Employee health and cost of healthcare are relevant to all businesses, regardless of size. Whether you have 2 employees or 200, keeping healthcare costs in check as more provisions of the Affordable Care Act take effect is crucial. Making employe health a part of your organization is a great way to ensure these costs remain manageable. For some employers even the location of the office is a matter of employee health.
For a software company in Cedar Rapids, choosing an office on the third floor of a building helps employees get away from their desks during the day; climbing two flights of stairs to get to the cafe to eat. Building fitness into the day is a way for employers to promote behavior that will help control organization costs. This approach can be more sensitive to employees who are unwilling to have either indirect or direct conversations with their employer about their health. For some employees it will be a topic they are unwilling to broach, and employers have to be sensitive to that population of their staff as well. Other employers take a more direct approach.
A biometric screening found that 56% of the young workforce at a Tax Services firm in Dallas were considered overweight. As a result they took steps to change the lifestyles of their employees, offering cooking lessons, health club memberships and health fairs in the office to help maintain a healthy lifestyle. Adding spot rewards, like small denomination gift cards to healthy retailers like CVS/pharmacy or GNC, for reaching a goal like losing weight, or completing a 5k is a great way to support more independent employee efforts.
