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by Donald B. Ardell, Ph. D.
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Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

Should A Beer Company Win A Wellness Award?

Tuesday August 21, 2001

The company has also been honored for promoting economic opportunities for minorities, for supporting veterans, for good corporate citizenship, for leadership in gay and lesbian issues, for support of women's issues and the Jewish community, and for environmental achievements, among other honors and distinctions. You might want to know more about these corporate wellness awards, such as the Kelly leadership award. I'll summarize the selection process and the nature of Coors' winning program. After that, I'll comment on a question I often hear in relation to Coors, namely, should a company that produces a product that harms some people not automatically be eliminated from consideration for such honors? What do YOU think?

Let me tell you what I think, after describing how Coors earned the Kelly honors.

The Kelly award was weighted to cost containment and productivity, as well as fulfilling corporate potential and increasing creativity and efficiency. In promoting the contest, Kelly Communications distributed 15,000 application kits to companies nation-wide. They advertised the competition in varied publications and held two roundtable meetings with corporate wellness movers and shakers in New York City and Minneapolis. A prize of $25,000 and a Waterford crystal bowl were offered for the winner, in addition to the valuable publicity the winner would gain for its leadership and dedication.

The Kelly staff judged entries with help from thirteen outside experts selected on the basis of their expertise in eleven targeted health promotion program component areas. The eleven areas (seat belt programs, smoking cessation, exercise and fitness, pre-natal care, etc.) accounted for 40 percent of the applicant score. The other two areas assessed were program evaluation (20 percent) and the extent to which the program shaped health-enhancing norms and values within the corporation (40 percent).

One incidental benefit of Kelly's "HealthAction Leadership Award" was the educational value of the process. If you want to know how to start your own first-rate or potentially "award-winning" wellness program (and why bother with anything less?), just consider the following sample of criteria the Kelly people use for judging entries:

Participation rates overall and for six categories of employees (professional, service personnel, for examples); The range of program interventions (16 possibilities are listed, plus an "other" category;
Program costs and fee structures (and off-site accessibility); "What's special"-type of info about each element of the wellness program, as well as the usual detail (hours, frequency, target populations, follow-up, etc.);
Details on program evaluation, including criteria used and results; and Corporate wellness values promoted, including ways that the health promotion effort integrated with other departments, how upper management has been helped to appreciate the impact of the program on productivity and evidence that wellness as a corporate commitment appears in company mission statements.
Anyone who visited the Coors wellness facility in Golden, as I did, was not surprised by the selection of Coors as the winner of the "HealthAction Leadership Award." Coors deserved it on the basis of what they offer employees who care about self-management and lifestyle artistry. It clearly has the best fitness center, the best prenatal care program and best overall culture for promoting wellness values.

However, there are those who say Coors makes beer, and beer makes college students and other immature people behave very badly, at times.

George Orwell, among others, would have loved the fact that Coors not only won best overall program award from the Kelly folks but also was recognized for having the nation's second best substance abuse program! On the other hand, that devilish Ambrose Bierce might have declared "Coors Wellness" an oxymoron!

For many folks, the burning question is this: Is beer the kind of product that reasonably can co-exist with the idea of a wellness organization? Is it not odd that a company that spends millions promoting a product that, when misused, causes Promethean social problems was honored as an undisputed champion of corporate wellness? What if the winning company had been RJR Nabisco and the product featured nicotine and other agents of a vile and squalid nature? What if the winning wellness company had a record of despoiling the environment? What if it were a politically-oriented organization and worked for causes you found villainous, unsavory and nefarious (National Rifle Association, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Fraternal Order of Benevolent Columbian Drug Dealers, University of Florida Athletic Boosters Club or the like)? For some people, the question comes down to this: Should we overlook what a company does if its wellness program is good enough?

More on this, including my opinion on the issues, tomorrow.

Cheers. Take care.

Domain: physical
Subdomain: adaptations and challenges

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