molly fletcher can tell a story.

en route to the masters tournament to support a new client, she felt a new mother’s pressing duty: the need to pump. undeterred by high-driving speeds, intrigued truckers, and incoming calls, she drove with one hand on the wheel and one hand on the breast pump before arriving at the masters, tossing the milk in an ice chest, and sauntering on to the range. she pumped. she navigated. she executed.

excellent execution was her focus and that of the other speakers at people report’s 2011 best practices conference (PRBPC), an annual conference that brings together senior leaders in the restaurant industry. execution that benefited the employee, the employer, the customer, the industry, and yes, the world. (i was there with bruce rush, director, total rewards at taco bell corporation, to talk about the excellent execution of workplace wellness efforts.)

with a tag line of “people, planet, profits,” the conference’s emphasis of doing well by doing good shouldn’t have surprised me. frankly, it did. this cynical girl—like the other, more famous one—has heard far too many BS-laden speeches to unquestioningly accept. but with shrinking markets and shriveling margins, the organizers, speakers and attendees at PRBPC recognize that good business means good ethics and meaningful brands.

which brings us back to molly fletcher, who ended her speech with three flip-the-frame questions every human resources department should ask:

• how do we find out what employees want?
• how do we have employees’ backs?
• how do we make employees heroes?

yes. how do we?

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upcoming: how do we use these questions to flip the frame on our approach to wellness?

this post is by ray goldberg, VP, benefits strategy & economics, at marsh & mclennan companies. ray is a regular participant in our #co_health chats and a great resource. you can follow him on twitter @raygoldberg.

The 2011 HERO Forum for Employee Health Management Solutions featured the most uniformly high-quality presentations of any conference I’ve ever attended. I want to share some key principles speakers raised, as well as a few specific, compelling ideas.

What Makes Wellness Click?

There was wide agreement that the success of wellness programs depends on culture, leadership engagement, communications, and incentives—in that order. In fact, the Google team concluded that culture—how we do things around here —is the most important factor; they’ve stubbed their toes when their programs clashed with their delight-our-employees-who-work-24×7 culture.

Leaders, too, play a powerful role, and from this Forum, it appears many are:

• Andy Crighton, Chief Medical Officer of Prudential Financial, a 2011 Koop Award winner, described their “State of the Company Health Summit,” a 3-hour presentation open to all colleagues where four of their senior leaders discussed the importance of colleague health to their business.
• The National Physical Activity Plan announced the CEO Pledge, a way for CEO’s to publicly declare their support for health and fitness activities for their employees—whether before, after, or during work hours.
• Mike Trueblood, the CFO of Karsten Manufacturing (the manufacturer of Ping golf gear), took a visible leadership role in addressing wellness. After concluding that most controllable health costs stemmed from weight management and stress, they ran two contests—weight loss as a percentage of body weight and minutes of exercise—with ongoing prizes and recognition, for individuals and business teams.
• And Eastman Chemical, also a 2011 Koop Award winner, shared how their CEO sees the firm’s health and wellness culture as his number-one legacy. I heard that from another firm, too. That’s pretty powerful stuff.

Highlighting the role of communications, Alcon, the third 2011 Koop Award winner, recommended that employers “keep the program in front of people all the time” and keep it fresh by continuously adding to it.

Presenters and attendees alike described their use of financial incentives: “Incentives can be a terrific catalyst to get things started. But they won’t sustain change by themselves.” But firms are using nonfinancial incentives, too, including employee testimonials, celebrations for team accomplishments, and—my favorite—meetings with the CEO for colleagues who make big changes.

Seeding a Culture

A number of firms discussed their approach to both corporate and business units’ needs.

• ConAgra’s Charlie Salter described their focus on measuring and reducing modifiable health risks. They’ve stratified their per capita health care costs by the number of health risks, as well as by participants vs. nonparticipants. Their dashboard shows these key figures for each major business.
• Corinthian Colleges’ Sheri Feibush relies on a network of wellness champions throughout each of its schools to drive corporate-wide initiatives, as well as work on programs for individual schools.
• Dover’s Amy Katzoff drives certain initiatives from corporate, and each of its 35 OpCos has a HERO Scorecard reflecting its own practices. (You, too, can complete the HERO Scorecard to see how your organization stacks up. And HERO’s Employee Health Management Best Practice Scorecard, reflecting the practices of 450 different firms, is available to anyone.)

