The world is changing. It may sound cliché, but in this era of constant social, economic, and cultural evolution, more and more people are pondering existential questions and reprioritizing what matters in life and work. Employers and employees alike are rethinking their involvement in the workplace.
As a result, workforce health has taken on a whole new meaning. Workers want to feel like they can focus on all dimensions of their well-being. And business leaders, eager to retain talent, want to provide a supportive environment where that ethos thrives.
This is why Cigna Healthcare offers not just health benefits packages, but the resources needed for a more intentional workplace culture of health. With a portfolio of products and tools built to drive quality of care, clinical expertise, patient empowerment, and expanded access, Cigna Healthcare’s solutions help business leaders adapt and settle into this changing business environment.
But to get the most from these everyday tools, organizations need a strong foundation that puts them in the right context: a self-reinforcing culture of employee health and vitality. Let’s explore what that means and how to bring yours to life for a well supported workforce, reduced health care costs, and improved business growth.
Anyone can build a healthy workplace culture—but making it last takes something special.
A self-reinforcing culture of health is systemically established and maintained to perpetuate itself. In such an environment, people are motivated to embrace new mindsets, which, in turn, drives behaviors that sustain more success.
Concurrent trends have driven the need for cultures that self-reinforce, including the Great Resignation and its health-related contributors. Roughly half of all employees are experiencing burnout and they’ve responded by leaving.1 In 2021, the U.S. saw a record-breaking rate of resignations of almost 4 million per month,2 and as of this writing, that trend appears to have continued throughout 2022.³
Employers have accordingly doubled down on workplace wellness. And amid mounting concerns of burnout and stress, they’re paying more attention to dimensions beyond physical health.
One 2022 survey found that 91% of employers were planning mental health initiatives as part of their return-to-worksite strategies, compared to 60% of employers planning physical health programming.
But again, building a health-oriented culture is one thing. Making that culture last—ensuring it is self-reinforcing—takes well-intentioned progress to the next level.
Three important aspects come together to make that happen:
1
Benefit design
which builds the right programs for the right people.
2
Human centricity
which engages coaches, advocates, and navigators to make it easy to use the right programs for the right people at the right time.
3
Access and engagement
which systemize the culture by aligning policies and practices to enable investments to succeed and embedding wellness into the ways in which people work across the organization.
That last piece is critical. Offering the right solutions to the right people will still fail if leadership doesn’t get on board to accept and integrate the culture into everyday practice. At the same time, it’s not just on leaders to carry the torch. In a self-reinforcing culture of health, everyone has a role to play. An overarching social contract acknowledges and upholds expectations across diverse stakeholders—from employees, managers, and leaders to benefits partners, providers, and beyond.
Employees have to be made to feel accountable to themselves, with “accountability” playing out in multiple ways, including in their everyday utilization of health benefits. This is a key part of what makes cultures self-reinforcing: perpetuating positive outcomes. But, it does require that employees’ basic needs be met first. Consider Maslow’s hierarchy: Once workers feel financially, mentally, and physically secure, they can focus on those “extra” stages of personal growth and change. Leaders have a unique role to play in employee accountability, as well. Workers must feel like they have leaders’ support and sponsorship when doing what they need to thrive. That starts by setting good examples through leadership modeling. When leaders prioritize their own wellness, it normalizes and self-sustains that culture for everyone else.
A self-reinforcing culture of health promotes self-reinforcing business benefits, from productivity, costs, and resourcing to bottom-line scalability and growth. Although no two organizations are the same, here’s what many businesses have experienced when investing in their workplace health culture for the long haul.
Worker wellness and productivity
More than any other factor, senior executives report productivity as the most significant business outcome of a healthy workforce. A Cigna survey found that 45% of respondents cited that benefit as the top finding, more than retention (37%) and morale and motivation (also 37%).5
It’s little surprise that this issue has come to the forefront given recent downswings in labor market productivity for certain sectors such as manufacturing. In the third quarter of 2022, for example, manufacturing labor productivity dropped by 2.9%.6 Although not the only cause, sick days contribute to lost productivity with roughly 2.9 lost days per employee.7
Employers can recover some of these losses with a more intentional and self-reinforcing focus on worker wellness, which has been closely linked to workplace productivity. Gartner, for instance, has found that so-called “sustainable performers” (those who fulfill job duties without compromising long-term health) are 17% more productive than other workers.8
Cost of health care
The majority (70%) of changes that could preempt poor health occur before sick patients even get seen9—which means that employers have a lot of opportunity to prevent high-cost medical events months or even years ahead of time.7
Employers have a lot of opportunity to prevent high-cost medical events months or even years ahead of time.
