Is Your Company’s Wellness Program Optimized?
Sep 30, 2011
Is Your Company’s Wellness Program Optimized?
By Dr. Daniel Friedland, for the San Diego Business Journal
What does wellness mean to you? Being free from disease? Or does it mean more – like feeling a sense of vitality that enhances productivity?
Many wellness programs support physical fitness, healthy eating, smoking cessation and avoiding substance abuse to enhance health and decrease healthcare costs. But many programs miss the main cause of poor health habits and health disorders: stress. You can be physically fit but mentally and emotionally so stressed that your body doesn’t function properly – or worse – becomes a cause of disease. And that’s bad for our workforce – especially when you look at the statistics out there.
According to the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America Survey (2009), 75% of the US population is either moderately or extremely stressed. Stress has been shown to negatively impact work productivity and healthcare costs. What’s more the survey found:
- - 51% employees report lost productivity due to stress (and this is 58% in Gen Xers and 61% in Millennials);
- - The more stress someone has, the less she is able to make significant improvements in wellness programs. For example, as shown in the table from the survey below, if you are extremely stressed, your ability to lose weight declines.
Furthermore research has shown:
- - Up to 90% of visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related conditions.
- - 40% of job turnover is due to stress.
- - Replacing an average employee costs 120-200% of the salary of the position affected.
- - Healthcare expenditures are nearly 50% greater for workers who report high levels of stress.
- - Insurance claims for stress-related industrial accidents cost nearly twice as much as non stress-related industrial accidents.
- - The total cost in absenteeism, lower productivity, staff turnover, and health-related expenses is estimated to be $200 billion/year.
Stress also affects decision making and the way we relate and communicate with each other. The inability to effectively navigate stress erodes health, relationships, mental clarity, performance, and the bottom line.
Therefore it is critical that, if you want your wellness program to be effective, you must first deal with the underlying stress that 75% of our population is dealing with and that limits effective health engagement and productivity.
Barney & Barney, a leading full service insurance brokerage based in San Diego, recognizes this and is introducing innovative wellness programs that not only focus on navigating stress but on increasing productivity.
Barney & Barney has appointed Daniel Friedland, MD, an international expert in Evidence-Based Medicine and Health and Wellness to create innovative new wellness programs to help people navigate stress and achieve peak performance.
Grounded in a culmination of discoveries related to brain science and spanning disciplines from neuroscience, emotional intelligence, positive psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness, these programs teach people how to recognize and tame their stress by learning how to shift activity in their brains to deal with stress more effectively and optimize decision making.
Dr. Daniel Friedland has adapted the powerful decision making framework of Evidence-Based Medicine, the way all doctors are now trained to make medical decisions, to provide companies with a novel strategy to navigate stress, make better decisions, improve productivity and inspire peak performance. He offers live and online workshops that teach:
- - How the brain instinctively responds to stress and how this impairs thinking, decision making , communication and performance;
- - Scientifically proven techniques to neutralize stress and optimize brain function; and
- - How to implement a groundbreaking 4-step framework to enhance health, relationships and productivity.
Barney & Barney LLC and Dr. Friedland will be introducing the new online program, Achieve Peak Performance, in the coming months. For more information on this and the live workshops now available, please contact Daniel.Friedland@barneyandbarney.com or check our website, www.barneyandbarney.com, for forthcoming announcements.
Dr. Friedland serves as Barney & Barney’s Medical Director, assisting their Employee Benefits Division with wellness solutions for clients.
