Businesses embracing employee wellness practices, including the provision of healthy food options, are reaping rewards.

"Wellness has always been a part of our organization," says Dr. David Doull, director of wellness at Husky Injection Molding Systems in Bolton.

Doull says company founder and CEO Robert Schad has always believed that healthier people are more productive. "He believed in it even before there was a return on investment."

With a workforce of 2,000, Husky has seen a continuing and substantial return from its heavy investment in health and wellness, Doull says.

Husky Injection Molding's subsidized cafeteria has salads but no deep fried foods or red meat.

"Absenteeism is half the industry average, drug costs are one-third and accident claims are a fraction of the industry average," he notes.

Husky works closely with its food vendors, adhering to strict nutritional guidelines, and the company's subsidized cafeteria does not offer deep-fried foods or red meat. Where possible, local and organic produce is offered.

Lower and healthier fat options are encouraged through heftier subsidies for vegetables than for poultry and fish choices. "There is a made-to-order area, a fresh salad bar and home-made soup every day," Doull says. "We are competing with Wendy's across the street. We keep our pricing competitive."

Asked how the company is able to radically change eating habits, Doull says Husky is constantly "assessing peoples' level of readiness. All you can do is educate - put it in their faces. Hopefully, they will be ready for change."

Louise Huneault, president of Break An Egg, a Toronto-based business that focuses on food and eating within the broad spectrum of wellness programs, says she works with "organizations who want to better employee metrics from a health perspective."

For an employee population that is obese, for example, hypertension, diabetes, weight and cholesterol are key issues that are addressed.

Tactics may include "a regular column on the company's website or an e-newsletter with questionnaires, contests and games ... cooking demonstrations and classes internally and offsite," Huneault says.

A popular offering is a recipe remake, she says. "Someone will send in a request, such as: 'How do I turn my recipe for fat chocolate chip cookies into skinny chocolate chip cookies?' " Workplaces also are tailoring their wellness programs to their unique populations and communities. Given that elder-care issues are significant for its relatively young workforce, Husky has brought in a sessional speaker to talk about how to care for aging parents. It plans a followup session to bring in community-based resources to meet those challenges.

Beverly Beuermann-King, a stress-and-wellness specialist with Work Smart Live Smart, which is based in Little Britain, south of Lindsay, says some company cafeterias offer hot, freshly prepared meals for workers to take home with them. Other companies offer instruction in deskercises for workers in traditional office environments.

A telecommunications company offered a dog-walking program in conjunction with a nearby humane society, Beuermann-King says. "It was a feel-good community endeavour and good physical exercise."

Theresa Hawco, who owns The Touch 10 in Toronto, says she has been catering her on-site massage services to the corporate market for the past eight years. She adds that a client in the chemical business has her come in every two weeks and perform massage on up to 15 of its 90 employees for 15 to 20 minutes each.

Hawco says that employees report "less tension, less headaches. They're more relaxed, and they feel better emotionally and physically.”

The biggest benefit for the company is "heightened morale amongst employees. They feel cared about," she adds.

Latoya Dickenson.

"I'm my own success story," says Latoya Dickenson, who owns Ambiance Onsite Spa Services and met Hawco when her previous employee brought her in. "I felt so relaxed, so de-stressed. I was doing the same job afterwards, but I felt better doing it because I felt better."

The experience was her aha moment. She quit that job and, after travelling abroad, started her own mobile wellness business earlier this year.

Dickenson has practitioners such as Hawco onboard who offer massage, reflexology, yoga workshops and nutritional guidance. "Employees learn exercises to do at their desks to pep them up and which foods to eat to feel energized," she says.

Dickenson says that five to 10 years ago, employers considered employee stress at home and in the workplace as the employees' problem. "Now they recognize that it's their problem. It's costing them billions of dollars per year in sick time, turnover and workers' compensation claims."

She points to a report last year by Deloitte Touche, It's 2008: Do You Know Where Your Talent is? that said: "Disenchanted workers pull down productivity, increase churn and darken the morale of the people around them. The annual economic costs are huge ... a whopping $350 billion US in the United States."

Dickenson says: "By taking the initiative and putting money into wellness, they're offsetting that cost."

Beuermann-King agrees: "Companies are looking at the bottom line. They've gone as far as they can at becoming lean and mean, so how do they become more profitable?

"They look at how much money is being spent on benefits. By spending more money on the front end, helping people deal with this stuff, it is less costly on the back end (in terms of) lost productivity, absenteeism and so on," she says.

Research by Linda Duxbury of Carleton University and Chris Higgins of the University of Western Ontario indicates that work-life conflicts cost organizations anywhere from $6-$10 billion per year in increased absenteeism.

Benefits Interface, Inc., a Hamilton company that consults on benefits issues, reported that the real costs of absenteeism include not only the wages and benefits paid during absence, but also "staffing, scheduling, retraining, lost productivity, diminished morale, turnover (and) opportunity cost."

Duxbury's and Higgins' research showed one-third of the cost associated with absenteeism is attributable to workers taking mental-health days.

The most recent Staying At Work survey conducted by Watson Wyatt Worldwide revealed that 56 per cent of respondents consider the steady increase in mental-health claims to be a top concern.

Three-quarters of respondents indicated that mental-health issues are still the leading cause of short-term disability claims. Likewise, 79 per cent said that such issues remain the leading cause of long-term disability claims.

Given those kinds of findings, it is no surprise that the wellness movement has also been bolstered by younger employees who are "demanding work-life balance and health management in the companies they're seeking out," Beuermann-King says.

She says employee assistance programs (EAPs) are doing most of the current research on the cost effectiveness of wellness initiatives, adding that research by Warren Shepell Consultants shows that for every dollar spent on EAPs, the savings are in the range of $7 to $14.

"Employees that are engaged in the workplace - where the company is taking care of them and they're taking care of themselves - are more committed," Beuermann-King says.

(Anastasia MacLean can be reached at maclean@businessedge.ca)