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Feel Good and Do Great Work: Professional Development as a Business Strategy
November 20, 2009
By Brandyn Payne and Susie Kjen
The mission of Healthways, Inc., is to create a healthier world, one person at a time.
We do this through the development and delivery of innovative, personalized health and well-being programs that help keep healthy people healthy, slow disease progression, and promote the best possible health for people living with chronic conditions. Improving well-being is not only our business—it's also our commitment to our employees, whom we call colleagues.
Over the last two years, our Colleague and Leader Development teams have found several unique opportunities to help our learners "walk the talk" of wellness and prevention.
Through our programs, LIVE WELL and Move to Health, we’re educating colleagues and challenging them to higher levels of personal health and well-being—in short, to be healthier in mind, body, and spirit.
Here are our tips for thinking about how to improve your own organization's overall health in mind, body, and spirit:
•Align with the bottom line. As expanding well-being is our business strategy, it’s critical that our learning programs are an extension of that goal. So, not only do we offer leading-edge well-being and prevention programs for our customers, e provide the same services to our colleagues. For example, our Move to Health program offers colleagues free fitness center memberships, one-on-one support for chronic conditions such as diabetes and asthma, online tools to set and track personal health goals, and financial incentives for participating in wellness activities.
• Think differently. Remember that Apple marketing campaign from a few years back, which smashed the notion of conformity? Well, we've taken it to heart. To stay relevant, we employ a variety of learning interventions. If we need to reduce dialer time in our call centers, we create self-study tools for on-the-job training. If we need company-wide consistency in message, we create talking points for our managers and support them with training calls and role-play activities. We aren't tied to any one instructional approach, which helps address learning gaps in creative ways.
• Picture the parasol. The metaphor of an umbrella unifies our learning and HR teams, and it creates deliberate connections between the products, services, and support available to colleagues. LIVE WELL is our colleague "brand"—that is, the strategy we use to talk with colleagues about their compensation and rewards, career development, benefits, and work environment. LIVE WELL helps us ensure our programs support and extend one another. Above all, it ensures we are considering our colleagues' well-being when determining where to focus efforts. If it doesn't pass the "will this improve the colleague experience?" filter, we don't do it.
• Get the data. We're learning to be rigorous about seeking out colleagues' assessment of their mental, physical, and spiritual health, as well as their overall engagement and productivity. By gathering this data, we can better align our programs to meet their needs. As learning and HR professionals, we have so much data at our disposal—turnover and retention figures, health risk and medical claims data, engagement and satisfaction survey results, sales figures, diversity and workplace safety data. To be better business partners, we use this data to identify gaps and opportunities for Healthways and its colleagues.
Our CEO, Ben Leedle, best articulates the logic that guides our program decisions:
"On average, people spend half their adult lives at work, so employers have a tremendous opportunity, and a great responsibility, to influence people's well-being and lifestyle decisions and, by extension, their on-the-job performance. Improving…well-being is an investment that pays dividends."
Brandyn Payne, PhD, SPHR, currently leads Colleague Development for Healthways, Inc., a health and well-being company headquartered in Franklin, TW. She is a learning industry veteran with more than 15 years of experience as a team leader, performance consultant and designer with experience in sectors including government, telecommunications, insurance, IT, and consumer goods.
Susie Kjell is a senior learning designer at Healthways, Inc., who is responsible for Colleague Learning and Development. She has developed and deployed training of all kinds in many different environments throughout her 17 years as a trainer. Her area of expertise is online learning and development.
For more information, visit www.healthways.com
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