Michael DiPrima has lost more than 60 pounds. Chauncey Wordlaw has lowered his body-fat percentage by five points. Erin Mocko says she is fitter than she has ever been.
What’s their secret? Some fabulous new diet drug?
Not quite.
DiPrima, Wordlaw and Mocko all take advantage of a health trend that is getting to be as popular as the Atkins diet: employer-sponsored health-and-wellness programs.
DiPrima works out almost every morning at the 10,000-square-foot on-site gym at North Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories, where he is director of Abbott International Operations IT.
Wordlaw is an electrician at Alberto-Culver USA Inc. in Melrose Park. The company offers a wellness program and fitness center.
Mocko, a research pharmacist at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, has earned a day off by participating in the hospital’s Health Points program, which rewards healthy behavior such as exercising.
Outside of Chicago, employees at Sprint’s Overland Park, Kan., headquarters get a daily workout–whether they like it or not–by walking as much as a half-mile between the various buildings on campus. They also can bound up the stairs in less time than it takes the company’s elevators to reach their destination.
Sprint spokeswoman Lisa Brady said the company purposely installed poky hydraulic elevators and designed the sprawling campus to encourage employees to get moving, especially in car-happy Kansas City.
These companies are hardly alone in helping their employees keep fit and trim. Ninety-five percent of companies responding to a survey by Lincolnshire-based Hewitt Associates offer some sort of health-promotion program, ranging from cholesterol screenings to workout facilities to health fairs.
Of those firms, 36 percent maintain a workout facility for employees, and 29 percent encourage fitness by sponsoring corporate sports teams and tournaments.
Not coincidentally, the office-as-health-club trend occurs at a time when Americans are getting bigger. In 1991, 12 percent of American adults qualified as obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, almost 21 percent of the adult population is obese, the NIH says, which reflects an epidemic that is taking its toll on corporate coffers.
High blood pressure, diabetes and other obesity-related illnesses cost corporations $12 billion last year, according to the Washington Business Group on Health, a non-profit organization that focuses on health concerns.
“In today’s health-care climate, as costs are escalating, employers are more open to [wellness] programs than ever before,” said Camille Haltom, a health-care consultant at Hewitt.
Requests from firms to implement such programs have risen dramatically in the last two years, she added.
Launching a health program, however, is not as easy as hiring a nutritionist or putting a couple of treadmills in an unused conference room, said Linda Demarest, health benefits director at the American Management Association, a New York-based trade group.
Demarest cited an October association study indicating that although 71 percent of executives say they recognize the benefits of workplace health programs, fewer than half had implemented such programs. Companies tend to stall because of indecision, not lack of interest, Demarest says.
“The disconnect is in deciding which type of program has the greatest payoff at the least cost,” Demarest said.
Executives at Abbott worked through several concerns before launching a wellness program in 1988, said Megan Rizzo, fitness coordinator for the health-care products company.
Space was one concern. The company ended up installing the gym in the lower level of a building that houses senior management at a cost “that was a lot more than they expected,” Rizzo said, though she would not cite a figure.
Staffing the center was another issue. Rizzo said the company considered outsourcing staff for the gym but decided to keep it in-house. “We wanted employees to have accountability and ownership with the program,” Rizzo said.
About 1,000 of the company’s 17,000 employees use the gym regularly and pay about $200 a year to do so, about one-fifth the cost of a private club membership.
Rizzo said traffic at the gym has increased about 25 percent since Abbott remodeled the space in January. “That’s success to us,” she said. .
Although Rizzo says Abbott has not done any studies to determine the program’s financial payoff to the company, some employees say they have personally seen a payoff.
DiPrima says since he has lost weight, he is a more productive employee.
“I have more energy, I’m more mentally sharp, and I have greater endurance for the day’s trials and issues,” he said.
Another plus: He no longer suffers from debilitating sinus headaches that often would turn into migraines, causing him to miss work.
Alberto-Culver hired an outside firm, Oak Brook-based Advocate Health Care, to run its wellness program and fitness center.
Its program encompasses a new 11,000-square-foot gym used regularly by about 300 of the company’s 1,100 employees, weight-management classes and health seminars.
The company is still tinkering with its 4-year-old program to make it as accessible as possible to employees, says Dan Stone, vice president of Alberto-Culver’s corporate communications. For instance, it recently added a kickboxing class and is rethinking the operating hours of its gym, now open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. weekdays.
“We see this as a work in progress,” Stone said.
Wordlaw, 38, says his four-times-a-week workout regimen has cut his body fat to 11 percent from 16 percent, and his resting heart rate is now 57 beats per minute, down from 75. As a result, he is more alert and is no longer prone to catching colds, he says.
“I sleep better at night and that gives me more energy at work,” said Wordlaw, who pays $15 a month to exercise in his company’s gym.
Lack of space kept Children’s Memorial Hospital from building an on-site gym when it kicked off its health-and-wellness program four years ago. However, the hospital, which employs about 3,600 people, subsidizes memberships at several private clubs, said Barbara Bowman, chief human resource officer.
Another strategy it uses to motivate its workers is an incentive program called Health Points.
For example, participating employees can earn one point for every 30 minutes they walk (the program works on the honor system), 20 points for participating in an organized walk or run, and 50 points for running a marathon. The points are redeemable for athletic equipment such as running shoes, gift certificates, and, for the grand total of 250 points, a day off.
Mocko, 28, the research pharmacist, used her day off to spend a day shopping with her mother.
The program “is a good way of saying `thank you for working here, you’re doing a good job,'” Mocko said.
