Historically, many employers have implemented a culture of safety since the concept’s origins in the 1980s. Recognizing the impact that workforce health can have on safety, it is logical to integrate a culture of safety with a culture of health and well-being. When employees are healthy, they are less likely to get injured at work, and they are more likely to return to work more quickly when injured.
Employers have traditionally treated health and safety as separate issues. But many expert sources such as NIOSH and the National Academies have proposed a Total Worker’s Health approach. Over time, more enterprises combine work-site health promotions and workforce illness prevention with safety to deliver a more effective Integrated Health and Safety (IHS) program. IHS is a strategic approach that combines health and safety programs and policies to improve overall well-being.
To align health and safety strategies, Dr. Ray Fabius, the Chief Medical Officer and President of HealthNEXT, co-authored a whitepaper published in the May 2015 issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM). In partnership with the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) and Underwriters Laboratories (UL). This collaborative effort aimed to establish a framework that enables the seamless integration of health and safety strategies, resulting in measurable outcomes.
Read the full whitepaper, Integrating Health and Safety in the Workplace, to discover valuable insights on:
- Aligning health and safety strategies across organizational silos
- Effectively integrating health and safety functions
- Defining Integrated Health and Safety
- Establishing a replicable and scalable framework with a system of health and safety metrics
Why This Matters to Employers
Studies show that worker health is connected to the market performance of companies, suggesting that prioritizing health and safety can bring greater value to companies and their investors. As a result, a universal system of health and safety metrics and reporting will likely emerge as a new standard for valuation.
In addition, a study by the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that companies with comprehensive IHS programs had a 29% lower absenteeism rate than companies without such programs. Moreover, a study by the National Safety Council found that a 1% improvement in employee health can lead to a 2% increase in productivity.
Institutionalizing health and safety metrics and reporting can push workplace IHS programming into the mainstream business strategy and enable organizations to measure, manage and benchmark the health of their workforce as a strategic asset to the business.
Creating Integration Guidelines
Participants in the 2014 ACOEM/UL summit meeting compared seven leading national and international guidelines that aim to improve workforce health by focusing on health and safety together across operational divisions.
A review of the guidelines suggests that while many share common elements, they lack specific strategies for helping employers unify processes across organizational silos and bring disparate teams together operationally for more effective integration.
Participants concluded that two components most often missing from guidelines today are strategies for better aligning and integrating health and safety efforts across operational activity centers and a universally applicable system of health and safety metrics.
Measuring Integrated Health and Safety
The whitepaper, Integrating Health and Safety in the Workplace, offers a measurement system consistent with the DJSI (Dow Jones Sustainability Index) and meets robust requirements in the three sustainability dimensions – economic, social, and environmental.
The IHS Index should include the following:
- A comprehensive set of standards.
- A carefully calibrated set of metrics.
- A geometric scoring process to help organizations arrive at a consistent measurement of their performance in terms of health and safety integration.
Standards for engagement in prevention and wellness by employers/ employees include:
- Health promotion,
- Lifestyle management,
- Safety engineering programs,
- Biometric testing,
- Active disease management,
- Healthy vending machine and cafeteria selections,
- Effective communication strategies to inform employees of what they can do to reduce illness, disease, and accidents,
- And the organization is aligned with the goals of the community in which it operates, acts as a transparent and trusted partner, and has strong policies to ensure attention to issues of importance.
Companies qualifying for inclusion in the IHS Index would be required to demonstrate adherence to diverse activities aimed at ensuring the engagement of IHS strategies with employees, including reporting relevant environmental inspections by regulatory agencies and being a good corporate citizen of the community.
To fully accomplish this journey, enterprises must evolve from an emphasis on risk management to medical management to population health and ultimately transform the corporation to embrace a culture of health, safety, and well-being.
How Employers Can Implement the IHS Index Now
With strong and sustained senior-level buy-in established, the details of health and safety integration can begin using a five-point roadmap developed by the ACOEM/UL task force:
Phase 1 – Developing a Rationale for Why Integration is Important and Needed
The first integration phase involves defining the value of integration, engaging leadership, articulating a vision, and developing an organizational policy statement.
Phase 2 – Evaluate the Current Health and Safety Status of an Organization
Managers should assess how their organization is trending from a health, productivity, and performance perspective and determine what can be done to mitigate the illness burden of their workers. Workforce demographics should be considered when assessing data and metrics.
Phase 3 – Develop and Implement a New Integrated Strategy and Vision
Phase 3 involves implementing the vision and strategies identified in phases 1 and 2 by following the methodologies found in the book Leading Change by John P. Kotter, Ph.D. to:
- Create a sense of urgency
- Create a guiding coalition of key stakeholders
- Develop a change vision communication plan
- Identify goals and remove obstacles to change
- Turn words into action with management participation
- Phase rollout to build momentum with short-term successes
Phase 4 – Create a System for Data Collection, Monitoring, and Evaluation
Integrated health and safety programs should be monitored monthly to evaluate participation and engagement and quantify the investment’s value. The effectiveness of IHS strategies should also be examined once or twice a year.
When establishing an IHS monitoring plan, it is essential to note that significant directional results may take at least 2 to 3 years to be seen. However, for aggressive intervention programs, some results may be evident after the first year.
Phase 5 – Gauge Progress Periodically and Take Corrective Action
The final phase of integrating health and safety activities entails reviewing and adjusting or developing corrective actions as necessary. This is achieved through program evaluation, incorporating lessons learned, and providing rewards and recognition. For example, incentives to promote health and well-being include discounts at local health clubs, additional days off, and direct salary/bonus payment incentives.
Key Considerations for Integrated Health and Safety Success
Health and safety teams should be more closely aligned through overarching strategies and integrated organizationally in the workplace.
The creation of a standardized definition for IHS, a new IHS Index, and a roadmap for integration should advance with several guiding principles in place:
- Integrated Health and Safety must be developed with small and medium-sized organizations in mind.
- Programs must be applied in both white-collar and blue-collar workplaces as they are equally concerned about issues such as ergonomics, business continuity, and emergency preparedness and response.
- IHS is successful if well incentivized with favorable tax policies, discounts provided by insurance carriers, or preferred workers’ compensation rates.
- Integrated Health and Safety will succeed if it has the formal buy-in and public backing of organizations from both the health and safety communities. This means outreach to potential partners, awareness building, co-sponsorship of special events, and educational activities.
- Education models must convey IHS concepts in a way that makes them relevant and accessible to employees.
- Data collected must follow regulatory compliance.
How HealthNEXT Can Help
Through advanced measurement tools and on-demand Chief Medical Officers, HealthNEXT provides multi-year, strategic roadmaps to build a culture of health, safety, and well-being for corporations, resulting in reduced healthcare costs, enhanced productivity, and long-term competitive advantage. The HealthNEXT portal and methodology incorporate the many important recommendations of this seminal whitepaper. With our help, your organization can establish a sustainable benchmark culture of health, safety, and well-being.
