Page 68 - Occupational Health & Safety, June 2019

Employee Gifts & Incentives
Keeping Them Healthy is Keeping Them Safe Having a highly engaged workforce should be the goal of every department in a company.
Engaged employees are simply far more likely to work harder, smarter, and safer.
BY BRIAN GALONEK
The interconnected worlds of wellness and safety are just now coming into view for many safety and HR professionals. If better understood, the correlation between the two can be leveraged to improve not just employee health and safety, but also employee engagement and corporate profitability.
What do obesity, tobacco use, stress, and high blood pressure all have in common? They are all safety issues. That’s right, these things that we as- sociate with health and wellness also relate directly to safety. Health and wellness issues, historically viewed as separate and distinct from safety, are now showing very clearly how interdependent they are.
Obvious correlations:
■ Obesity leads to sleep apnea, which leads to tired driving, longer reaction times, and accidents. Obesity levels have doubled in the United States in the past 20 years.
■ Smokers take more daily work breaks and 64 Occupational Health & Safety | JUNE 2019
have higher levels of absenteeism, which causes disruption. This puts additional stress on the work- force and leads to an increase in accidents and inju- ries. The average smoker takes roughly six days of smoke breaks per year.
■ Stress leads to tired and distracted work, which leads to mistakes and ultimately to a less safe workforce. Seventy percent of workers with high levels of stress say that it impacts their work life.
Less obvious, but equally important correlations:
■ Diabetes can lead to vision loss and other medical issues, which can affect a person’s ability to get and/or keep a commercial driver’s license.
■ Hypertension, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol levels are all treatable conditions that, left untreated, lead to greater stress, physical and mental exhaustion, and safety-related problems.
■ Workers who sit most of the day have twice the incidence of cardiovascular disease as com- pared with those that are on their feet most of the work day—“sitting is the new smoking.”
When looking at these examples (and countless more), it’s easy to see how interconnected health, wellness, safety, and overall job performance are. Only 20-30 percent of health issues are caused by genetics. The other 70-80 percent come from life- style choices, the environment, and access to care, and therefore they can be affected in a positive way. The questions then become, what can an employer do about it, and is it even their responsibility?
Speaking to the second question, in some cir- cles you will hear a great deal of push-back against the “nanny state”—the notion that corporations, by taking on these issues, are taking on the role of “household nanny” by trying to steer their em- ployees to make good decisions. After all, goes the thinking, people get to make their own choices, and it should not be up to their employer to help them make the right choices. The question really comes down to how we view intrinsic vs. extrinsic moti- vation, and the reality is that far more people are extrinsically motivated, meaning that they can be influenced in the right direction in ways that ben- efit both them and their employer.
It is also important to note that the younger
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