Productivity in the workplace

By Ed Baas, Director, Product Marketing, HealthMedia, Inc

Most organizations use human capital to fulfill the function of producing, selling, servicing and supporting to achieve their corporate goals – whether financial or non-financial in nature. When the ability of human capital becomes impaired – productivity in the organization will ultimately decline. Numerous studies have attempted to quantify the reduction in productivity due to health issues.

There are two main constructs of health related productivity. The first is when the employee is physically not at work. This is referred to as absenteeism. Absenteeism is typically easy to quantify through payroll records, however a modern trend in organizations is for paid time off, regardless whether the employee is ill, on vacation or just needs a ‘mental health’ day. This movement toward “combined personal time off” makes it more difficult to isolate the impact of health related absenteeism.

Even harder to measure than absenteeism is when an employee is physically at the work site but is not performing to full capacity. This phenomenon is referred to as ‘presenteeism’, that is, the employee is at work but there is some condition that is preventing the employee from being fully engaged in their assigned work. There are a lot of reasons that a person may be absent from work or may not be performing at a satisfactory level while at work. These may range from illness, child-care responsibilities and family issues to perhaps over-indulgence the previous evening.

As mentioned earlier, there has been significant work done on the recognition that absenteeism and presenteeism exist, and various models have attempted to calculate the financial impact on the business entity. However, there has been little evidence of a solution to the productivity problem that can positively impact the return on investment. That is, until now.

HealthMedia, Inc, the global leader in scalable behavior change interventions for wellness, disease management, behavioral health and medication adherence, has been collecting productivity data from program participants for the last two years. By imbedding questions derived from the Work Productivity and Activity Impairment (WPAI) instrument into its program assessments, HealthMedia has been able to quantify two critical components of the productivity puzzle.

First, using data from its health risk assessment, HealthMedia has quantified the baseline productivity impairment that various health related conditions can have on an organization.

Second, HealthMedia has been able to calculate the projected impact that its behavior change interventions have on improving productivity – both in the areas of absenteeism and presenteeism.

The results for population impairment are based on more than a quarter of a million people who have answered the productivity questions in the health risk assessment – HealthMedia® Succeed™. The WPAI productivity instrument asks about hours missed from work due to health conditions and impairment at work and outside of work due to the health conditions. The work related answers are combined to create an Overall Impairment Index. This index has been segmented by health conditions such as weight, stress, depression, sleep, chronic conditions, etc. The magnitude of productivity losses can be monetized for each condition by multiplying the impairment index by the prevalence rate and the number of employees and average salary for a particular organization.

For example, consider the condition of obesity on an organization with 10,000 employees and an average loaded salary of $50,000. Succeed™ data shows that the overall impairment for obese and extremely obese range from 11 percent to 15 percent.

When the impairment rates are combined with the prevalence rates – in this case 23 percent for obese and 4.5 percent for extremely obese, the dollar impact of the impairment based on these conditions can be calculated and amounts to $5.6 million for obese and $2.1 million for extremely obese.

This represents the projected amount of money that an employer could be losing through lost productivity. This dollar amount does not include any multiplier factors such as the cost of delayed projects, temporary staff to make the lost work, or the extra work others on a team may be required to do to complete a project. Similar results have been calculated for other conditions including stress, chronic conditions, etc.

The good news is in the solution. HealthMedia has developed a series of scalable behavior change interventions that have been clinically proven to improve health and now may actually improve productivity as well. Longitudinal analysis of WPAI data from HealthMedia’s book of business at baseline and again at 30, 90 and 180 days show an improvement in overall impairment due to the interventions.

For example, for the weight management program, a percentage point change in overall impairment of 1.89 combined with a prevalence rate of 28 percent for obese and extremely obese, using a sample company of 10,000 employees at $50,000 loaded salary and a modest 10 percent program participation rate would result in a projected productivity gain of $264,000. Similar and larger results have been seen for interventions in chronic illness, nutrition, back treatment and stress management.

Although there is no automated way to measure the change in presenteeism - there is no wire or computer chip that can be imbedded in someone’s brain to measure their improved performance on the job - there is now longitudinal evidence from tens of thousands of participants who have indicated that they are more productive in their job as a result of taking the behavior change interventions.

HealthMedia interventions have already been proven to be effective in clinical trails and biometric comparisons, now, with the addition of productivity data, they are proving to be of greater value to the employer. There is clearly a case to include productivity results in the return on investment calculation for wellness and disease management programs.