Making the connection between employee health and business performance

Prudential wanted to understand how health and talent are interconnected. To help illustrate the impact of employee health on business performance, the company needed rich data and deep analytic insights. It turned to Truven for both.

Business challenge

Prudential Financial, Inc. wanted to define the various connections between employee health and business performance and identify opportunities to improve both.

Transformation

Utilizing the Truven Health Insights solution and analytics consulting services, the company analyzed employee data to see how health and lifestyle risk factors affected productivity, absenteeism and more.

Results

• Helped to pinpoint opportunities to assist employees in improving health

• Helped to define connections between employee health and business performance

• Helped to empower business leaders in promoting a culture of health
  
  

Business challenge

The need

Prudential, a financial services leader with offices around the globe, sought to engage and empower its business leaders in promoting a culture of health across the organization. To understand how health and talent are interconnected, Prudential first needed to identify and collect relevant employee satisfaction data. 

Transformation

The approach

Prudential decided to focus on five key dimensions of health and wellness — physical, emotional, social, spiritual and financial. A team comprising of Prudential employees and Truven analytic consultants used the Health Insights solution to develop custom risk profiles for business groups and other organizations within Prudential. The goal for these risk profiles was threefold:– To track the prevalence of health and lifestyle risk factors among each group over time, compared to the company overall.– To evaluate the impact of presenteeism and disability.– To emphasize measures of supervisor support. The team used the Health Insights solution to integrate response data from an employee opinion survey, a work limitation survey and custom health risk assessments (HRAs) to define correlations between various measures of health with various measures of employee satisfaction. HRA data was also integrated with basic eligibility data to calculate rates of turnover and retention among employees with certain risk factors.

Results

The outcome

Thanks to the insights gained from working with Health Insights and the Truven analytics consulting team, Prudential determined that employee health and well-being are indeed integral to business success, and therefore should be a companywide priority.

Financial stress was linked with:

• Lower productivity (120 percent more hours lost per employee)

• Higher absenteeism (two more self-report ed missed work days per employee)

• Greater incidence of short-term disability (69 percent more cases per 100 and 70 percent more days lost per 100)

Favorable supervisor support of employee health initiatives was connected to:

• Higher job satisfaction: 94 percent greater rate of affirmative job satisfaction

• Higher productivity: 57 percent fewer hours lost per employee

• Lower job stress: 86 percent greater rate of employees without job stress

• Fewer days lost to disability: 53 percent fewer cases per 100 and 63 percent fewer days lost per 100

As a result of these findings, Prudential established new programs, benefits and offerings promoting financial health, as well as a dedicated financial health task force. Prudential will be rolling out a new financial health platform to its employees, including an assessment tool, educational materials and other resources.

As a further reflection of Prudential’s pervasive culture of health, the annual HRA completion rate is consistently above 75 percent. The company’s health and wellness team now routinely engages with business group leaders and other stakeholders on how best to address any concerns identified through the risk profile reporting.