Overview
There is burgeoning awareness in corporate Australia regarding presenteeism and the negative impact employee health risks have upon this. Employers are increasingly keen to reverse this trend via corporate health interventions, however, as with all corporate expenditure the question of ROI is critical. The Health at Work ROI Calculator, designed to estimate both current excess productivity loss as a result of your baseline workforce health risk and the potential fiscal benefits secondary to engagement with Health at Work and the implementation of our targeted corporate health programs, provides you with a benchmark answer.
The method used by our calculator to estimate the potential financial gain your company is likely to make as a result of Health at Work engagement is based on:
- A salary conversion method (also known as the Human Capital Approach HCA) - the most commonly applied and highly regarded methodology
- Baseline workforce health risk data derived from Health at Work aggregate data of over 5,000 Australian employees (largest corporate Australian dataset)
- Health risk related productivity impact data from Burton et al (2005) study of over 28,000 employees
- An estimated realistic participation rate of 50% in our corporate health programs
- An estimated reduction of one health risk per participating employee
While there is much discussion about the need to validate attempts to translate productivity losses and gains into direct economic outcomes, there is a general consensus that the HCA provides an estimation of the lower bound cost of lost productivity. Experts agree that the real cost, and therefore the financial gains of successful interventions, could be as much as two- five times the figure produced using this method. The Health at Work ROI Calculator can only provide an estimation .
References
Burton WN, Chen CY, Conti DJ, Schultz AB, Edington DW. The association between health risk change and presenteeism change.J Occup Environ Med. 2006;48(3):252-63.
Burton WN, Chen CY, Conti DJ, Schultz AB, Pransky G, Edington DW.The association of health risks with on-the-job productivity. J Occup Environ Med. 2005;47(8):769-77.
Mattke S, Balakrishnan A, Bergamo G, Newberry SJ. A review of methods to measure health-related productivity loss. Am J Manag Care. 2007;13(4):211-7.
Mills PR, Kessler RC, Cooper J, Sullivan S. Impact of a health promotion program on employee health risks and work productivity. Am J Health Promot. 2007;22(1):45-53.
Schultz AB, Chen CY, Edington DW. The cost and impact of health conditions on presenteeism to employers: a review of the literature. Pharmacoeconomics. 2009;27(5):365-78.
