Boost Your Bottom Line with Your Wellness Program
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These fantastic results are exactly what we experienced over
a nine-month period. As the president of a lean call center company, CaLLogix,
in New Hampshire (an expensive part of the country for a call center to be
located), my focus is on being highly responsive to our clients' changing
requirements, delivering exceptional service and managing a profitable company.
Attrition, absenteeism and rising health care costs
negatively impact our service and bottom line. Our ability to provide superior
service depends upon our staff being ready to take the important calls coming
into our center.
When 15 people are absent on a single day in a 200-person
call center, we have to scramble to cover the calls those 15 people would have
taken. We used to average 15 absences . . . now we average two—that's much
easier to manage.
We initially designed our Consciousness @ CaLLogix Wellness Program to address a few big
challenges for our employees: smoking cessation, weight loss and stress
reduction. Our goal was to help our
employees be healthier and happier by reducing smoking, eating healthier
and helping them better manage the stress they face in their personal and
professional lives.
Our employees are better able to serve our customers when
they are healthier and their stress is managed. Not only has our wellness
program increased the health of our employees, it has solved some of our key
management issues.
Here's how we've designed our program:
- Smoking Cessation Program: We offer this two times per year.
More than half of the program participants stopped smoking initially and
over 7% are still smoke free one year later.
- Conscious Success: This program teaches employees how to
quickly reduce stress through easy to use mindfulness techniques--which
can be used at any time to immediately calm the nervous system and
increase effectiveness in the present moment.
- Monday Minute: Conscious Success sends a weekly newsletter
with stress reduction tips and we post this on our internal site.
- Meditations: We hold brief
stress reduction meditations a few times a week using recordings provided
by Harvard Pilgrim and Conscious Success.
- Webcasts: Conscious Success offers a monthly webcast in which
techniques are discussed and taught and questions are answered.
- Awaken Your Inner Radiance Book: We
bought this book for our Supervisors and administrative staff to help them
learn how to reduce negative thought patterns and live a more healthy
life.
- Conscious Success Program for Leaders: Our supervisors took a
variation of the Conscious Success program which focuses on reducing
negative thought patterns and stress that effect leadership and management
abilities. A 360°
assessment of their emotional and social intelligence was conducted at the
beginning of the program and will be evaluated again a year later. We are
coaching our Supervisors on the results of the assessments to help them
further develop their emotional and social intelligence competencies.
- Healthy Eating Programs: We organize and run this program internally:
- Healthy Recipes: In celebration
of National Nutrition Month we research and posted a week's worth of
healthy recipes and healthy dietary guidelines and tips on our internal
website.
- Healthy Start: To
encourage a healthy start to the day we offer a snack each morning during
Customer Service week of apples and peanut butter, granola bars, yogurt or
orange juice.
- Happy Healthy Day:
On Valentine's Day we wished employees a happy day and introduced them to
the delicious health benefits of oranges and dark chocolate.
- Summer BBQ: Offering a relaxing,
team building lunch outside.
- Theme Days: To encourage a relaxed, fun, motivating, and happy
atmosphere at work. It gives our Representatives a fun break since their
home life is often quite stressful. Some themes are: 50's Day, Patriot's
Day, Celtics Day, Red Sox Day, Ugly Sweater Day, Hat Day, Super Hero Day
and Halloween (with appropriate) dress up.
- Customer Service Week: Many of the above-mentioned programs
are offered during customer service week. Our most recent theme was
Refresh ˜ Recharge ˜ Reconnect. During this week we offered Healthy Start,
"Souper" Heroes soup and sandwich lunch, puzzle challenges each
morning, blood pressure screening, smoking cessation programs, flu shots,
mini office yoga classes, and opportunities to reconnect by having
supervisors write compliments about their employees on paper leaves that
decorate big paper trees on the walls.
- +500 STEP CHALLENGE: A few times a year we give pedometers and
a log to all employees and encourage them to record the number of steps
they take each day. Each time we offer this challenge we get greater
participation from our employees. In addition, many employees participate
in our walking club, which meets three days per week at lunch. Our
employees are now aware of the number of steps they take each day and have
become more active. During Customer Service Week, we have a 24 hour step
challenge which gets the whole office moving.
- Snowfly Program: We encourage participation in and reward our
employees efforts in these programs with snowfly tokens. With the tokens
they get cash and other terrific rewards.
We fully believe in walking our talk. Our management team
participates in the Wellness Programs, dresses up for theme days and creates
much of the content for our employees. We also celebrate our achievements with
our staff. In celebration of our sixth anniversary as a company, we gave each
employee a chocolate dipped strawberry, a glass of sparkling cider and a note
thanking them for their commitment and outstanding support in fulfilling our
promise to our clients and their customers.
We've noticed some interesting results of this initiative:
- Employees are more likely
to participate in smoking cessation and eat healthier once they've participated
in the Conscious Success program.
- Each time we offer the
+500 Step Challenge participation has grown and the group has become very
competitive. Now, during 10-minute breaks on rainy days, we see groups of
employees walking the halls rather than sitting in the break room. In
total, during our step challenge weeks, our employees have walked 2,710
miles and taken over 5,420,000 steps.
- The number of employees
asking for meditation breaks has grown and attendance keeps rising in
these sessions.
Here's a specific instance in which we've seen the program
improve our customer service: An irate customer,
who tried to place an order on line, called in and was not pleasant to our
representative. Our rep, who had been in our Conscious Success training
that day, did everything right: she apologized to the customer, did not make
excuses that may have frustrated the customer even further or become defensive,
had incredible patience with the caller, had a positive attitude throughout the
call, and turned what could have been a horrible call into a great experience
for the customer!
Our provider for the
smoking cessation is Harvard Pilgrim
Health Care, and our provider for our stress reduction program is Conscious Success, LLC. |
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