Healthy staff boost profits

Corporate spending on programmes to help staff remain in tip-top condition is not just a luxury option like GPS in the company limo -- it is a key component of saving costs and polishing the bottom line.

That is the one of the major findings of the Healthy Company Index survey conducted by Discovery Vitality, the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Cape Town and US expert Ron Goetzel, a professor of public health at Emory University in Atlanta.

Results of the survey, the first of its kind in South Africa, were announced on Friday.

Top honours for the company with the healthiest employees went to software firm Business Systems Group (BSG), with offices in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London. Among the companies it narrowly beat were two which might have expected to win, fitness chain Virgin Active and health-food maker Vital Foods.

The 101 companies and organisations taking part ranged from a government department to a Johannesburg high school, St Stithians, and law firms.

Employees at participating companies responded to a questionnaire that assessed a range of health risk factors, including whether they smoked, whether they were overweight, how much alcohol they consumed, how much they exercised and what they ate.

Each participant was then assigned a "Vitality age" - a theoretical medical age intended to indicate the positive or negative impact of a person's habits on his or her lifespan.

The survey found that 71.6% of respondents had a Vitality age higher than their actual age. "The average age for employees was 36.4, while the average Vitality age was 39.8," the survey report said. "This means that most employees are losing 3.4 years of life on average because of poor lifestyle habits."

Craig Nossel, head of Discovery Vitality Wellness, said the figures were a cause for concern, but not unexpected given the incidence of obesity and chronic disease in the general population.

He said one of the statistics that "jumped out" of the survey was that people who did not lead healthy lifestyles had rates of absenteeism and hospitalisation about 30% higher than those who did.

"From the perspective of companies, they need to be interested in this," he said. "For those who haven't participated in the survey or don't have wellness programmes in place, this starts to say what the financial impact is."

Survey results are being analysed by Professor Karen Milner of the University of the Witwatersrand's school of human and community development, who said there were strong correlations between the health promotion activities of companies and the Vitality age of their staff.

"The companies can take the message from that that the money they're putting into those programmes is actually having an effect," she said. "Offering employee wellness facilities correlates with the Vitality age."

Milner said many of the 13578 people who responded to the questionnaires did not consider themselves to be in trouble, even though they had several risk factors, such as high cholesterol.

"We found that people who had quite a large number of risk factors still regarded themselves as in pretty good health. That suggests that people are unaware of the impact that their lifestyle is having on their health - perhaps in denial, perhaps unaware," she said.

"People think, 'I'm not actually sick, so I must be in good health' - but the current thinking is that good health is not the absence of illness. If you're not ill, it doesn't mean that you're in good health. If you're living an unhealthy lifestyle, you can't consider yourself to be in good health."

Milner said there was "a bit of work to be done to say that not looking after your health is negative, is problematic".

"We tended to get more people in the risk range than in the non-risk range, so that was an area clearly where there is a lot of work to be done. But what was quite positive was we found some of the health promotion activities companies are doing are having an impact."

She said the data provided a gold mine of information for academics. "This database will start giving us trends in terms of what's happening in the South African workplace, which will allow companies to start planning better, to know what works, what doesn't. We'll be able to provide really useful information to companies in terms of where to direct resources from a health promotion point of view."

Nossel said the survey showed there was a strong commitment to wellness programmes by companies.

"What will be valuable is to be able to see which of the initiatives are having the biggest impact and then sharing best practice between various companies. So, putting in a gym, for example - what impact is it having, is it getting people to be more active?

"In companies that have put things in place, it does have a positive impact on their employees. Where you see leadership has bought into the programme, employees are saying, 'The company cares, they're interested, it's not just about what I produce, but they're concerned about my health.'"

He said in some companies, up to 80% of staff responded to the questionnaires.

"We also saw a lot of people are having preventative checks - blood pressure, cholesterol. It shows people are looking for information. Maybe to change behaviour is not quite as easy, but certainly gaining knowledge is one of the positive trends that has come out in the survey."