Danone tracks health assessment impact to help support staff needs

Danone has been able to tailor its healthcare strategy to support employees’ needs by tracking the impact of the employer-funded health assessments that it rolled out to all staff last year.

Danone

The fresh dairy organisation previously offered the assessment, which offers a full health screen, only to senior staff, but it decided to extend access in line with its business objective to help people live healthier lives.

As a result, 476 staff undertook a health assessment between the launch of the benefit last April and the end of the year.

John Mayor, head of UK rewards and HR project management at Danone, says: “Within the data set, we have very a robust set of management information, so we have the opportunity to drill down and look at key trends within our businesses.”

The organisation can now, for example, more easily identify staff who need support with, say, smoking cessation or healthy eating.

Danone appointed health screening provider Bluecrest Health Screening to deliver the health assessments to staff, along with bespoke reports detailing key measures such as body mass, heart rate, lung capacity and cholesterol.

The organisation, which won the award for ‘Most engaging benefits package’ at the Employee Benefits Awards 2014, has tailored the assessment in line with its healthy digestion-focused yogurt product ranges Activia and Actimel.

Mayor says: “We are very concerned about vitamin D and celiac disease [a digestive disease that damages the small intestine], and these have been added into the screening at no extra cost.”

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Danone will also introduce more stringent testing for heart attack risk for its female population this year. 

The organisation funded expanded staff access to the health benefit by reallocating £100,000 worth of savings that it made by discontinuing the dependents’ death-in-service pension it previously provided to staff in one of its business units.