Healthy goals deliver performance

By VICKI JAYNE

What makes a healthy workplace?

Will turning your employees into fitness freaks with good eating habits and comfortable workstations do the trick - or is there more involved?

Should "health" be tackled at an individual or organisational level?

The whole question of workplace health is one that more companies are addressing for a range of reasons. Many corporate health programmes were kick-started by the need to meet stricter workplace safety standards, but most now have broader aims.

They are tied in with such issues as attracting and retaining good employees, reducing absenteeism, increasing productivity and innovation, improving workplace morale and helping workers counter the stresses of busier work/life environments. There's also a growing awareness that happy, healthy employees mean higher-performing companies.

All of which means more demand for corporate health services.

Established providers report an increase in business, with one executive health counselling service booked out a year ahead. New players are plugging specialist niches and a growing range of health providers are seeking business clients.

Company aims and workplace needs, as well as time and budgetary constraints, help determine what corporate health programmes include. But they can cover everything from ergonomic assessments and shoulder massages to advice on nutrition, aerobics classes, health seminars, executive health checks, work/life balance strategies, or training in mental resilience, emotional intelligence and leadership.

Having been in the business for seven years, corporate health specialist Karen Beard reckons demand for the sort of services she provides has increased because of the results she gets.

She says the top three issues her company (The Body Corporate) is called on to address are high levels of stress, sickness and staff turnover.

Programmes are tailored through staff surveys, individual interviews and personal health checks. Most aim to offer a range of "health tools" on site so that time-strapped workers can use them as required.

"Delivery has to be user-friendly. When people are under pressure it's no good us going in there and giving them more to do."

Her company runs coaching sessions tackling such things as how to manage stress, and the health implications of eating the right food, exercising and maintaining a good work/life balance.

Proper nutrition is often one of the first things jettisoned when people get too busy, says Beard. Keeping such issues in mind reaps good results.

You get a lot of bang for your buck working with people on a personal level about their physical wellbeing, agrees Dr Sven Hansen, who runs E-Health, a business specialising in corporate health and resilience.

It has recently been incorporated into SalusHealth preventive healthcare services.

Hansen also places emphasis on emotional wellbeing. "I think that is the highest leverage point. I do a lot of work in companies around the whole area of emotional intelligence because it's emerged as a critical factor for top performance."

Also effective, he says, are the cognitive disciplines, training your mind to work creatively, make quick decisions, and maintain optimism, enthusiasm and motivation.

"Now we're beginning to introduce the idea of spiritual intelligence, which is to do with values, whether people feel they are doing something that makes them feel good about themselves."

He describes the issue of workplace health as "systemic" - its parts can't be addressed in isolation.

"As organisations have to work faster and more creatively in uncertain times, then their various parts have to be better aligned so all work together."

In other words, focusing on individual stress issues while setting unrealistic corporate goals is a recipe for failure. Likewise, persuading employees to sit properly and eat well in a work environment characterised by indifferent management and poor communication won't work.

In fact, says Australian specialist Dr Peter Hart, research shows traditional corporate health programmes that focus primarily on stress management training or the promotion of health behaviour rarely lead to improvements in employee wellbeing.

An industrial and organisational psychologist, Hart is director of Melbourne-based Insight SRC. He was in Auckland recently talking about some of the stress "myths" unveiled by large-scale studies into occupational wellbeing.

One confusion is the tendency to see "stress" and "morale" as opposite sides of the one coin, so that high stress goes with low morale.

In fact, high stress can happily co-exist with high morale and, importantly, stress and morale have different causes and consequences.

"So when putting in place a development or preventive programme, it is important to know whether wellbeing problems are the outcome of too much stress or not enough morale."

He says that instead of addressing the causes of health problems, most corporate wellness programmes tend to focus on the employee and assume it is something about the way they cope that is the cause of stress.

"Our research has shown it is the quality of an immediate manager's leadership style as well as the quality of organisational climate they create for their staff that matters most - so this requires an organisational rather than individual approach."

This holds true even in jobs held to be high stress - such as police work or teaching. Most tend to walk into such jobs with their eyes open to the stressful situations they might encounter.

"What they don't expect is to find that they sometimes have to deal with poor leaders/managers and bureaucracies that are not supportive.

"In every organisation we have researched, the main cause of health problems in the workplace is poor leadership and people management practices."'

* vjayne@iconz.co.nz