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Word document A Conversation With… Ed Buffett
BPM: Was one of the obstacles that employers wanted to see a return on investment (ROI) before they would start putting money into wellness?
EB: In 1997 and 1998, when we were out there trying to convince people that there was a business case, there were a couple of things that were really harming us.
First, virtually every employer in Canada has a healthcare and dental plan. None can tell you the ROI on those programs. So a different standard was being applied to wellness.
As well, invariably, we would meet with senior people and wouldnʼt get too far into the presentation before someone would raise the question ʻwhatʼs the return on my investment?ʼ
To be quite honest, in 1997, we didnʼt have a strong answer to that question. Intuitively, we believed certain things would happen. Those of us who were the believers felt that – based on what weʼd seen in the United States – if people made meaningful change in terms of diet, exercise, and managing stress, we would see reductions in absenteeism, a lower incidence of presenteeism, and fewer LTD claims.
BPM: When did this start to change?
EB: In the late 1990s, better research started coming out of academia in the United States and Canada. This research demonstrated that there would be a return on investment.
I might not be able to tell you at any moment in time whether youʼre going to get $3 for every $1 invested because every circumstance is different. A lot of the ROI is based on the demographics of the workforce and the nature of the work they do. But I can tell you that youʼre going to get far more back than youʼre going to spend. Alternatively, I havenʼt seen any studies that demonstrated that firms got less than they spent.
Whatʼs fascinating is we had that period in 1997 where intuitively people knew it made sense, but without the ROI, nobody was willing to go to their executive committee. And for most of these companies, the amount of money that would be required to get a good program up and off the ground was miniscule compared to what these organizations were spending on their benefit programs. An organization that might be spending $100 million a year on its employee benefit program could, for somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million, put together the Cadillac of worksite wellness programs that would pay off huge dividends in the area of improved attendance, improved productivity, and a measurable improvement in employee morale.
BPM: When did employers really start to see the need for wellness programs?
EB: The year 2005 was a watershed year. A couple things happened. The media really seemed to get a hold of the fact that the boomers are getting ready to leave the workplace. And people such as Linda Duxbury, a business professor at Carleton University who is arguably the conscience of healthcare as it relates to prevention and, in particular, work/family life balance, started to suggest that although many of them hadnʼt left, they had already checked out.
The other thing that happened was the elimination of mandatory retirement. If you expect people to work beyond age 65, there is no point if theyʼre not healthy. However, if part of my strategy to deal with the fact Iʼm going to have a hard time finding enough workers is to employ people who are over age 65, then I had better be certain that theyʼre healthy.
Employers started getting it. They started realizing that they were going to have to compete for employees.
BPM: Where do you see wellness and prevention programs going forward?
EB: Over the course of the next 10 to 20 years, most employers are going to have robust wellness programs. Theyʼre going to have them because they need them to compete for the workers theyʼre going to so desperately need. Theyʼre going to be offering these programs because young people today, who are coming out of university, are not looking at the dollars exclusively. They are looking at a lot of these intangibles to determine where they want to work.
They want to know if the employer has a wellness program. Does it really believe in work/family life balance? What is the organizational culture?
Plus, in todayʼs world, itʼs much easier for people to get on the Internet and acquire the answers to those questions.
Companies are being compelled to think about this quite seriously.
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Ed Buffett was born in Toronto in 1943. He grew up in what was then the city of York. After high school, he went to the University of Southern Mississippi in the U.S. on a football scholarship.
While he loved football, he was also a student of history. At Southern Mississippi, he experienced history first hand as it was at the height of the civil rights movement, a point in time when schools such as his were becoming desegregated.
Returning to Canada, he worked for Allstate Insurance first in the administration side of the business and then sales. After nine years of doing this, Buffett decided it was time to start his own business in the benefits consulting field – Buffett Taylor & Associates. He built a niche benefits consulting business that tended to focus on the public sector such as school boards, regional governments, and municipalities.
Then came Halloweʼen, 1994. While playing tennis with a friend, he started feeling sluggish and within hours suffered cardiac arrest. “The last thought I had before I actually went into cardiac arrest was I am going to survive this. I am not going to die now. I was 50 at the time. I was too damn young.”
Upon his recovery, his attention turned to wellness and for the past 13 years he has been one of the champions of bringing wellness into the workplace.
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