How to Influence Healthy Choices

Healthcare costs are fast becoming (if not already) the number one focus of large companies.  As more and more companies find themselves in the "knowledge" industry employees become the machines in need of maintenance.  This applies to industrial age companies that in the past had only to worry about keeping the factories running.  Now the factories are cube farms and the machines are people.  I know this sounds a bit demeaning to the employee but in reality most companies now rely on the output of peoples minds versus the output of machines.

This article in Business Week Online highlights the efforts that Microsoft is going through to put a dent in their health care costs.  As a student of motivation and influence I found this passage most interesting....

Its war against weight started in 2002, about the same time Ballmer, then all puff and jowl, lost a fast 50 and turned taut and lean. His newly restructured physique was the inspiration of Redmond, and soon 800 Microsofties were forgoing the logger-man portions in the cafeteria and subbing diet sodas for the free pop.

Healthy living isn't a program - it's a culture change and one of the surest ways to begin changing the culture of a company is to see the culture exhibited by the leaders of the company.  Steve Ballmer probably did more for their wellness campaign at Microsoft than any incentive program could have.  Kudos!

The thing to remember is that whatever behaviors that are modeled by the senior managers are the behaviors that are mimicked in the rank-and-file.  This advice doesn't just apply to wellness - it applies to anything a company wants the employees to internalize - from a customer focus to Six Sigma. 

As companies look to maintain their human machines they begin to see that preventative maintenance is the key to long-term profitability and maintaining the most important (arguably) machines sends an clear message.

Comments

[scott crandall]

With long term employment becoming what -- five or six years -- it makes no sense for employer-provided healthcare to be the standard beyond the next decade. Business, and policy-makers (and, unfortunately, politicians) must grapple with affordable choices that the average American can avail himself with. Perhaps a range of changes from expensive, comprehensive programs to more bare bones, large deductible, major medical/catastrophic care. Company-provided plans are going to become a dinosaur, if only because of the explosion of self-employed, contract-based and part-time workers. THAT's what we need to be thinking about: how can we design a non-government, non-one-payer system that won't bankrupt the country and everything it touches. Any thing else is whistling past the graveyard.