One US firm has found a novel way to make sure their people are eating healthily, by feeding them three meals a day, carefully-planned by the company dietician. 

Whether there will be tangible impact on wellbeing and performance, certainly in the short-term, is debatable. If anything, it’s the kind of novelty health benefit that just raises more questions in the minds of employers and HR teams over the value of corporate wellness.

Reports by the RAND Corporation have continued to claim that many forms of provision will “rarely” provide a Return on Investment. A particular barrier to impact is the low levels of participation when it comes to gym membership and other healthy activity schemes. 

The three-meals initiative is an example of what’s going wrong. We need to be helping people to become more responsible, not less. A Gallup survey has suggested less than a quarter of employees at an organisation with a wellbeing programme get involved.

The importance of annual health screenings is in providing the facts. Here’s hard evidence of the health of the individual employee, and advice on what they can do to make the picture better, for them to act on or otherwise. It’s personal data just for them – not something that’s shared with a manager or anyone in the organisation, so no pressure, but also a stronger sense of needing to make active choices.

What we’ve seen among our clients is changes in employee behaviour. As the anonymous data has begun to be collated year-on-year across a large and representative body of staff, employers have been able to track progress. For example, at Danone UK, voluntary take-up of annual health screening among employees is around 60%. An experienced GP provides an interpretation of the data, highlighting the issues that are relevant and would actually benefit from more attention in the health and wellbeing strategy, and those which might just be a red herring. Danone’s business units have seen a decrease in numbers of employees with ‘raised BMI’ levels between 6% and 11%. Numbers of smokers has been falling at levels between 5% and 12%. Cases of high blood pressure have seen falls ranging from 14% to 18%.

So here’s the basis for ROI to be calculated going forward – for particular health issues to be identified, schemes implemented, and what this means for actual employee health, cross-referenced against levels of productivity, absence and management time spent on dealing with absence and health-related issues.