Grady Saucier was behind his desk at MMR Group during a recent lunch break when a fellow employee asked if he was heading out to exercise.
“I wanted to blow it off,” Saucier, vice president of marketing at the Baton Rouge-based company, tells Business Report in a feature in the new issue. “But peer pressure made me get up and go do it.”
He didn’t have far to go.
In 2016, MMR Group transformed an onsite building into a 10,000-square-foot workout facility with treadmills, weight racks, a boot camp area and basketball court. Saucier says the gym cost about $1.1 million to build and was steered largely by the passion of MMR President and CEO James “Pepper” Rutland, a former LSU football player. The company, which has 400 employees in the Capital City, also pays for a trainer two hours a day and catered sandwiches four days a week.
“It’s definitely made us more productive,” says Saucier. “I have energy in the middle of the afternoon instead of hitting the wall.”
While they take on many different forms, there has been a steady climb in the number of employer-based wellness programs nationwide and across the Capital Region. Believed to foster savings in health insurance claims, increase productivity and give companies a hiring edge, wellness programs are a $6 billion industry in the United States, according to a recent study conducted by the RAND Corporation. Half of all employers with 50 or more employees offered some type of wellness program in 2012, the study revealed.
“What it means has been different for everybody,” says Karen Breaux, human resources manager at Postlethwaite & Netterville and a board member with the Greater Baton Rouge Society for Human Resource Management.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana was an early adapter in employee wellness several years ago, with an onsite workout room, an outdoor walking track, biometric testing and a fleet of online programs to help its more than 2,000 employees focus on better eating and exercise.
Today, higher-risk employees of the company have access to special counseling, and all employees have the opportunity to accumulate credits to qualify for a preferred premium rate at the end of year, absorbing the employee portion of their health insurance. Linking the company’s wellness initiatives directly to the cost of insurance helped employee participation jump from about 52% to 90%, says Barbara Miller, Blue Cross human resource specialist.
But while it’s hard to dispute the value of wellness, pinning down a return on investment in employee wellness programs has vexed companies for a number of reasons, including fluctuating participation and the challenge in monitoring the health of a population subset that may change jobs. Moreover, the RAND study warns that previous assumptions that wellness programs return $3 for every $1 spent, may be misleading and that the biggest yield comes from helping employees already struggling with health issues stay out of the hospital, where costs are highest.
“ROI is definitely a challenge to hone in on,” says Nan Davis, vice president of human resources at AWC in Baton Rouge.
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