Canadian HR Reporter

CANADIAN HR REPORTER January 25, 2016 NEWS 3 Pilot project garners impressive results TELUS takes science-based approach to employee health with wellness program BY SARAH DOBSON LONG-FOCUSED on health and wellness, TELUS is ramping up its approach with a program that includes diagnostics, health coaches and technology to en- courage healthy, sustainable be- haviours among employees. "The personalized medicine space needs to embrace the tech- nology to be able to grow this area of wellness so that people can self- manage their health in a better way and it doesn't have to be one- on-one — it can be group, it can be digital, it can be virtual," said Elaine Chin, chief wellness officer at TELUS, who spoke at a Good- Life Fitness Health & Wellness Leadership Summit in Toronto in November. As part of a pilot, the company recently launched a metrics-driv- en Self-Health program where employees had their health pro- file completed. is included a health-risk assessment, physical and biochemical biometrics and having their progress tracked over 12 weeks, with support from a health coach and fellow employees. e 266 participants first com- pleted a symptom profiler to mea- sure their level of presenteeism. ey were then given an activity monitor to measure their steps, activity, dietary habits via food logging, and sleep. "Our goal is to provide all TELUS employees with a public health record as part of their well- ness because they can track their own health, literally, and monitor and get results," said Chin. "As we walk through the self-health pi- lot, we can review those specific items." TELUS then brought in Life- Labs to do biometric screening on participating employees, in- cluding physical attributes such as weight, height and waist cir- cumference, and blood work for cholesterol, blood sugar and he- moglobin A1C and insulin. Through these biometrics, the Self-Health program let par- ticipants know their risk factors around metabolic syndrome, diabetes, prediabetes and insulin resistance. e results download- ed automatically into the public health records. Once the blood work results came back, employees were part- nered with a health coach supplied by Morneau Shepell. e coaches connected over the phone with employees in a one-hour session (with one-half of participants also having a 30-minute followup ses- sion) to discuss the results and create a personal health action plan of lifestyle changes that in- cluded sleep, nutrition and exer- cise routines. One of the variables in addition to the blood work was to under- stand people's lifestyles, so par- ticipants used a Fitbit Charge to track steps and calories burned, said Chin. "Moving forward, we're going to be agnostic to devices — we want people to be able to wear whatever they're wearing that they like to wear." Nutrition was also logged, along with vigorous or moder- ate activity levels, and hours and quality of sleep. "When people get heavier and overweight and not fit, there's a higher tendency to have sleep ap- nea and you can infer that from seeing the results of your tracker," she said. e tracker automatically up- loaded all the information into the self-health site so in one view, par- ticipants could see the question- naire they did at the beginning, the Fitbit data points, nutrition data points, physical biometrics before and after the project; blood work before and after; and their personal health action plan. TELUS employees also had access to a social enterprise challenge platform that allowed people to engage with each other through challenges, for prizes. "We recognized that a lot of our team members are… millennials and they like to engage in the so- cial environment meaning 'How do I rate compared to somebody else?' and… 'I'd like to challenge my friends and let's do it together,'" said Chin. Employees could also create their own clubs, such as bringing work to lunch for a month or bik- ing in the morning. "It allows team members to come together and to encourage each other because behavioural change is difficult on your own — we need encouragement and we need to sustain behaviour for about 12 weeks in order to have a more reliable, sustainable behav- ioural change," she said. Results In the end, each participant aver- aged an increase of 2,126 steps per day or 160 kilometres over the program. ey also reduced their risk of heart disease, diabe- tes, arthritis, depression and low back pain. New health behaviours adopted included: • walking daily • regular exercise • sleeping longer and better • stress management techniques PROJECT > pg. 8

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