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Management commitment to employee health up 600%: Survey

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Willis North America’s Human Capital Practice, a unit of Willis Group Holdings P.L.C., on Thursday released its findings of its health and productivity survey, which found that organizations’ senior leadership commitment to improving employee health was up 600% from last year’s results.

According to the survey, 42% of senior leadership surveyed said they were improving employee benefit health through workplace wellness programs and cultural support for wellness, compared with 6% in 2009.

The Willis Health and Productivity Survey also found that employers still were struggling to successfully engage their workforce in their health and productivity initiatives and also reported having trouble measuring the success rate of those offerings.

Willis reported that it received more than 1,900 responses to the survey and that 71% of the respondents had 500 or fewer employees.

Some key findings of the survey include:

• Fifty-three percent of employers indicated they had some type of wellness program. Of those with a wellness program, 57% describe their program as “basic.”

• Health care costs remain the driving force motivating organizations to implement worksite wellness programs. Seventy-eight percent of employers reviewed their health care cost trends prior to implementing a wellness program.

• Only 28% of responding employers have a specific and defined strategy in place to improve employee engagement in the workplace. Of the organizations that have a formal strategy, 64% considered their worksite wellness program to be an important part of their overall employee engagement strategy.

“While it is encouraging to see organizational support at the senior level significantly increasing, the survey indicates a need to focus programs on increased employee engagement,” said Cheryl Mealey, national practice leader, wellness consulting with Willis Human Capital Practice in a statement.

Ms. Mealey added that employers are missing an important opportunity by not investing in training designed to assist mid-level managers in managing relationships along with the health and productivity workforce.

The full survey can be found at www.willis.com/documents/publications.

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