Portal to Employee Health at Habitat for Humanity

In 2014, the need for safe and affordable access to healthcare is more important than ever. With the rise of obesity and long-term diseases such as diabetes and CVD (cardiovascular disease), coupled with the continuing increase in insurance premiums, Americans are aware of just how crucial it is to have a good insurance policy. For a long time, corporations and businesses have relied on providing benefits to their full-time and part-time employees as a way of mitigating salaries, increasing job attraction, and ensuring worker health. This is especially true for employers who cannot offer extremely competitive salaries but do have an able benefits package with which to draw in qualified workers.

And although it’s become somewhat of a standard model, there are still many businesses unable or unwilling to offer benefits programs or other health-based initiatives for their employees. Whether they cannot afford to, do not see the return, or simply haven’t considered it, the private sector is divided when it comes to health provisions or health screenings. As Reddick points out in an article for Public Personnel Management (2009), private-sector employers are more unwilling than public-sector employers to offer or recognize the importance of health benefits to their employees, but many of them also understand that health-based workplace initiatives can make a lower salary more attractive to potential employees.

With this in mind, I contacted [name] Oregon’s Habitat for Humanity to discuss health initiatives at their place of work. As it turns out, Habitat for Humanity offers neither health insurance nor health screenings for its employees and volunteers. As a non-profit company with 100 percent financial transparency, it was not a question of what the business would like to do or recognizing the fiscal and social benefits of having healthy employees, so much as figuring a way to implement an initiative. Dealing with both volunteers and employees, Habitat for Humanity is in the unique position of needing healthy, strong, and competent people to help build their houses, while not being able to offer much monetary incentive. Health screenings and nutrition counseling are therefore a cost-effective way of soliciting their volunteer program.

We discussed goals and potential pathways to reaching them. Offering benefits packages is predicated on many different factors and requires a way of maneuvering the bottom line, but this is not the only way to motivate and improve employee and volunteer health. One of the Healthy People 2020 objectives for workplace health is to “increase the proportion of worksites that offer nutrition or weight management classes or counseling.” My contact thought that this would an achievable and affordable near-term solution to affect worker and volunteer health.

Any smart business person needs to consider the health of his or her employees. In terms of probability and worker longevity, a healthy employee is less likely to take sick days, less likely to need medical leave, less likely to die early, and is likely to be more productive at work. The CDC recommends providing nutrition counseling at worksites, including “self-monitoring, overcoming barriers to selecting healthy foods,” as well as providing support in the social environment of the workplace (CDC 2013). The agency also suggests that even if nutrition counseling is the only health benefit an employee can offer, this is still seen as an attractive addition for any potential employee, thereby increasing the quality of workers an employer can hire.

Of course, understanding the benefits of something is different from implementing it. My contact and I discussed the different ways Habitat for Humanity could being providing health-based initiatives and nutrition counseling. First, Habitat for Humanity could begin hosting nutrition retreats or nutrition classes at their places of work. This could be done during work hours or after-work for those who wish to participate. They also could contact a gym or personal trainer and set up a mandatory fitness and nutrition program for their employees, such as Wegmans has done for its employees.

Secondly, they could offer free health screenings for employees and volunteers. As a study by Brown, Medford, Chen, and Brown (2009) showed, older volunteers are not only incredibly capable physical volunteers for Habitat for Humanity, they also display better mental health than younger volunteers. The authors conclude that older volunteers are an undervalued resource, so creating an environment where older people felt safe could increase the organization’s volunteer base for certain age demographics. Providing free health screenings and nutrition counseling for new volunteers could be the harbinger for a whole host of new, healthy, and proactive volunteers.

As American workers become more health-conscious and as lifespans increase, the need for integration of health-initiatives into the workplace will continue to grow, and this is true for employees, volunteers, profit and non-profit businesses alike. Habitat for Humanity may not be able to immediately provide a full benefits package to its employees, but American employers must realize that there are myriad ways in which to increase the health, and thereby productivity, of its workers and volunteers.

References

Brown, J., Mefford, L., Chen, S., & Brown, A. (2009). Health and function of older persons volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. Southern Online Journal Of Nursing Research

Reddick, C. G. (2009). The Importance of Employee Health Benefits to Public and Private Sector Organizations. Public Personnel Management, 38(2).

Workplace Health Promotion - Nutrition. (2013, October 23). Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/workplacehealthpromotion/implementation/topics/nutrition.html