Sun Life-Ivey takes a pivotal step towards quantifying wellness
A brand new contribution to the field of wellness research
If you could pinpoint exactly where the health of your organization is suffering, would you?
That’s what the Sun Life-Ivey Canadian Wellness Return on Investment Study aims to add to the field of wellness research with its Organizational Wellness Index tool.
The Organizational Wellness Index was used in a two-year study to measure how treatment and control groups responded differently to the various aspects of wellness programs. It also targeted how benefits programs are affecting employees when leadership is involved.
In the study, treatment groups demonstrated significant shifts across the index (6.8% improvement), while control groups did not (2.7% improvement).
What wellness components are measured in the index?
There are five components in the Organizational Wellness Index.
- Workplace culture & engagement
- Nutrition
- Stress
- Alcohol & tobacco
- Physical activity
The categories were weighted based on their importance and are listed in the chart below:
“If you’re looking to improve the health of your employees, it’s really important for you to build a culture of wellness,” said Professor Michael Rouse of the Richard Ivey School of Business, and the principal investigator in the study. “That’s why the culture and engagement piece is so important.”
“Workplace culture & engagement” is weighted at 44% because of the importance of leadership and management in encouraging a shift across the index.
Rouse noted that most of the time, nothing will happen with culture and engagement if management and leadership is not on board. Once that culture is in place, management can start zeroing-in on the other components that have lower scores on the index.
Why is the index important for organizational wellness research?
Although it’s currently meant for academic research, Rouse shaped the weighting in the tool’s components so that it can be used easily by researchers worldwide.
It can give a universal measurement across time of how organizations are trending, and where they need to focus.
“It’s a contribution to this research in the area of which there is very little research in Canada,” said Erin Dick, Director, Organizational, Wellness, Integrated Health Solutions at Sun Life Financial. “Hopefully it will be duplicated by academic researchers to come in this field.”
The future of wellness research
Dick said that more practical applications of the tool may be explored in the future following the complete analysis of the study results, which have yet to be published. This means that there is potential for a tool that employers can use in their own organizations.
Meanwhile, Rouse notes that if researchers pay attention to what they find out while using the organizational wellness index and actually apply it, they will be able to focus their efforts more. This could pave the way for employers to improve the health of their employees through benefits programs and workplace culture initiatives.
“If you imagine that everybody is measuring their organization, using the same tool, then the leverage and the understanding that we can get from being able to compare across industries, regions in Canada, and globally—that just gives us so much power in terms of really understanding what’s going on,” said Rouse.