Overall, the average 1,000-person workforce will experience a $1 million claim every two years.10 Those claims can vary from emergency procedures to life-changing diagnoses that require specialty drugs, such as infusions among cancer patients. Just 3% of employees take such drugs, but they account for 22% of employers’ total health care expenses.11
Strategic benefit design can significantly cut those costs, such as Cigna Healthcare’s proactive site of care management that has saved clients $81,000 per intervention per year.12 Businesses have also experienced discounts up to a third of the price of specialty drugs with average wholesale pricing through aggressive doctor fee schedules.13
Cost control also applies to everyday care, including mental wellbeing, which has become a priority issue for many employers. Organizations stand to save $1,377 per member per year when workers use behavioral care, but access remains a critical issue.14 Companies can evolve to meet this need by integrating benefits packages with expansive, fast-access provider networks; specialized initiatives such as substance use programs; and employee assistance programs (EAPs) that are available 24/7.
70%
of changes that could preempt poor health occur before sick patients even get seen8
$ 81,000
saved by clients per intervention per year11 through Cigna Healthcare’s proactive site of care management
$1,377
saved per member per year when workers use behavioral care
Recruitment and retention
The recent tightening of the labor market has elevated recruitment and retention value. But despite uncertain labor conditions, a self-reinforcing culture of health has helped many employers maintain confidence in the resilience of their labor standing.
There is an emerging pool of data to support those sentiments, for example from Gartner, which found that workers are 1.7 times more likely to stay at a job when they’re a sustainable performer.15
Beyond just keeping existing employees, self-sustaining workplaces can also fortify their ability to recruit new hires—even as talent pools get increasingly younger. These trends have helped shape a new era of benefit design, informed partly by generational factors. According to a 2022 LinkedIn survey, for example, 66% of Gen Z workers say workplace cultures can be improved with mental health and wellness investments, compared to just 31% of Baby Boomer workers who say the same.16
Organizations that commit to workplace health, safety, and wellbeing perform better than the S&P 500 Index.17
Employers of any size or structure can create meaningful change with a self-reinforcing culture of health. But, they must commit themselves to take the first step and be willing to explore new tactics. One important strategy is to approach this undertaking with an emphasis on workforce vitality, which can reinforce multiple dimensions of health. “Vitality” may sound squishy and subjective, but Cigna Healthcare has partnered with experts to develop a finite and measurable definition of the term. Consider these three factors:
Relatedness
such as the community that embodies, represents, and upholds workplace culture.
Autonomy
such as the accountability and drive that employees have to take ownership of their own well-being.
Competence
such as the community that embodies, represents, and upholds workplace culture.
Successful efforts to build a self-reinforcing culture of health address each of those three points in a symbiotic manner. As they weave vitality into overall initiatives, organizations can foster more meaningful, profitable, and lasting cultural change through various straightforward micro-steps.
Here are 10 to get you started:
1. Encourage alignment
Rally and empower key stakeholders across employees, managers, leaders, brokers, and providers to give everyone a voice in developing and maintaining workplace culture. It shouldn’t just be leadership making consequential decisions that affect the entire enterprise.
2. Identify “hot spots”
Deploy polls, questionnaires, and other survey tools to ask people what they want in a healthy workplace culture, from physical and mental wellness needs to more support and how-to resources around benefit selection and utilization.
3. Assess the data
Review claims data, benefit utilization analytics, and other insights to understand the organization’s unique needs across health care and benefit utilization, costs, and other factors.
4. Create and codify a plan
With everyone’s feedback and insights in mind, develop a blueprint for your organization’s self-reinforcing culture of health. Orient that plan around a few key goals that match up with demonstrated needs, but don’t try to achieve everything at once.
5. Empower culture champions
Designate a single committee or multiple smaller teams to help bring the written plan to life and keep it evergreen through events, policies, and everyday changes in office culture.
6. Level up your benefits
Enact a robust benefits program that supports the culture you’ve created while addressing unmet needs found by talking with stakeholders and reviewing analytics.
7. Build a sense of community
Create everyday opportunities for more meaningful and supportive connections among the workforce, such as community-based volunteering, guided meditation events, or virtual teambuilding that account for the realities of today’s remote teams.
8. Enable worker autonomy
Break down barriers to entry to make programs easy to engage with, and provide employees with the tools they need to be accountable to themselves, such as healthy cafeteria choices, designated walking breaks, or even so-called “Zoom workouts.”
9. Offer tools for success
Focus on resources and education that inspire accountability, benefit utilization, and positive actions anywhere at any time, such as convenient telehealth, concierge health care services, and health coaching.
10. Plan for growth
With Cigna Healthcare's help, assemble the elements of your plan, from value-based accountable care models that prioritize quality care to reimagined funding structures that put more predictability into health care costs.
Once the cultural foundation is built, the hard part begins: making it last. Ongoing care and maintenance can mean the difference between a healthy self-reinforcing culture and one that barely outlives its paper plan or digital file. So, how do you sustain that culture for future success?
