to adopt a safety/wellness program. You are challenged to design a program that attracts and motivates employees to embrace safe work ethics and take on a healthy lifestyle of exercising, eating right, and more. Ultimately, a safe and healthy workforce will reduce high absenteeism, injuries, high worker's comp claims, and high insurance claims and will increase morale.

1st reality check:
A successful safety/wellness program requires effort and the understanding of human behavior. Once the novelty wears off people will naturally fall into the following two categories:

Engaged
· Working Well (those employees who routinely take care of themselves, have few days off, rarely get injured, or have no need for health care, except for preventive visits) and
· A few high-risk employees who have made a personal decision to make a change.

Non Engaged
· The unmotivated employees, or, as I call them, the "frequent flyers" (those employees who routinely use as many days possible to take off work, are accident prone, and have not seen a physician for years

2nd reality check:
Not all employees will participate because "it's good for them." They'll participate when they get the right answer for "What's in it for me?" Therefore, the next step to enticing more "frequent flyer" participation in safety/wellness activities is to assure you have long term commitment from the executive team to offer incentives for achievement of specific criteria. The best way to do this is to clearly articulate how a successful program will be measured and how this will enhance organizational success and improve the culture. Then think about the value added at the individual level. This necessitates a quick glimpse into human behavior--more specifically, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need and incentives.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Need

Abraham Maslow, a psychologist and motivation theorist, identified five levels of need or motives to human behavior. At the bottom of the hierarchy is the strongest need--physiological needs, then safety needs, belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs. Usually, it is a requirement for each motivator to be satisfied before the higher need can be fulfilled; however, most practitioners agree these needs interconnect.

There is often a big disconnect between doing what is “good for us” and “what we have always done.” What we fail to realize is that often times changing life long habits requires all levels of the Maslow Hierarchy to be engaged. Understanding what motivates people will help you with implementing an effective employee wellness program that will focus on decreasing health care costs, worker's compensation claims, and absenteeism costs.

Tips for creating a wellness/safety program that “sticks.”
· Tie wellness/safety objectives to organizational goals.
· Communicate how the wellness program will make your organization an even better place to work.
· Keep the program “alive and active” in everyone’s minds.
· Offer incentives or rewards for meeting specific goals. Rewards need to be frequent and at all levels of readiness. They need to be given for the slightest hint of a wanted behavior and to an exceeded behavior. They don't need to be extravagant, but the significance needs to match the behavior and the employee's wants.
· Always remember that the purpose of a safety/wellness program is to elicit positive long-term behavior change not short-term and to change an employee's risky behavior to safe and well ones.