By Matt Ginn
Southern Farm Bureau Life Insurance Company (SFBLI) has been on a journey to improving the health of our workplace, and its employees and their families since 2007. We have used a variety of innovations and best practice tools to enhance our efforts by showing improvements in our culture, engagement, health outcomes, and financial impacts through our SFBLI WellnessWorks! Program.
Our executive team has shown tremendous leadership in dedicating staff and resources toward employer health management and overall wellbeing. We have reviewed and expanded our consultants, hired a dedicated initiative leader, and added more value-based vendors within our self-insured health plan. Over the years, integrating our internal efforts, picking the right partners, and elevating the expectations of our external partners have been critical factors in our realized success.
Starting this journey over ten years ago, our vice president of human resources, Billy Sims, paired me with Murray Harber, to develop a robust and integrated health promotion program. We started our efforts Program in 2008 by completing the HERO Employee Health Management Scorecard, where we scored around 20% in offering a comprehensive EHM program. Every year, we created a strategic plan to help us become more comprehensive by identifying areas of opportunity and working on implementing tactics that our leadership supported. Currently, we score over 80% in offering a comprehensive model where our leadership, management, supervisors, and employees are engaged in their work and in being healthier. While we still have more to accomplish, we are proud of what we have built and enjoyed sharing with other employers locally, regionally, and nationally. We have won the Mississippi Healthiest Workplace Award for many years and have been recognized nationally for our efforts.
In early September, we were able to attend the HERO Forum – Health Enhancement Resource Organization, the creator of the HERO EHM Scorecard. This organization is made up of the leading companies and vendors who use best practices to gain meaningful results in an employer’s population health, health costs, and shareholder value. At this event, we were awarded an Honorable Mention in the annual C. Everett Koop Award where there were seven Honorable Mentions, and two winners who showed excellence in providing evidence-based best practices in employer health promotion were announced. We are proud to be in the Top 10 of the Healthiest Workplaces in the United States. Our goal is to work toward becoming the overall winner of the award. Of course, our ultimate goal is that we continue to be the workplace of choice by attracting, training, engaging, and retaining the top talent for our organization.
Earlier this year, we were selected as a Great Place to Work by the Gallup, where our engagement went from 59% to 74%. We work with many other departments and integrate our efforts to the best of our ability where the end-user – our employees – have access to information, programs, and resources to the best person and employee that they can be.
