Policies ensuring workplace health and wellness in well-performing countries, such as the United States, Canada, and Japan, hold valuable lessons for India Inc. leaders
Businesses in India have an urgent need to recognise and meet their workforce’s expectations of sustained, preventive healthcare. Thanks to workplace pressures, COVID-19, and increasingly unsettling surroundings, Indian employees have become more conscious of their risk of chronic and lifestyle diseases and have sought out preventive healthcare services.
It is also imperative for companies that are mandated or aspire to become ESG-correct. SEBI's Business Responsibility & Sustainability Reporting requires businesses to respect and promote the well-being of all employees, including those in their value chains.
This creates a responsibility for corporate health leaders, to foster healthy work environments that protect their employees and their productivity. Policies ensuring workplace health and wellness in well-performing countries, such as the United States, Canada, and Japan, hold valuable lessons for India’s leaders.
A wealth of research spotlights the increasing incidences of non-communicable diseases - obesity and related conditions, cancer, and mental illnesses among this population subset—and their impact on a workplace’s financial health. A 2020 Asian Development Bank report on members’ wellness indicators noted that, as the bottom third country among ADB members, India has performed poorly compared to other Asian nations.
In 2022, a Deloitte survey revealed that poor mental health among Indian employees cost their employers $14 billion annually and registered the need for India Inc. to act urgently. The silver lining in the deterioration of urban populations’ health has been the growing investment into employee wellnessby some of India’s leading corporates.
These leaders have adopted a solutions mindset to absorb lessons from globally successful strategies and inculcate them into their company’s culture. While these strategies have been implemented by governments, they have played a significant role in ensuring employee health and, therefore, overall wellness and productivity in corporates, and small to medium-scale businesses. A noteworthy example can be found in Asia’s best-performing country—Japan—according to the ADB report.
Japan is about to launch the third term of its national health movement, Health Japan 21 (HJ21), which was initiated in 2000. The country has evolved its focus from simply containing the rise of Chronic Conditions, to holistically addressing citizens’ personal, social, and environmental health, including in workplaces. Japan’s national law mandates that employers offer annual health check-ups and that employees undergo these check-ups.
HJ21 encourages employers, through government incentives, to implement health checks and screenings for their staffers. Then, employers can target high-risk individuals and ensure they follow up with health professionals; create healthier menus, with calorie labels, for office canteens; restrict or ban smoking during work hours; and create team activities to break the monotony of a sedentary work day.Japan also instituted the Metabo Law, in 2008.
Widely misconstrued as criminalising fatness in Japan, Metabo calls on employers to annually measure employee waistlines. These records help employers track who is at risk of a roster of chronic conditions, such as diabetes, heart attacks, and strokes, and intervene in time.
Even policies in the United States have noted the significant impact work environments have on people’s health. The Affordable Care Act’s National Prevention Strategy (2011) asked employers to support workplace wellness efforts, and provide “counselling to promote life skills, combat depression, address substance use problems, and enhance overall emotional well-being for employees”.
The government’s Healthy People 2030 Initiative set a range of objectives to make workplaces safer and healthier, including prohibiting workplace smoking, creating nutrition and employee health promotion programmes for the staff, and even encouraging physical activities.
In their departmental plan, Canada’s Centre for Occupational Health and Safety made a crucial observation. Modern work technologies have blurred the lines between home and office spaces, especially since the pandemic. Any wellness agenda must take this shift into account, and the “psychosocial” risk it poses for employees at the risk of burnout. India Inc. must pay particular attention to this phenomenon, and to the stigma that prevents people from talking about failing mental health.
Like many other aspects of our lives, good health too is an incentive. Companies can cultivate a positive well-being culture by acknowledging the health transitions of their workforce.
Such measures are far superior to one-off company workshops on wellness or relying on individual employees’ capacity for ‘resilience’. This outlook is dated and results in a section of employees falling through the cracks; particularly those still resistant to preventive health measures—screening for chronic conditions, leading healthier lives, adopting health aids—because they live in denial, or they are not adequately aware of the risks.
Behavioural change is hard. However, we now know it can be successfully brought about through continuous engagement, and long-term strategies of care integrated into a corporate’s ethos.
There are strong examples of organisations that have found a perfect blend of making preventive healthcare fun, affordable and highly impactful. While health impact can be clearly measured, a culture of healthy behaviour transcends metrics.
(Shikhar Malhotra is Vice Chairman and CEO of HCL Healthcare.)