Inspiring greater employee health and wellbeing – and reducing healthcare costs

At a leading independent energy company – an ISS Guckenheimer customer – leadership envisioned creating a more productive workplace environment that was focused on promoting a healthy lifestyle for employees, while lowering the absenteeism rate.

The customer wanted to use this wellness initiative to not only help their employees make healthier decisions but to reduce the healthcare cost for the employees. 

This Fortune 500 company is engaged in the exploration and production of oil and natural gas, focusing on onshore operations and four core oil-producing areas across the United States. They are part of the S&P 500 Index. 

We helped them by: 

• Designing and implementing their wellness programme, WELL, to promote healthier food choices by labeling meals with either a green or red label, which represented the difference between WELL programme meals and non-WELL programme meals. 
• Actively working with the customer’s wellness team on the menu selection to include nutritionally rich options designed by the ISS Guckenheimer Nutrition Strategy team; in addition, we crafted a marketing plan to promote the programme. 
• Discounting healthier meals to encourage sales of WELL options and influence employees to make healthy choices. 

Through a detailed marketing plan to promote the WELL programme, we offered green labeled meals at a discounted rate of 25% to 50% over the course of 5 years. Subsidizing the WELL meals resulted in a steady trend of employee buy-in. Even when we lowered the discount percentage, there was a continuous increase in purchased WELL meals compared to non-WELL meals. In addition to growing the wellness programme, we were able to save the customer 10% on annual healthcare cost. For every dollar spent on food wellness per employee, the customer received a $4.64 in return on investment. 

This is an example of how ISS works with customers to increase health & wellbeing and drive down healthcare costs.