Impact of a health promotion program on employee health risks and work productivity

Abstract

Purpose: Evaluate the impact of a multicomponent workplace health promotion program on employee health risks and work productivity.

Design: Quasi-experimental 12-month before-after intervention-control study.

Setting: A multinational corporation headquartered in the United Kingdom.

Subjects: Of 618 employees offered the program, 266 (43%) completed questionnaires before and after the program. A total of 1242 of 2500 (49.7%) of a control population also completed questionnaires 12 months apart.

Intervention: A multicomponent health promotion program incorporating a health risk appraisal questionnaire, access to a tailored health improvement web portal, wellness literature, and seminars and workshops focused upon identified wellness issues.

Measures: Outcomes were (1) cumulative count of health risk factors and the World Health Organization health and work performance questionnaire measures of (2) workplace absenteeism and (3) work performance.

Results: After adjusting for baseline differences, improvements in all three outcomes were significantly greater in the intervention group compared with the control group. Mean excess reductions of 0.45 health risk factors and 0.36 monthly absenteeism days and a mean increase of 0.79 on the work performance scale were observed in the intervention group compared with the control group. The intervention yielded a positive return on investment, even using conservative assumptions about effect size estimation.

Conclusion: The results suggest that a well-implemented multicomponent workplace health promotion program can produce sizeable changes in health risks and productivity.