Dr. Robert Galvin
GE Chief Medical Officer

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GE has 300,000 employees around the world. Healthcare costs are a significant expense. Beyond this, we know that healthy employees make for a healthy business, with people being more productive, taking fewer sick-days and appreciating a better work environment.

In the United States and other industrialized countries, over 50 percent of health problems and costs are related to lifestyle factors such as smoking, obesity, exercise, safe driving and stress. People spend more of their working hours at work than anywhere else and are influenced by the culture of their organization. As a major employer, we have an opportunity to support the health of our employees and their families by creating healthier workplaces. Just as a good company has to keep employees safe, we believe it should keep them healthy.

Over the years, GE had developed a number of programs promoting employee health, which were highly valued by employees. Some of our sites, in particular, had a strong culture of health, ensuring healthy food in cafeterias, providing smoking cessation programs and offering exercise facilities, for example. Often the drive for this came down to a committed leader who understood the business case for better health, or even from the efforts of individual employees who had experienced their own health issues and wanted to change their workplace.

Under the healthymagination initiative, we have committed to take these health promotion programs to a new level and we launched an ambitious company-wide approach called HealthAhead. It aims to make GE the leader in having healthy worksites.

Led by Vice-Chairman John Rice and an operating vice-president from each business, we consulted with GE people in every region and developed a set of standards to make clear what it means to be a healthy workplace. There are 50 measures, including tobacco-free campuses, nutritional labeling of foods in cafeterias and vending machines and the requirement that at least 20 percent of all foods offered be healthy. A high proportion of employees must undergo health risks appraisals and health screenings where these are available. Healthy workplaces also offer free nicotine replacement treatment, and substantial subsidies for healthy foods and fitness options.

We set a high bar for becoming a HealthAhead site. It requires internal changes as well as work with catering suppliers, transportation authorities and exercise facilities. In the first year, as of May, three sites have been certified. By 2012, we aim to have 100 percent of GE workplaces certified.

Changing lifestyles is extremely difficult, but GE is serious about it. Our experience is that for change to be successful it has to be led both from the top down and bottom up. The commitment and leadership of our business leaders, Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt and Vice-Chairman John Rice and have been critical, but so too is the support and enthusiasm of employees who experience an improvement in their workplaces.

In this first year, all sites are in the process of completing baseline evaluations to understand where they need to make improvements and changes, and we have surveyed employees around the world to understand their concerns and needs. There has been vigorous dialogue about some areas. The discussion on the campus-free tobacco policy received the largest number of comments of any topic on GE's internal web site. Some people thought it was a great idea, others were critical. In the end, GE decided that the right thing to do, since tobacco is a major killer, was to institute smoke-free campuses across all our sites. This will be completed by May 2011. At same time we are offering smoking cessation support and a healthcare premium discount for non-smokers (in the United States).

Anyone who has tried it knows that switching to a healthy diet, taking up exercise or giving up smoking is not something that can be done overnight. It takes perseverance and hard work. Similarly, for GE, HealthAhead is not a crash-diet but a long-term shift toward a culture of health.