Wellness on tap at Coors.

• Author: Clifford, Francis W.
• Position: Coors Brewing Co.'s wellness program - Employee Benefits

Don't think of your wellness program as just a warm and fuzzy benefit - it can be an effective cost-cutting strategy. Find out how Coors' plan keeps the work force and the bottom line healthy.

In July 1981, the doors to Coors' on-site wellness center opened for the first time. In the early days, this facility was our way of subtly encouraging employees to pursue wellness in body, mind and spirit. The center offered exercise programs, cardiovascular and weight-training equipment, health-education courses and health screenings like mammograms and blood-pressure evaluations. We made no attempt to quantify our returns in terms of lower health-care costs because that wasn't the center's intent. Our goal was employee well-being and primary-care prevention.

But our focus changed as our health-care costs escalated nearly 50 percent between 1983 and 1986. We wanted some sense of the bottom-line benefits, if any, our wellness benefits provided. Embarking on a major cost-benefit study, we found we could expect that each dollar invested in the program returned $1.24 to $8.33, depending on whether we were analyzing the best-case, typical or worst-case scenario. The average we could expect to save was a return of $6.15 for every dollar invested. We estimated the program saved the company at least $1.9 million annually by decreasing medical costs, reducing sick leave and increasing productivity.

The study, conducted by James R. Terborg, a professor at the Graduate School of Management at the University of Oregon, further showed we could cover the annual operating costs of the program, including fixed and variable costs, with as few as 130 participants. In 1994, the center registered 51,000 uses by more than 2,350 employees (some employees use more than one service or program). At our Golden, Colo., headquarters, we employ about 5,200 workers. For employees at our Memphis, Tenn., and Shenandoah, Va., facilities, where we don't have enough people to make an on-site wellness center feasible, we offer incentives for them to join local health clubs. Those incentives also apply to people in our field force.

If we could generate this kind of return from a program that we didn't originally intend as a money saver, we began to wonder what kind of impact a more organized wellness approach could have. What if we offered employees additional on-site health services, such as primary and dependent care? What if we managed disability or workers' compensation cases more aggressively to improve care for employees and expedite their rehabilitation? These questions prompted us to begin looking at wellness not as a program in and of itself, but as an integral piece of our overall health cost-management strategy.

THE WHOLE ENCHILADA

Today, we've expanded the focus of our wellness program to include prevention, rehabilitation, secondary prevention and managed care. At the same time, we target our efforts in certain areas to the employee populations at highest risk for specific health problems. So it's not just marathon runners who use the wellness center - we now have people with back problems and cardiac health programs. One of our biggest...