Grow Healthy!

By Peter Panepento (adapted)

When Cathy Phelps sits down with her staff members at the Denver Center for Crime Victims for their annual employment reviews, she doesn’t just set goals for their work performance. Instead, Ms. Phelps, the executive director, helps them make plans to improve their lives.

All of the center’s 12 full-time employees are required to create annual self-care plans, in which they outline a series of steps they would like to take to improve their physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual well-being.

The self-care plans have helped many of Ms. Phelps’s employees make significant changes. One of the nonprofit group’s workers lost 35 pounds after embarking on a nutrition and exercise plan; this year, her goal is to complete a triathlon.

But while such goals would seem to have little connection with counseling crime victims, Ms. Phelps says her emphasis on wellness has helped her build a happier, more loyal, and more productive staff. More than half of the employees, she says, have been on the job for more than eight years — a rarity in a field prone to burnout.

The program has also saved money — the Denver Center gets discounts on its workers’-compensation insurance, has hired fewer temporary workers to cover staff absenteeism, and has cut down on recruiting and hiring costs. “I look at it as a management tool. One of the byproducts of it is improved morale,” Ms. Phelps says. “But it’s also about buying what we sell. We work with trauma, which means we’re the folks people leave all of their junk with. We need to be healthy and stable to help them.”

A Variety of Options
The Denver Center’s innovative approach to employee wellness illustrates how a nonprofit organization that promotes good health for its workers can build a happier, more productive staff. Wellness programs often help prevent employees from getting sick, missing work, and burning out from job-related stress. And with health-insurance premiums rising at a rate of more than 10 percent per year for most employers, wellness programs are also a popular and inexpensive way to curb health-care costs.
But many nonprofit employers do not run large-scale wellness programs — mainly because they believe the programs are costly and time consuming. What’s more, say nonprofit managers and human-resources experts, many of those who do sponsor such programs don’t believe their employees are fully taking advantage of them.

A variety of low-cost options, however, can help time- and cash-strapped organizations promote good health for their employees. “It’s pretty typical that wellness programs don’t happen because of money and because of time,” says Mary Hansbrough, wellness manager at the Community Partnership of Southern Arizona, in Tucson. “But you can do things. Even if it’s just a few people who take advantage, it starts to build.”

Most American employers — about 7 out of 10 — believe that they have a responsibility to promote wellness among their workers, but far fewer do anything about it, according to a survey last year of 354 U.S. companies and nonprofit organizations by the American Management Association.

Fewer than half of the survey respondents said they offer educational programs on topics such as exercise and fitness (47 percent), smoking cessation (41 percent), weight management (34 percent), stress management (33 percent), or nutrition (25 percent).

While the study doesn’t specifically chart nonprofit organizations’ participation in wellness programs, many nonprofit managers say such programs are less prevalent at charities than in the business world.

Tailored Programs
Since starting its wellness program for employees three years ago, the College of Wooster, in Ohio, has also found another positive result: improved employee morale.

Rising costs pushed the college to make some big changes to its health-insurance program three years ago, says Timothy Tegtmeier, the institution’s treasurer. Along with switching to a self-insurance program, in which the college pays for employees’ medical treatment itself and sets its own premiums based on estimated care costs, the 1,800-student liberal-arts college also took steps to help its workers improve their fitness and nutrition. It contracted a local YMCA branch to provide a staff member to coordinate a wellness program that includes employee health screenings, personalized fitness plans, and nutrition advice. Wooster pays the YMCA $45,000 per year for the program, but Mr. Tegtmeier says the college saves more than twice that amount through lower health-insurance premiums.

The new health-insurance program — and its corresponding emphasis on wellness — has helped the College of Wooster decrease weekly medical claims by 2 percent in its current fiscal year, compared with one year ago. It has also helped improve the outlook of some of the college’s employees. Jimmy Meyer, assistant editor of Wooster’s alumni magazine, says she has been taking part in lunchtime aerobics and yoga classes and is in better shape now than she has been at any other time in her life. By staying fit, the 56-year-old says she is more productive and happy.

“It’s really improved my health. It’s improved my outlook,” Ms. Meyer says. “The day goes much faster on the days I work out. I’m more alert in the afternoons.”

But charities don’t have to have college and university resources to sponsor effective wellness programs. Ms. Hansbrough, of the Community Partnership of Southern Arizona, has found success by offering an array of small-scale wellness activities to employees.

Since the organization’s staff is not housed in a single building, Ms. Hansbrough has tailored her program to work for employees in far-flung offices and clinics that stretch into four counties. Employees have the option of getting together over lunch to learn about reducing stress, losing weight, and establishing an exercise regimen. They can get tips on improving their health through an online newsletter, at office meetings, and via bulletin-board items. They will soon have the opportunity to take walks on well-marked trails around the organization’s larger offices.

The scattered locales have made disseminating wellness information a challenge, Ms. Hansbrough says. “The trick is to feed them bits, but more frequently,” she says. “We try to give people something that they can have in their hands that they can revisit.”
Small-scale, low-cost, easy-to-access programs have had success for other nonprofit organizations as well. Babson, for example, offers an array of such efforts, says Mr. Aubuchon. It has tried to find recreational programs that are tailored to fit the tastes of its employees, he says — and about half of Babson’s 600 workers participate in at least one program. For example, some employees are attracted to activities such as an after-work volleyball team. Others might be more apt to take lunchtime walks or gather before work to skate.

By offering as many venues as possible to encourage employees to exercise and improve their health habits, organizations multiply their odds of having those programs connect with a larger number of employees, say nonprofit managers.

“No one individual program is particularly effective in terms of promoting a healthy organization,” Mr. Aubuchon says. “But it’s a number of things — it’s the multitude of programs that gets the best results, because different people have different interests.”