How Covid-19 Has Increased Attention on Employee Wellness

Covid-19 has caused a lot of disagreements, many of them stemming from which side of the political spectrum you’re on (family gatherings are only going to get more interesting from here). One thing we can all agree on, though, is that for the next couple of decades, we will be talking about the Pre-Covid and Post-Covid world.

When it comes to the pre- and post-Covid world, I see two types of changes that we will continue to live through. Some of those changes started with Covid and hopefully one day will end along with the Covid pandemic, like the effects on restaurants, travel, performing arts etc.

And then there are the other changes that were part of gradual trends that were already happening, but Covid expedited things significantly. Things like online grocery ordering and online language tutoring saw double digit increases in just a single year between 2020 and 2021 that -- in non-pandemic times -- you might expect to see over a five-year period. 

There were even bigger changes than that, with remote work, Zoom meetings, telehealth, point-of-care diagnostic tests and subscription fitness services like Peloton seeing jumps in one year that you would normally expect to see over a 10-year period. 

And I would include one other, less obvious, thing in this 10-year-leap-in-one-year bucket: attention to employee wellness solutions.

Before the pandemic, many companies were already paying attention to their employees’ health, evidenced by how many businesses were giving away smart, trackable health products to their workforce to help them live healthier lives (things like step counters and overall health monitoring devices).

And while this is a noble gesture, these health tracking products tend not to come with any way for a company to track the return on investment for the actual wellness part of the equation. 

Pre-Covid, companies that were interested in tracking employee wellness came in two categories: 

1. Self-Insured companies trying to decrease costs by investing in the health of their employees by earlier detection of issues.
2. Companies in it for the “cool factor” who saw it as a trend that they had to jump on. (These are the same type of companies that were putting adult slides into their headquarters a few years ago.)

But, the pandemic changed all that. By talking to different service providers in the employee wellness space, I am seeing major changes that are urging companies of all sizes to take a more proactive role in their employees’ well being.

Some of the trends I’m seeing include:

Remote Work’s Potential Impacts on Health 

Most employees seem to like remote working, but not everyone benefits from it the same way. There is a potential negative impact of a remote work environment that can lead to all kinds of physical and mental health issues.

Increasing Mental Health Issues

This article by the Kaiser Family Foundation shares some grimm figures and shows us how serious the pandemic’s impact on mental health has been.

The graph below also shows you how serious the situation is. Presumably, most of those adults work for a corporation, which means the issue of mental health now is a top priority for many companies, given its implications not only on their direct healthcare costs, but -- even more importantly -- on retention, productivity and risk exposure. 

Increasing Substance Abuse Issues

After a brief stagnation (or improvement depending on your perspective) in the substance abuse rates in the USA, the pandemic caused a significant increase in substance abuse in the US. Here are just a few bullet points from the Centers for Disease Control.

• 37 of the 38 U.S. jurisdictions with available synthetic opioid data reported increases in synthetic opioid-involved overdose deaths.
• 18 of these jurisdictions reported increases greater than 50 percent.
• 10 western states reported over a 98 percent increase in synthetic opioid-involved deaths.

And these figures only cover the impact in the first few months of Covid-19. The recent figures shared here show that increases in substance abuse were even worse than initially expected.

The increase in substance abuse not only causes major productivity issues for many corporations, but depending on the nature of the business, the risk of employing a drug abuser can be detrimental for some corporations.

Increased Cost Drivers from Pandemic for Self-Insured Companies

When you look at the significant health issue drivers of potential healthcare cost savings for self-insured large corporations, you quickly realize that they are very much negatively impacted by the pandemic.

For example, mental health, obesity, hypertension and diabetes are all negatively impacted and will cause increased potential costs to self-insured companies. That would mean self-insured companies will have to take even more proactive steps to detect these potential issues earlier and support the well-being of their employees. 

Despite the increased demand for corporate wellness programs, the solutions presented to the companies are still fragmented and for the most part not designed to provide quantifiable results and ROI. There are solutions like ConfirmBiosciences’ HealthState that are designed to give better quantifiable results, but companies themselves still have to do the heavy lifting to find the best solutions to their priorities since there is no single solution that can do it all. 

We are still possibly years away from a Salesforce-type comprehensive solution for HR and C-level executives that would help them to start implementing strategic pieces of Corporate Wellness programs (rather than choosing the “Cool” one recommended by their most outspoken employees).

If you are in the Corporate Wellness space as a provider or employer, please do not hesitate to reach out to me for a chat since this is an area I would love to learn more about and share whatever information I have.