Occupational health providers are transforming their services to support emerging health risks and utilise digital service delivery. Employers that work with them to co-create solutions and assess the business impacts stand to gain the most benefits, writes Louise Abbs.
The pandemic has fundamentally changed the way that occupational health is delivered, with long-term plans having to give way to supporting employees with immediate priorities; be that the need to deliver services remotely due to homeworking, or put in place new solutions for emerging issues such as long Covid.
The result has been a couple of years of immense creativity and innovation, with new digital services and apps being delivered. This has made occupational health services more accessible than ever, leading to a far more agile and responsive way of working with employers to meet emerging needs.
In many cases, employers helped to co-create these new services, by sharing pulse survey data about how employees’ concerns were progressing. From rising anxiety and bereavement levels to increasing musculoskeletal issues as more people started working from home and NHS operations got cancelled, as well as rising levels of fatigue and burnout.
The result has been a fundamental shift from the perception of occupational health as a sickness absence management tool, to a professional service with the insights and expertise needed to help people stay healthy and productive. Fortunately, that desire to flex and adapt solutions to employees’ needs has remained in place.
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However, employers that simply put OH services on hold during the pandemic, or didn’t have the employee insights needed to flex what they were doing, might now be unaware of all the new services developed over the past few years.
Taking stock
So, the first step to getting the most out of working with your OH provider is to take stock of what they can provide now. You might be surprised to discover a plethora of new services, from postal blood testing to AI-guided mental health counselling.
The next step to maximising the relationship is to think about what the business needs from its wellbeing strategy. For example, instead of OH being seen as a necessary expense to get people back to work, think about how it can create a culture of health and help the business with its attraction and retention policies.
Once you know what the business needs its wellbeing policies to achieve, share this with your OH providers to find out what they can do to support this. We don’t know what we don’t know, so just as you might not know of all the new services that OH providers have been innovating, they might not know what your business needs right now when it comes to its wellbeing and talent agendas.
Building a business case
Also critical to better aligning health and wellbeing strategies with key business drivers, is working with people from the business to make the case for certain wellbeing initiatives. Conducting fatigue assessments might be seen as an expense. But, if the business can help you quantify the cost of people going off sick with exhaustion and your OH provider justifies cost-savings associated with catching people before they fall, you will be able to demonstrate the potential ROI savings. All of this will help to secure business sponsorship for the initiative at a higher level.
Also, many OH providers will not only provide a dedicated account manager, but someone who can actually be seconded into the business to learn about it and help drive forward targets on everything from absence and productivity to employee engagement and retention.
Many OH provides will not only provide a dedicated account manager, but someone who can actually be seconded into the business to learn about it and help drive forward targets on everything from absence and productivity to employee engagement and retention”
In general, the more you can shift the focus from simply managing absence to creating a culture of health the better. Most budget tends to be spent on supporting those who are already off sick, when a more proactive approach to pre-empting future problems will yield greater returns. This could include, for example, blood screening to detect non-communicable diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease or cancer, to protect the health of an ageing workforce, or investment in mental health apps and online CBT training to help younger generations cope with increasing anxiety.
Promoting services
Another important aspect of working in partnership with OH suppliers is when it comes to promoting and increasing take-up of services. If the aim is to genuinely reduce the prevalence of mental health-related absence and staff attrition due to stress, a ‘tick-box’ employee assistance programme that no-one knows about, let alone uses, won’t have much impact. Instead, look for providers that want to drive awareness and take-up and judge themselves on the number of calls and people being helped to stay in work.
Providers that want to have a positive impact on your bottom line will have strategies in place to help you promote their services, especially via managers who are the people best placed to encourage employees to use them. These providers will also be willing to flex and adapt their services to your needs. For example, by reallocating existing resource to emerging needs, such as delivering webinars on burnout or workshops on long Covid instead of more generic health education if it emerges that this is what the workforce is most in need of.
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Finally, view your OH partner as a partner. Talk to them about emerging issues, share data about what employees need and meet with them regularly. Listen to their ideas and be prepared to adapt your initial contract, so you can flex your approach in keeping with broader business needs and what will have the most positive impact.
Next month, Louise’s third article in this three-part series will look at how to create a culture of health to give your wellbeing strategy the best chance of success.
