Employees value CEO participation in corporate wellness programs

LISA BISACCIA, executive vice president and chief human resources officer for CVS Health Corp., has a wide array of responsibilities, including overseeing wellness programs for the company’s 240,000 employees and their families. / COURTESY CVS HEALTH
LISA BISACCIA, executive vice president and chief human resources officer for CVS Health Corp., has a wide array of responsibilities, including overseeing wellness programs for the company’s 240,000 employees and their families. / COURTESY CVS HEALTH

PROVIDENCE – Workplace stress always, almost always or very often impacts nearly 30 percent of employees who responded to a national survey commissioned by the American Heart Association CEO Roundtable, the AHA–Southern New England reported. The AHA plans to use the survey’s data to identify key actions that employers can take to improve health and well-being in their organizations.
“The big takeaway from the survey is that employers really play an important role in addressing the top concerns of employees through programming and CEO leadership,” said Amanda Leite, executive director of AHA–Southern New England. “That’s what we intend to encourage with our work here in Rhode Island.”
How important is CEO leadership around and participation in corporate health and wellness programs? Very, according to the results of a Nielsen online survey from August 2016 of 2,008 adults employed in a business offering a health plan and employing at least 25 individuals. Employees who knew that their CEO participated in such programs reported better productivity (60 percent), improved work quality (56 percent) and higher job satisfaction (54 percent). Seventy percent of those whose CEO participated in health programs reported feeling that their employer cares either a great deal or a lot about them (70 percent) and that their employer is committed to employees’ health (93 percent). Additional data found that nearly half of respondents alleviated their stress levels by occasionally disconnecting from technology, 40 percent want their employers to recognize their workplace stress and 30 percent wished for flexibility in work schedules.
A leadership collaborative that combines AHA’s scientific expertise with CEOs’ broad corporate experience, the AHA CEO Roundtable provides employers with tools to adopt a common set of standards designed to improve workplace health programs’ quality and engage people where they spend the majority of their day – at work, said Leite. The AHA CEO Roundtable has 26 members, including CVS Health Corp.’s President and CEO Larry J. Merlo, who has been a member since 2013, when the roundtable was founded.
At CVS Health, Merlo appointed Lisa Bisaccia, executive vice president and chief human resources officer, to a volunteer leadership role on the roundtable. “[At CVS Health], we like to say, ‘health is everything,’” said Bisaccia. With oversight responsibility for advancing the wellness of the company’s 240,000 employees and their families, she’s constantly challenging her team to implement a host of tools and services to meet that objective, she said. One CVS Health initiative, “700 Good Reasons,” asks smoking employees to pay a $50 deposit that they will get back, along with a $700 reward, if they succeed in quitting smoking. Many employees have quit smoking, and lost weight, she reported and CVS Health is able to share these best practices with employers throughout the country, given Merlo’s roundtable membership.
In related news, Leite announced that AHA is transitioning from its Fit-Friendly program to a new initiative that uses a suite of digital tools as a continuous quality improvement tool. “The new program [Workplace Health Solutions] will help set a higher standard in workplace health in Rhode Island and across the country that is based in AHA science and recommendations,” said Leite, who explained that the transition occurred after the AHA recommended workplace wellness programs include AHA’s Life’s Simple 7, which offers objective, scientifically-grounded measures of employees’ heart health. Life’s Simple 7 are these: manage blood pressure, control cholesterol, reduce blood sugar, get active, eat better, lose weight and stop smoking. Leite expects that many of the 24 companies in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts currently participating in AHA’s Fit-Friendly program will migrate to using the new program next year.
While Life’s Simple 7 sound easy, it’s clear from Rhode Island’s rising obesity rate that not everyone can get on board. Rhode Island’s obesity rate was 10.1 percent in 1990, 16.9 percent in 2000 and 26 percent in 2016, as noted in “The State of Obesity: Better Policies for a Healthier America,” a September 2016 report from the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, citing the state’s obesity rates the 12th lowest in the nation. Despite our relatively good national ranking, Bisaccia said that obesity, which is linked to greater risks of cardiovascular disease or stroke and of developing arthritis, diabetes and cancer, is one of Rhode Island’s greatest health challenges. Should those rates continue, Bisaccia said that Rhode Island’s projected heart disease rates will jump to 301,251 in 2030, a dramatic increase from the 64,087 cases of heart disease in 2010.
The AHA Rhode Island board of directors will help to enroll 20 local companies in the Workplace Health Achievement Index, which helps companies assess and improve their employees’ health, said Anna Umberto, vice president of strategic procurement at CVS Health and an AHA Rhode Island board member. Companies are invited to join the index before a March 31, 2017 deadline.
Approaching wellness from the perspective of continuous improvement, the Workplace Health Solutions identifies five actions for employers to take: assess health culture, consult AHA resources, implement change and reassess, recognize and reward achievement and review data insights.
For more information, visit sneheart@heart.org or call (401) 228-2325.

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