By: Zonke Mashile, Head of Healthy Company at Discovery Corporate and Employee Benefits
Globally, one in every eight people lives with a mental health disorder. In SA, one in every five people have symptoms of probable depression with suicide the fourth leading cause of death in young adults.
Data from Discovery Health Medical Scheme, the largest open medical scheme in SA, reveals that one in every seven members were treated for some form of mental health condition in 2021 with an 11% increase in new mental illness diagnoses between 2017 and 2021. These statistics are impacting workplaces.
The research is very clear that healthier employees contribute more in the workplace. Not only are healthier employees using less sick days, but research across the Discovery Group shows that employees who engage in exercise, have a good credit score and are not managing a mental health condition are less absent in the workplace and are less prone to making errors. Interestingly, health-related issues and behaviours like mental wellbeing and sleep habits have a significantly greater impact on absenteeism and presenteeism than traditional work-related issues like job satisfaction.
Employee assistance programmes to better support employees to live healthier lives are becoming increasingly more prevalent in workplaces. Discovery, for example, has launched Healthy Company, a digitally-enabled, comprehensive employee assistance programme and wellness solution. It identifies and proactively supports both at-risk employees and those that are well with a personalised solution throughout their working life.
The programme provides an integrated data-driven view of employee wellbeing, allowing employers to respond to individual employee challenges beyond just physical and mental health.
This much broader view of wellbeing enables insights that support employers with practical, tailored interventions for each employee’s individual set of emotional, physical or financial challenges.
The programme assesses physical wellbeing through a holistic set of screenings of body mass index, waist circumference, body fat percentage, blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, HIV screening and vision screening. Emotional wellbeing is evaluated during screenings, online assessments or phone calls guided by coaches acting as navigators of care. Employees can also capture their daily mood on the Discovery app or website. The programme then uses artificial intelligence to detect signs of emotional distress, triggering immediate interventions where risk is flagged. All members also have access to the full suite of financial wellbeing assessments through Vitality Money, Discovery Bank’s proprietary behaviour-change programme.
Financial wellbeing is a critical component of overall wellbeing. The financial wellbeing aspects of our employee assistance programme are designed to measure and understand an employee’s current financial situation, give them the tools to improve it, and reward them for positive behaviour changes along the way.
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Digital financial wellbeing assessments are used to gather a combination of self-reported and pre-populated data, depending on the employee’s underlying suite of Discovery products. The data is then used to calculate an employee’s risk rating for each of the five controllable financial behaviours and an aggregated financial risk rating is created. These risk ratings inform relevant financial wellbeing interventions.
The programme also provides emergency legal support for employees. Available 24 hours a day, this support includes assistance with basic legal document creation and general legal advice, including bail assistance should an employee be arrested.
Employees who need legal advice can contact one of our legal advisers during working hours for assistance with issues such as divorce, maintenance, custody, criminal matters, property disputes, breach of contract and claims for payment. Depending on the intervention recommended, the platform then guides employees to the trauma counsellor, psychologist, registered counsellor, social worker, debt counsellor or legal adviser most suited to assist the employee with their particular challenge.
Employers are provided with access to valuable insights and tools related to the wellbeing of their own workforce. This includes the Discovery Absenteeism Index, a modelling algorithm that uses both healthcare claims and demographic data to determine an expected absenteeism score, which is available to employers who also have a Discovery Health Medical Scheme. The Index enables employers to assess employee absenteeism without the need for human resource data and to compare their businesses data with those of others within the same sector.
Other nifty employer tools include a wellness calendar, a mental health toolkit, a mental health policy template, a mental health KAP survey and access to relevant self-selected workshops and training programmes.
Utilisation of employee assistance programmes averages between 3 and 5% globally. In SA, approximately 4 to 6% of employees with access to employee assistance programmes use them. Healthy Company’s membership has grown by 22% while the number of employer groups has increased by 27% in the last 18 months.
Utilisation of the programme is over 30%. This demonstrates its relevance.