As noted at many of Amcham Finland’s Life Science Group’s events and initiatives, preventative healthcare is the way of the future, and it was exciting to join the ‘Morning with Aino’ event to hear about a comprehensive tool that allows companies to improve employee health and well-being.
Member company Aino Health Management’s business model is to show that proactive, preventative healthcare and well-being is in the interest of HR departments and companies overall. They’ve developed tools by which data can be harnessed to help employees remain healthy and content and hence productive and engaged. In the context of global markets, companies can’t afford to lose out on this productivity.
“A few years ago, we started thinking about the wider perspective, how we could positively affect companies’ productivity and occupational well-being. The fact is that healthy and dedicated employees do better at their jobs, which means noticeably better results. Traditionally, we haven’t been able to quantify this value in Finland. Now we can, and it’s even become a precondition of competitiveness,” says Finland’s Country Manager Markku Pitkänen.
According to Pitkänen, corporate health management will develop to be a mega-trend of the future because, as companies increasingly compete for the best talent, they want to take good care of those employees. Corporate health management can solve challenges related to burnout, productivity, sick-leave and early retirement, but companies already need a comprehensive approach to manage well-being through preventative healthcare before anything happens. The data needed to build a holistic view of a person already exists, and new tools to use it are now being developed.
Aino Health is developing ways to solve the challenges of productivity and occupational well-being based on data and knowledge-based management. “For this purpose, we have developed the Business Health Index, which analyzes a company’s current stage of corporate health management and provides a long-term plan for improving it. We need new tools and different ways of looking at how to solve these challenges,” says Pitkänen. “The current models simply aren’t enough when competing in global markets.”
HR and corporate health management accompanied with occupational health management will become the key strategical areas of the future and will determine a company’s success. Increased productivity, improved employee health and decreased costs are the future for companies – from the small to global giants – who all wrestle with these challenges. The need to improve operations exists and it’s important to find the right way go about it.
“Sick leave and disabilities are areas that every company can affect. Now is the time to take preventative health management into use and seize the competitive advantage for yourself. Waiting and continuing as usual will not lead to growth,” concludes Pitkänen.