Offering comprehensive health assessments can keep your top performers happy, healthy and engaged.
Management represents the people HR directors most want to retain. You want to secure managers’ intellectual capital and prevent them from working for competitors. You want these high-level employees to know the company appreciates the long nights and weekends spent in boardrooms, while also acknowledging how little time they have for their own health and wellness. Finally, you want to keep them healthy to avoid losing them to illness or sudden health problems.
Wellness has never been hotter, but efforts typically fail to reach this group. Look around the lunch-and-learn table or canvass the perspiring attendees at your boot camps, and ask yourself how many management team members are in attendance.
Why aren’t they getting involved? A few reasons stand out.
Execs aren’t in the office much – Many executives spend lots of time visiting work sites or manufacturing facilities, attending meetings with lawyers or accountants, conducting off-site strategy sessions or managing crises where they’re happening. And many trips are last minute, making it difficult to commit to initiatives in advance.
Their schedules are hectic – Executives have to work through face-to-face meetings, emails, client issues and negotiations on a daily basis. With the pressures of leadership and management, few can commit to focusing on wellness.
It isn’t in their DNA – Key executives have incomes allowing them to hire the best advice themselves, which they can solicit at their convenience, so they may prefer one-on-one sessions with an expert who can devote complete attention to their needs. An executive typically doesn’t attend a boot camp; she hires a personal trainer to come up with exactly the right fitness regimen. She won’t attend a seminar on healthy eating but will hire a nutritionist to design a meal plan for her.
To keep executives healthy and productive, some HR directors have had success with comprehensive health assessments, also known as executive medicals. These five-hour head-to-toe medical diagnostics are designed to complete all of an executive’s preventative health screening procedures in a single morning. Blood tests and ultrasound scans are conducted on-site, and the results are discussed in person with a physician that same day.
Having an annual executive medical makes sense for three reasons.
1. It’s strategic – According to Statistics Canada, 4.4 million Canadians—about 15% of the population—do not have a regular medical doctor, and being without a doctor is associated with fewer visits to general practitioners (GPs) who can play a role in early screening and treatment of medical conditions. Anecdotal evidence suggests the proportion of executives without a family doctor is even higher. What executive can afford to take time off from work to spend several hours in a waiting room for five minutes with a GP? More to the point, what company can afford its executives taking that afternoon off work, not to mention any followup specialist appointments and lab visits?
2. It’s efficient – Included in the once-a-year five-hour span is a series of procedures that would take at least a full workweek within the public system. Much of the value comes from the hour of face time executives get with a GP through the course of the medical—one accustomed to the probing, intelligent questions many executives will ask.
3. It’s symbolic – Providing your senior management team with executive medicals says you value the executive’s time, health and continued engagement with the company.
Finally, it can encourage behaviour change. About 70% of Medcan clients said the comprehensive health assessment encouraged them to change their lives: cut down on saturated fats, exercise more or incorporate stress relievers into their weekly routine. This reality check can provide trickle-down benefits reinforcing and perpetuating a corporation’s strategy. Providing annual executive medicals to the management team helps keep these employees healthy, fit and engaged.
Yolanda Billinkoff is vice-president, sales and account management, at the Medcan Clinic.
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