As September marks Heart Awareness Month in South Africa, employers are encouraged to assess the health of their workforce beyond the annual wellness day. A large financial institution in South Africa, for example, found that its customer operations team recorded sick leave at almost twice the rate of its risk and compliance division. Despite both teams spending much of the day behind a screen, the customer operations team worked rotating shifts, continuous customer-facing targets, and high call volumes, while the risk and compliance team worked largely conventional office hours.
To better understand the health of its employees, the financial institution launched a voluntary 12-week programme through its employee assistance programme (EAP) alongside qualified medical practitioners. A selected cohort of employees received wearable devices on loan, with informed consent, while HR provided the environmental context, including working hours, shift patterns, leave patterns, and periods of unusually high workload. At the end of the programme, the results revealed significant differences in the health and activity patterns of the two teams.
The customer operations employees averaged five hours 50 minutes of sleep a night compared with six hours 40 minutes in risk and compliance. Their sedentary time was almost an hour longer each day, while average daily activity was lower. During peak customer demand, the customer-facing team also showed a noticeable change in resting heart rate patterns. These findings did not prove that shift work caused illness but changed the question HR was asking.
South African technology company Khoi Tech is building technology around this possibility with its Afriwatch1 device, which collects health and activity information, including heart rate, blood oxygen, temperature, sleep, and activity. The device achieved an average 94% accuracy in health data tested during research, development, and clinical testing against medically certified equipment. Khoi Tech has also been involved in remote monitoring of lung cancer patients at Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital.
However, wearable devices are not a substitute for medical consultations or diagnostic investigations. Employers must consider the ethical implications of collecting health, biometric, and personal information through wearable technology, including transparency, lawful processing, security, and cross-border transfers. Personal information impact assessments are also an important consideration for workplace deployments.
The business case for taking cardiovascular prevention seriously is strong, with a workplace wellness programme focused on cardiovascular risk reduction resulting in annualised cost savings of R20,128 per participant. Another workplace intervention found that 57% of employees initially classified as high risk moved into the low-risk category, while annual health claim costs fell by 48%, producing a reported sixfold return on investment.
Ultimately, the case for workforce health is not separate from the bottom line. Sick leave, lost productivity, healthcare costs, and the disruption that follows serious illness all have financial consequences. Health intelligence gives organisations an opportunity to see patterns earlier and ask whether something in the working environment is contributing to them.
Key points
- Companies can benefit from using health intelligence to improve employee wellness and reduce costs.
- Wearable devices can provide valuable insights into employee health but must be used ethically and in conjunction with medical consultations.
- Workplace wellness programmes can result in significant cost savings and improved productivity.