Measuring What Matters

I’m always on the lookout for hard data that shows the value of wellness. I found three research presentations particularly compelling:

• Healthways’ Carter Coberely showed that the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index is correlated with health care utilization and costs, as well as with absenteeism, disability costs, individual performance, and job satisfaction.
• And Ron Goetzel and OptumHealth’s Stephen Hartley separately summarized available literature about employee health management, including financial savings, effectiveness of incentives, and the use of online tools and mobile apps.

All in all, it was a very powerful learning experience; highly recommended.

I offer one closing thought, courtesy of one of our speakers: “Be sure to take advantage of the programs you’re putting in place—to act as a role model for your colleagues, and for your own wellbeing.”

philly’s mayor nutter wasn’t able to tax soda, but he could downsize it, move it out of eye level and price it higher than water. eschewing boston’s tougher soda ban, philly’s using behavioral economics in 255 vending machines across the city, including municipal buildings and recreation centers, to test its impact on buying choices.

how has your company made a healthy food choice the easier or guided choice?

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“you americans are crap at time off.”

from what i can gather, that’s what sir richard branson told 14,000 people gathered to hear him at the society of human resources management (SHRM) 2011 annual conference & exposition.

damn straight.

who doesn’t know we’re laggards when it comes to vacation time and maternity leave? you can forget paternity leave. that barely registers on our U.S. work radars. we’re also really poor on the work-life fit scale, despite the number of surveys that suggest we recognize how critical work-life flexibility is to 21st century success. SHRM credits the disconnect to a lack of trust by the employer and cries out for a culture change.

but you know what? we’re part of the problem. here are two prime examples, the first from an inc. article, why nice girls finish last:

“Interestingly enough, I had a conversation with an editor in New York the other day, and I know that she has three kids, and I know her company has flex-time. I said, ‘Do you work flex time so you can be with your kids more?’ She said, ‘No. If you ask for or take flex time, you’re marginalized. Instead what I do is when I need extra time off, I just quietly take it.’ I think that’s good advice because anything that sets you apart from your male counterpart—in terms of gender—is going to work to your disadvantage. Unfortunately, that’s still where we are. It’s unfortunate but it’s true. I’m not saying you can’t have a family if you want a career; you just have to decide what’s most important to you, what your values are, and how you’ll manage expectations around them.”

this next one’s from an article by cali yost, a woman i greatly admire:

“My advice would be not to get into ‘why’ you are leaving early/late or working from home, and simply let others know how the work will get done, and how you can be reached if needed. Go to the soccer game, meet your friend for coffee, get your nails done. Come in earlier, leave a little later, or catch up from home afterwards to make it happen. Just keep focused on the ‘how,’ and less on the ‘why.’”

i bristle at both of these articles, perhaps naively. and perhaps more so because gay marriage just passed in NY.

whether you agree with gay marriage or not, you can recognize that gay marriage didn’t pass in NY or elsewhere because people waited for it to happen or gave up when it didn’t. they didn’t keep their feelings, desires and legitimate needs to themselves. no. people championed for the right. they came back after being shot down. factions collaborated. and maybe most important, they made themselves visible—in all walks of life. more people now know they know someone who’s gay, including those whose votes mattered. that’s a game changer.

battles aren’t won without a fight, and achieving work-life fit is a battle. we need trailblazers and activists. i understand it’s a risky proposition for those who sign up. they can be labeled slackers, layabouts, GenY (!) and worse. but we need work-life flexatarians to come out of the closet. we need people, particularly those like the senior female exec with kids i mention above, to say it loud and say it proud, “heck yeah. i go to the gym during work hours.” perhaps we’ll strike a blow for better performance management at the same time.

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the "tea run"

getting people to do small things regularly throughout the day is a good thing. recent research shows our continuous sitting is doing us a lot of harm, even if we participate in a killer kinect sports game from time to time.

to the rescue, at least for one group of designers—apple’s health kit. it’s a simple kit (see the complete kit here), filled with weighted mugs, post-it notes and an exercise guide. the image above is one of 70 exercises included in the guide. like this one, they’re all basic exercises that anyone can do anywhere.

conceptually, this is a great idea. does it work for apple? no clue. any solution, wellness or other, needs to work for the culture and the targeted group. apple always struck me as a pretty cool company, and designers are even cooler than that. i do wonder if they’d be caught dead doing mug curls. and i hope apple involved them in the kit’s creation.

but that’s not the point of my post.

the point of my post is that improving employee health is going to involve pratfalls. we can laugh and say that wellness sucks. we can sit on the sidelines and poke fun at the things we think won’t work. or we can push ideas and potentially fanciful notions out into the world to learn from. we’ll drop the losers and tweak the winners.

apple’s health kit may not fly. who knows? do you?

