More employers are making the connection between...

healthy body, healthy worker

By Christine Wong

LORNE GOLDENBERG creates warriors. For several years, he has been charged with the task of whipping some of the toughest, highest paid and most talented men into scoring machines.

Over the course of his career, Goldenberg has performed this unique and rugged service for the likes of the Chicago Blackhawks, the St. Louis Blues, the Ottawa Senators and the Ottawa 67's.

If you run a professional hockey club and you want to put your players through their paces, Goldenberg is the guy to call. He has been doing it so long that he used to work his magic for the dearly departed Quebec Nordiques, long before a baby-faced Eric Lindros turned down a lucrative invitation to join that team.

But we digress.

These days, Goldenberg is pumping up a new breed of warrior, addressing the corporeal concerns of the corporate ranks. The teams include Nortel Networks, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., the former Newbridge Networks (now Alcatel), Bell Canada and the Riverside Hospital. These warriors brandish Palm Pilots instead of sticks and raid each other's executives in an expansion draft that goes on all year round. Goldenberg is keeping them primed for the business battlefield.

"High-tech clients make up probably 75 per cent of our business," Goldenberg says.

More and more companies are turning to Goldenberg and his 13-year old company, Strength Tek Fitness Consulting and Management for services such as fitness and wellness consulting, the design and management of on-site fitness facilities, stress management and personal training - all offered in the convenience of the client's workplace. Strength Tek already has 90 employees in Ottawa, Toronto and Bellville. If business keeps booming, Goldenberg envisions possible expansions in Montreal or out west.

Says Goldenberg: "There's definitely a lot of room for growth."

It's been a whirlwind of change at Alcatel's Ottawa operations, previously known as Newbridge Networks.

First, it was the take-over itself, engineered by the French telecom giant to make Kanata's crown jewel its very own. With that came the inevitable management shifts (step forward, Pearse Flynn) and the quirky new recruiting campaign. The latest change is really designed to set hearts aflutter.

In June, the company showed off its new fleet of portable defibrillators, which literally jumpstart the heart in the event of a cardiac arrest. Alcatel staff members are also being trained to operate them correctly in emergency situations.

Alcatel is one of the first local companies to bring the devices into the office, but Nortel Networks and the House of Commons are also integrating them into the workplace.

The reasons for having defibrillators on hand are numerous and worthy. Heart failure is still the leading killer in Canada, blamed for the deaths of 12,500 women and 9,500 men each year. In Ottawa, the average ambulance response time is 10 minutes, a time lag that could cause brain damage or death to people who suffer a cardiac arrest.

Alcatel's move is the latest twist in a new focus on health and fitness in the workplace. Last fall, the Health, Work and Wellness Institute was founded in Toronto. With chapters across Canada, the non-profit organization promotes wellness where we work.

According to the institute, corporate Canada pays a hefty price tag due to poor workplace health. The bill for all of this - absenteeism, lost productivity, overtime, disability payments and the cost of replacing ill workers - adds up to the tune of 520 billion a year. That brings us to the bottom line.

There are two major reasons for doing this," says Dr. Olaf Skjenna. "Greed and fear."

He is talking, of course, about the forces that motivate companies to initiate corporate health strategies in the first place. On reconsideration, Skjenna acknowledges the somewhat blurry line between greed and fear.

"It's the fear of litigation, the fear of fines, the fear of financial loss due to (insurance and disability) claims," says Skjenna of Sontex Health Services Ltd. Founded in 1981, the company offers services ranging from drug testing and mobile medical assessments, to diet, stress and ergonomics consulting.

"Besides the financial implications on the bottom line, the legislative requirements are becoming a lot stricter," Skjenna explains.

Under the Mike Harris Tory regime, the Ontario Ministry of Labour has forged a much harder line on occupational health and safety laws, taking on more of an enforcement role to actively pursue and penalize offenders.

"They're becoming stricter and companies are being audited, whereas they weren't in the past," Skjenna notes.

