“Corporate culture” is a term tossed around a lot. It’s easy to see why a particular corporate culture may be desirable. After all, it is often cited as the reason for low turnover and high participation in certain types of benefits and programs. You know what corporate culture means, even if you may be unable to define it in 10 words or less. However, you may not know how you can begin to build a positive, healthy culture for your own company.
The best way, says Rajiv Kumar, co-founder of a wellness company called Shape Up The Nation, is to stand aside. Your employees are poised to begin developing your healthy corporate culture—even if they don’t know it yet. And when the culture springs from them, rather than from the corner office, the benefits are longer lasting and run deeper.
Kumar realized in 2005 when attending medical school that, while medicine does not yet have all the answers, it does have some very simple ones. “We have some basic knowledge that can prevent many of the diseases we all face. If we adopt a healthy lifestyle, we know we can prevent type II diabetes, heart disease, certain forms of cancer, hypertension, etc. The problem is getting people to adopt those healthy behaviors that can prevent these conditions.
“What I saw with patients was that most people struggled with their weight, with keeping physically active, and some with quitting smoking,” he says. “Most of them were not succeeding, and it wasn’t for lack of trying. They would come back 3, 6, or 12 months later and had not made their goal. I realized that those who succeeded did so in a different way.”
People who were successful at losing weight, exercising regularly, eating better and making other healthy lifestyle choices had a social support system, Kumar says. “They had leveraged their social network to create accountability. They not only made an effort to be healthier, they engaged all the people around them, whom they know and trust and see regularly, to be part of their journey.” From that realization emerged Shape Up The Nation (www.shapeupthenation.com).
Wellness Directors Not Required
Shape Up The Nation relies on employees to encourage one another. Corporate wellness directors are cordially uninvited to direct it—although they should feel free to participate. The program usually begins with a 12-week team competition,. How? Find your leaders.
“They’re the ones who organize office events and are usually the first to sign up for anything,” Kumar says. “We look for those people to be team captains, asking them to be early adopters. They come online and commit to forming a team, and they search for colleagues to be a part of it.
“We find that the average team has 9 participants. So each team captain is finding 8 additional people who may not otherwise have heard the message, understood the message, or taken action on the message. Yet they’re signing up, not because their HR department asked them to or because their CEO asked them to in a top-down fashion, but because the person who sits in the cubicle next to them asked them, in a bottom-up fashion.”
The program works at Sperian Protection, a manufacturing firm where only about half of all employees have daily computer access. Sperian’s U.S. Benefits Manager Robin Benoit says the program enjoyed an 80% participation rate among U.S. employees in 2009, and a 90% satisfaction rate. “They have seen some real results with the program,” Benoit reports. “Altogether, in 2009 the group lost over 3,500 pounds, exercised almost 2 million minutes, and took over 820 million pedometer steps!
“With the Body Mass Index reductions we experienced, Shape Up The Nation provided an estimated return on investment of more than 3 times the cost of the program, based on average costs by risk band. It is a great success for the company as a whole, in my opinion.”
Shape Up The Nation’s platform is a social networking site, specific to each subscribing company and limited with regard to content. This is not a site where employees go to chat about their weekends and share albums full of family pictures. Rather, the focus of the site is health and wellness.
One employee may issue a challenge to another employee, such as the highest number of steps walked in a week. Or, one department may issue a challenge to another department about how many pounds they can collectively lose before the end of the month. Employees share health tips and offer encouragement or congratulations on a health achievement.
“People create a challenge, then invite their colleagues to be a part of it,” Kumar explains. “When you’re using user-generated information and opportunities to engage people, you make it relevant.
“For example, I might want to go for a walk. I would log in and the platform will tell me about the walking opportunities that are happening in my location.
“It might say, these three people are going walking at lunch tomorrow; this person is walking at the gym the next day; this person formed a group for walkers to share tips; and this person has formed a challenge to walk 10,000 steps every day for 10 weeks. I can engage in those activities, without the wellness director having to dream them up.”
The secret, then, is something you may have warned your children against: peer pressure. “We prefer to think of it more as peer motivation,” quips Kumar. “Group behavior change therapy has been around for years. We see it with models like Alcoholics Anonymous® and Weight Watchers®. Both are really effective programs. We take the concept and scale it in an affordable way across large populations.”
Intrinsic Motivation Is Essential
Affordability is important in this dark economy. Could it be that you’re spending more than you need to in encouraging wellness? “Financial incentives are already a big part of the wellness industry,” Kumar says.
“We have clients today who spend $500 to get an employee to take a health risk assessment, which really is not doing much except gathering some information. It doesn’t change behavior. We suggest companies leverage social incentives to change behavior.
“We believe that financial incentives cannot be the core philosophy of an effective wellness program. It really has to be about tapping into intrinsic motivation to change behavior. That comes from changing the company’s culture through social aspects,” he explains.
You can find ways to increase social motivation toward wellness on your own, Kumar says, by working to bring employees together. “Figure out a way to make your existing programs more community-based,” he says. “If you’re incenting employees to go to the gym, incent them to go to the gym with someone else—they only get the incentive if they bring along a colleague.
“Or if you’re asking them to get a biometric screening, encourage them to bring other employees along. It isn’t just about you getting your biometric screening; it’s about all of us doing it. Set a goal: 50% of us, companywide, are going to get our biometric screenings done.”
By offering resources and then stepping back, your employees may surprise you with the wellness momentum they create. “As employees get more involved, it really begins to change the culture. It becomes unacceptable to take the elevator to the second floor, or to serve cake at an employee’s birthday. That’s how you create sustainable behavior change.”