Motion Connected had the pleasure of recently attending a local seminar featuring Dr. Dee Edington, the founder of the University of Michigan Health Management Research Center. His insight was on display as he illustrated the competitive advantage of a “Thriving, Healthy, High-Performing and Sustainable Workplace and Workforce”. Here are some key highlights from his presentation:
1. “Just Don’t Get Worse”
Dr. Edington argued for a fresh perspective on goal-setting around wellness programs. Instead of seeing wellness as means to reverse trends, it would be equally impactful if it simply flattened out the natural increase of costs that comes with increase of age. In other words, keep people from not getting any worse.
He went on to explain this goal helps us focus on all segments of a workplace population (high, mid and low risk individuals) so can we keep them all in check. More is available on this topic in his book Zero Trends.
2. Learn from the Positive Outliers
When looking at the whole population, statistical analysis often eliminates the extreme outliers in a study in order to find the average. Dr. Edington suggested that eliminating them in wellness could endanger us from learning from them. Instead he suggests asking yourself some questions when looking at your healthy population.
What contributes to their extreme success? How then can we make today's outliers tomorrow’s norm? Why model ourselves after the average when we can learn from the above average?
3. Focus on the Value of Caring
In setting the bar on wellness, it is often claimed that wellness is failing to produce a return because it hasn't proven to reverse the unhealthy trends. Dr. Edington questioned why we don’t hold medicine and pharmaceuticals to this standard. Though both have gotten more sophisticated and powerful, they haven’t changed the numbers of our nation's population as a whole.
Does that mean they don’t work? No. Rather, they work for those who comply. Wellness is the same, it works for those who participate and engage. So how do you actually measure engagement? He argued that engagement measurements should be focused more on around VOC, the value of caring.
By focusing on the value of caring return you’ll see a positive impact in overall culture, business success and retention rates.
Each of these points weaves the same message of adjusting the focus of our wellness efforts.
As a pioneer in the industry, his decades of research definitely provoke a lot to consider in achieving our goal of a thriving workforce.