He knows what he is talking about. As a former medical officer for Air Canada, he helped develop a long-term program to monitor the health of the airline's pilots. Research indicated that eight out of every 1,000 pilots were grounded each year due to illness or another inability to perform in airlines without medical programs. Airlines that did have medical programs cut that in half to an annual rate of four grounded pilots per 1,000. At Air Canada, which instituted a stringent medical model, the rate worked out statistically to less than one grounded pilot per year.

"And this saves the company money," Skjenna says. "There's considerable cost savings to a company."

Like Goldenberg, Skjenna is also profiting from the upswing in corporate health consciousness. Sontex has a staff of 18 and a mobile satellite clinic that basically runs from Cornwall to Thunder Bay, including Toronto.

"Our business is increasing by about 50 per cent per year," he reveals. "Companies are realizing their executives are a key resource - and they can't afford to lose them."

Goldenberg couldn't agree more. He sees companies moving toward health as yet another competitive edge in the never-ending search for the best talent.

"They're all competing for the same people and it would certainly pay off in terms of recruiting," says Goldenberg, owner and president of Strength Tek.

"It used to be seen as a privilege to work for certain big companies like Nortel," he continues. "Now it's the other way around. Now, a company's lucky to have a certain individual if they've established themselves (in their industry). They want to do everything they can to keep these employees there."

Hence, the proliferation of more outlandish staff perks such as gymnasiums, volleyball and basketball courts and walking and inline skating tracks - all provided to employees on-site. In fact, a big portion of Goldenberg's business involves custom designing and managing in-house corporate fitness facilities. When considering the layout of their new build-to-suit office complexes, many local companies call on Strength Tek to incorporate showers and changing rooms into the mix.

The idea, Goldenberg says, is to show employees that the boss recognizes the importance of their entire lifestyle. The expectation that employees work major overtime for no extra cash (and with no word of complaint) is a throwback, he concludes.

"Am I gonna just work 80 hours a week and get paid for it? That turns off more people than it attracts. It demonstrates a lack of research and effort."

After searching for the appropriate metaphor, Goldenberg hits the bull's eye.

"It's like if the company car ends up being a 1970 Chevelle," he theorizes. "Big deal."

In the new millennium, the corporate health craze is now taking a different turn. What started out with a focus on the purely physical stop-smoking seminars, lunch-hour aerobics, the veggie burger special on the cafeteria menu has evolved into a decidedly more holistic approach. The last thing you want to do is put an aerobics program in when no one there wants it," is the way Goldenberg spells it out.

In today's workplace there are more options, such as yoga, tai chi and breathing exercises. "It's to help people learn to deal with stress," Golden berg says.

Sontex has its own program designed specifically for the pressure cooker lifestyle of professionals and executives: lawyers, doctors, accountants and anyone else juggling a heavy load of responsibility in their work life,"lt's tailored for people in fairly high-stress, high-workload situations so they can manage their health at least. We're getting more (demand) in preventive areas now," Skjenna says.

When asked for examples of the simple ways companies can relieve employee stress, Skjenna and Goldenberg both mention flex time.

"If (employees) want to start work earlier to get a workout in and break up their day, employers should be sensitive to that," Goldenberg suggests.

Sontex offers various services that go beyond the traditional realm of workplace health maintenance, including counselling for substance abuse and psychological problems.

This new-found attempt to meet workers' emotional, psychological and social needs does have some basis in physiology. Several studies have forged links between workplace problems and ailments such as depression, drug and alcohol abuse, weakened immunity to infectious diseases and greater danger of cardiovascular disease.

The shift is towards looking at how a company's work environment and management practices affect the health of its employees.

To that end, Sontex is playing matchmaker. Together with Virginia Commonwealth University, Sontex is developing two databases - one listing various jobs and their skill requirements, the other detailing real people who possess that combination of qualities and capabilities. By matching the two, job hunters could conceivably weed out positions that might prove hazardous to their health.

In the age of high-tech medicine, it looks like there's still no quick fix for a job that makes you sick. Perhaps that's why Alcatel has invested in defibrillators. When all else is said and done, how better to show you care about your employees than to shell out $6,000 for a box that could very well save their lives?

It sure beats veggie burgers.

Taken from "Ottawa HR" magazine,
an Ottawa Business Journal publication.