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what’s the first thing you think you’ll need to have to pull off a successful workplace wellness effort? senior leadership support, right? fair enough. having senior leadership support opens more than a few doors, not the least of which is the door to the vault. it also opens doors with middle managers, a true linchpin to most company-based initiatives if ever there was one. true senior management support also means your wellness effort could be more than a program here and a benefit there—basically, window dressing. but having senior leadership support isn’t the be all and end all. you still need employees to get on board. and to accomplish that, you’re going to need something more.

i know the barometer points down on peer-to-peer communication in edelman’s 2011 trust barometer. they found we now trust CEOs and other experts more than peers. you could read into this that hearing from “people like me” is no longer a critical part of a communication or change plan. speaking from experience, these people are just the from-the-ground-up support you need to build a true culture of health. that’s because they’re users of your services and fellow travelers of your average workaday world. in other words, they get it and they can sell it. they get the obstacles that coworkers face, from too much work to too little manager support to too little time to figure out health, not to mention health care. because they get it, they can sell it, whether that “it” is a new high-deductible health plan they’ve successfully navigated, a health assessment that alerted them to some dire health risk, or a health coach who helped them get their diabetes under control and their life on a more even keel.

one effective way to get these voices out in the open is to build a corps of workplace wellness advocates who can be charged with everything from educating people about available programs, services and discounts to rolling out new initiatives—it all depends on what your company needs and how much support and training you can afford to give them. to get a wellness advocate program off the ground, here are six things to consider:

1. what responsibilities will they have? will they educate and market only? or will they do more, like design and launch local initiatives or serve on a companywide wellness committee?
2. what qualities should they have? do they need to be great public speakers or have experienced their own personal change? what you need them to do will dictate what qualities they must have.
3. where do you need advocates? is there a business, a shift or a location that would benefit most from available advocates, and does it make sense to start there—even with a pilot?
4. how will you support them? will you design an orientation program just for them, one that steeps them in the information you want them to share? will you offer ongoing training on different topics? again, this could range from the obvious (a new benefit) to the less so (public speaking and motivation).
5. how will you connect them? if you’re geographically spread, chances are they are too. will you virtually connect them so they can learn from and advise one another?
6. how will you recognize and reward them? will you provide incentives, and what will they be? will you recognize them, maybe with a community-voted program for best advocate?

employee wellness advocates are a natural extension of the work you’re doing, and they’re an extension who’s “been there, done that.” they can connect with their peers readily, and they can help you do so too. so, the next time you’re noodling how to get more senior management support, give equal time to how you’ll showcase and support employee advocates.

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[image: dreaming_of_rivers]

the georgia children’s health alliance has taken a lot of grief for this campaign. the links here are a smattering of the hue and cry. the campaign originally consisted of billboard ads and a website with four personal narratives. the billboards have been pulled and so has one of the videos.

i’ll be honest; i don’t like the campaign. i’m going to break down why in this post, because dissecting this campaign offers valuable lessons for employers working this health puzzle.  i’ve included the billboard ads and one of the four videos. i wanted to include the one from bobby, but that was pulled. rightfully so. i review why in “message” below.

your face here?

health awareness is not promotion

one of my issues with this campaign is that it’s a health awareness campaign, not a health promotion campaign, the difference being that one makes you conscious of something and the other helps you do something about it. stealing from the world health organization, health promotion is “the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health.”  awareness campaigns have knowledge as the end result; promotion campaigns: action taken.

what works

even though i don’t think this campaign works as a whole, i don’t want to shortchange the fact that (most of) the videos do. the kids are emotionally naked. they bring you into their world, and it’s painful to be there. most grown-ups watching this video—parent or not—would want to do what they can to alleviate their pain.

what doesn’t work

now for what doesn’t work and what i think would’ve fixed it. i’m breaking down my reasons into three buckets: tone, message, and location (or channel).

tone. there’s a vast difference between the tone of the billboard ads and that of the videos. the kids break your heart. they speak about their pain, about being ostracized, about their illnesses in stark terms. the billboard ads use punchy lines and common jokes, like having “big bones,” to make a point.

how it could’ve been fixed: stay true to one tone—the tone that’ll appeal most to the audience you’re trying to reach. the alliance has been a little wishy-washy on who that audience is, but most of us would agree it’s parents. the genuine tone of the kids is the one to stick with and carry through to the billboards. it has the emotional pull and resonance the billboard text currently lacks.

message. with any communication, your aim is to leave your target audience with one clear message about what they should think, feel or do. consider the “it gets better” project. it’s name is its message, and the message is carried through every video as well. here, it’s unclear what the main message is. parents could feel shame, sorrow, inadequacy. as to what they should think or do? that’s left to their own invention.

