Jamie Aslin is team leader of institutional employee well-being at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a place where precise measurements matter. So when he saw an annual health-care premium trend that went from increasing more than 7 percent annually to suddenly being negative, he thought something had to be wrong.
Overall, Los Alamos saved $21 million in three years, and while the health insurance premium trend could not stay negative forever, it has stabilized at an annual rate of 2.5 percent, much lower than the national average of more than 7 percent. It saw the most savings, not surprisingly, among overweight and obese workers, the ones who were getting hurt the most. Los Alamos estimates a $100,000-per-employee health-care cost avoidance.
"Millennials now want more than a paycheck," Osborne said."They want to have an employer invest in well-being, not just in their skills training." "How do you measure productivity gains?" Aslin said."That is always a tough one when it is not an assembly line." Los Alamos has seen its wellness participation reach 67 percent of its workforce, up from a 60 percent rate at which it started, and a huge increase over its previous effort to create and manage its own in-house wellness effort before Virgin Pulse, which saw only 10 percent enrollment. Enrollment and engagement continue to see"small upticks year over year, Aslin said.
He led a study of how workplace wellness correlates to public company stock performance, and while correlation is not causation, the results were encouraging. Across a group of 26 companies — close to the size of the Dow Jones Industrial Average group of stocks — that had wellness programs, over a 14-year period this"wellness index" produced a stock return of 325 percent, versus 105 percent for the S&P 500.
The health promotion programs that dole out $250 to $300 per person, per year, are tackling a fraction of what we pay as a society to treat diseases like heart disease and diabetes, asthma and cancer, and many other preventable illnesses."I am comfortable with a $100 to $500 to get attention, and put in an HSA, but I get worried when it is higher number because whether it is a voluntary action or compelled because the employee needs money ... it becomes a gray area.
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