First, meet regularly with employees and management teams to solicit feedback. Keeping ongoing touchpoints can help identify emergent needs that may require pivots and reimagined solutions, such as new benefits offerings or more agile resources for workforces that are increasingly becoming remote and decentralized.
As those meetings uncover new opportunities to improve, review and modify planning documents as necessary. This keeps policies and programs fresh and top of mind among recruiters, existing workers, leaders, managers, and future job candidates.
If new efforts or programs do get implemented, quantify their impact by watching the data. You might find that one benefit change amply meets previously unmet needs while another falls short. Both insights are valuable: By keeping track of what works and what doesn’t—and responding in real-time—the culture becomes more fluid, flexible, and functional long term.
Remember also to supplement key areas and events with needed resources, tools, and information, such as town halls or extra support during open enrollment.
Change is the only constant in this modern workforce. As employees rethink the big questions in life, they’re prioritizing their own well-being and, in turn, valuing work experiences that help them thrive. Employers can respond with more intentional workplace wellness initiatives, but short-lived plans and policies only go so far.
With a self-reinforcing culture of workplace health, wellness becomes sustained, systemic, and shared by everyone. Simultaneously, business performance does, too, as leaders see better cost control, labor gains, and bottom-line impact. But you don’t have to go at it alone.
With tools, resources, and advanced funding options, Cigna Healthcare can help you unlock business growth.
Offered by Cigna Life and Health Insurance Company or its affiliates. In Utah, plans are offered by Cigna Health and Life Insurance Company.
- Employee Burnout Report: COVID-19’s Impact and 3 Strategies to Curb It, Indeed, March 11, 2021, https://uk.indeed.com/lead/ preventing-employee-burnout-report
- Interactive Chart: How Historic Has the Great Resignation Been?, SHRM, March 9, 2022, https://www.shrm.org/ resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/ interactive-quits-level-by-year.aspx
- The ‘Great Resignation’ Isn’t Over Yet, Statista, January 5, 2023, https://www.statista.com/chart/26186/number-ofpeople-quitting-their-jobs-in-the-united-states/
- Employers Focus on Well-Being and Work/Life Balance as Employees Return, SHRM, April 7, 2022, https://www.shrm.org/ resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pages/employersfocus-on-well-being-and-work-life-balance-as-employeesreturn.aspx
- The Employer Imperative: Driving US Economic Vitality Through a Healthy, Productive Workforce, Economist Intelligence Unit, Commissioned by Cigna, 2021, https://impact.economist.com/ projects/healthy-workforce/report/
- Productivity and Costs, Third Quarter 2022, Revised, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, December 7, 2022, https://www.bls. gov/news.release/prod2.nr0.htm
- Poor Health Costs US Employers $575 Billion and 1.5 Billion Days of Lost Productivity, Integrated Benefits Institute, December 8, 2020, https://news.ibiweb.org/poor-health-costs-usemployers-575-billion
- Employees Seek Personal Value and Purpose at Work. Be Prepared to Deliver., Gartner, January 13, 2022, https://www. gartner.com/en/articles/employees-seek-personal-value-andpurpose-at-work-be-prepared-to-deliver
- Good Health Is Good Business. Here’s why, McKinsey Global Institute, July 9, 2020, https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/ overview/in-the-news/good-health-is-good-business
- Cigna internal analysis of 2021 national commercial claims data. Results may vary.
- Cigna internal analysis of 2019 national commercial claims data. Results may vary
- Cigna claims analysis 2020. Includes both retrospective and prospective programs results. Individual customer results/ costs will vary.
- Average of all drugs on national medical specialty pharmacy fee schedules. Based on Cigna 2020-2021 YTD contracting data. Results may vary.
- Behavioral Outpatient Care October 2021: Pre-/Post-Analysis among customers with 3-14 behavioral OP visits. Savings is for customers with 12 months of eligibility. Results may vary
- Employees Seek Personal Value and Purpose at Work. Be Prepared to Deliver., Gartner, January 13, 2022, https://www. gartner.com/en/articles/employees-seek-personal-value-andpurpose-at-work-be-prepared-to-deliver
- 2022 Global Talent Trends: The Reinvention of Company Culture, LinkedIn, https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/ me/business/en-us/talent-solutions-lodestone/body/pdf/ global_talent_trends_2022.pdf
- Companies That Promote a Culture of Health, Safety, and Wellbeing Outperform in the Marketplace, Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, June, 2021, https:// journals.lww.com/joem/fulltext/2021/06000/companies_that_ promote_a_culture_of_health,.2.aspx
- Vitality: The Next Generation Measure of Health, Cigna, https://newsroom.cigna.com/the-state-of-vitality-in-theunited-states-chapter-1