(note: bobby’s video was pulled and replaced with this awkward one. here are my planned comments on that video which features bobby talking about his love of donuts, his hiding of chips so he can eat them later, and his vegetable disgust. “a separate issue is bobby’s video. i parenthetically added ‘most of’ when talking about what works about the videos because bobby’s stands out as being different. he talks of his love of food. of donuts and chips. i’ve no doubt he loves these things. most of us do. but in a campaign about childhood obesity, his testimony seems open to ridicule. its message validates the person who already believes solving obesity is as simple as telling someone to put down the donut. this video may be meant to show parents their food choices matter, but it’s a poor, misplaced choice and makes bobby vulnerable.” obviously, others turned up the heat on the alliance and they pulled the video, which would’ve been my suggestion as well.)

how it could’ve been fixed: kill the glib, dire billboard text. replace it with a combination of the kids’ real words and a new tag line. i’d play around with something we parents hear regularly from our kids:  “mommy…daddy…help me.” one billboard could read something like: “mama, help me: i want to play outside. stopchildhoodobesity.com.” not only would this approach play to our role as supporter, nurturer and steward, but it makes it clear that parents need to step up and learn how to prevent and reduce obesity and its many related problems. the idea needs work, but a clear call to parents to help their kids live a full, happy, healthy life might be a more persuasive technique.

location/channel. bj fogg explains effective behavior change as putting hot triggers in the path of motivated people. what he means is that we need to seize opportunities when someone shows a readiness to make a change. we need to allow them to act right then before the moment’s gone. you could argue that the billboard is a hot trigger, but we have no reason to believe that someone driving down the road is specifically motivated to tackle his or her child’s obesity problem. nor does driving down a road constitute a very good opportunity to take action.

the second breakdown here is that anyone who’s triggered to visit the stopchildhoodobesity site won’t find much. it features the videos of the four kids, a brief video on georgia’s childhood obesity statistics and an invite to join the conversation on facebook. there’s no support here. no guidance. no resources. no links. that’s coming in a previously unmentioned phase two and three, according to a recent interview given by ron frieson of the alliance. if you do visit their facebook page, you’ll find a stunning lack of involvement from the alliance. it’s been taken over by haters and others, including a representative from the CBS show the talk, who’s hunting them down for comment, i assume.

how it could’ve been fixed: don’t rely solely on one channel. billboards may be right for georgia’s culture, but there are significant shortfalls with their use, including fighting for attention in a cluttered air space. add channels that are relevant to and can springboard your audience to guided action. for example, ancillary materials shared with doctors, health clinics, community centers and schools bring the subject closer to the desired audience at a time when the information can be combined with personal discussion.

create a social strategy and follow through on it. the campaign’s use of facebook, twitter and youtube is ill-thought-out and poorly executed. they had an opportunity to reach out to the community, to rally discussion, to pull in people who’ve been there and can advise, nudge and empathize. instead, they’ve ceded the facebook page to the individuals commenting on it instead of engaging them in conversation, and they’ve let their youtube and twitter page languish. the obvious fix is: don’t take the easy step of using the tools and miss the hard, first step of planning.

these are my opinions, and these things can be subjective. a young woman who was part of the campaign eloquently spoke out about how her confidence grew because of being part of this campaign. what are your thoughts?

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holy…

the specter of death is a pretty strong image. i feel it behind me, as i sit for my third consecutive hour.

[click image to see in larger format.]

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death eaters are gonna get you if you sit too long

i’m at j. boye philadelphia 2011 today. i’m there to learn about a better user experience and ehealth innovations from my friends, beth gleba and jane sarasohn-kahn and other similarly amazing, smart people. i’m also there to give this presentation.

it’s a long, uphill battle to change the way we eat. i admire jamie oliver & IDEO’s moxie, teaming up to make that happen through the workplace with cooking & company. in this video, IDEO’s chris waugh speaks truth to power.

truth: small, social activities change our habits.
truth: work demands lead to “it’s take-out night, kids!”
truth: companies have enormous, unused leverage to make a difference. at work. at home. in the community.

power: that’s you, companies. listen up.

IDEO will be talking about cooking & company on the june 15 cohealth chat. don’t miss it.

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