POOR GRADES: Criticism may harm employees’ healthwork

Can’t handle negative feedback? Not able to accept criticism? Could be you need help from the “sensitivity to criticism” test, the latest of a growing number of screening tools being used by employers to find out more about the health, personality and psychology of their workers.

Employees can now be tested for drugs and alcohol misuse, as well as screened for general health, including heart and prostate disease, examined for work-related stress ? a big problem with 12.8 million working days lost each year owing to stress, depression and anxiety, according to the Health and Safety Executive. They can also be assessed for levels of assertion and honesty, and tested for management style.

Then there’s absence-management screening, pre-employment checks, ergonomic assessments, and tests for personality type to identify the risk-takers and team-players and to ensure there’s no mismatch with the job. Some UK companies have also developed a test that is used to assess whether someone who has had a psychiatric illness is ready to return to work.

It’s all a far cry from 1878 when Philippa Flowerday, Britain’s first “industrial nurse”, started work at the Colman’s mustard factory in Norwich. She was there to offer first aid and dish out cups of tea. She also took food from the factory kitchen to the homes of sick workers, carrying out about 45 visits a week, for a wage of ?1.30.

Now, the health and welfare of workers is big business, and much of it is no longer provided directly by employers but by specialist firms that offer a range of screens and tests.

“In the past three years our business has grown 100 to 150 per cent a year. Most of the leading banks and many other organisations have appointed employee well-being managers, a role that did not exist three years ago. Employers are taking this seriously,” says Clive Pinder, the managing director of Vielife, a leading health and well-being consultancy, whose clients include Prudential, Standard Life Healthcare and Unilever.

Dr Simon Sheard, the medical director of Capita Health Solutions, described as the largest commercial employer and trainer of occupational health professionals in the UK, also says times are changing: “There is an increasing trend to out-source, and firms that have done that more recently include BT, Royal Mail and the BBC. The old approach of tea and sympathy and the traditional factory nurse is declining”. Over the years occupational health has moved more towards preventive medicine, and in more recent times it has embraced a range of testing and screening that goes even farther. The increase in demand and range has been triggered by a number of factors, not least a realisation that workers are an important resource and that healthy workers are more productive ? they are less likely to be absent and more likely to be working at 100 per cent of their potential. Research by Vielife and Harvard University suggests that the most healthy are up to 20 per cent more productive than the least healthy. Another driver is the cost of ill-health and absenteeism. The Health and Safety Executive says absence from long-term sickness costs UK business more than ?3.8 billion a year. Yet another is the likely increase in ill-health problems at work due to an ageing workforce.

ETHICS: Staff well-being is needed

The irony is that employers increasingly want people who are more healthy, more energetic, less stressed ? thinner, faster and quicker, in other words ? but what they have been getting is a workforce that is less healthy, more stressed and fatter. Faced with that gulf, companies are turning in large numbers to organisations such as Capita Health Solutions. And research says that their help can have a substantial impact.

The Vielife-Harvard study shows that workplace health-promotion programmes can increase employee performance by 9 per cent, the equivalent of almost an extra week’s work a year from each employee. It can also reduce numbers of staff classed as having a high-risk health status by nearly a third, by identifying them and targeting interventions at their needs. It shows too that healthiest 25 per cent of the workforce is 18 per cent more productive than the least healthy 25 per cent, and that’s equivalent to one extra working day a week. Health screening in the workplace can also help companies to lower the risk of ending up before an industrial tribunal defending allegations of job-related injuries.