Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) and the human resources (HR) departments that they lead constantly face high expectations—both from the board of directors and the employees. While Boards & CEOs often raise concerns about falling productivity, absenteeism, and soaring healthcare components in employee CTCs, the concerns of employees include too much work stress, lack of increments, lack of work appreciation and inadequate health cover. Personalized wellness is an emerging set of health-tech tools that can provide a competitive advantage to HR leaders to address all such concerns by delivering on these 10 core areas that matter the most.

1. Delivers on Prevention

While most companies provide healthcare support, only a few provide wellness support that ensures the prevention of lifestyle diseases. This is because corporate healthcare services like executive health check-up programs are provided by hospitals whose primary focus is on reactive treatments.

These programs typically detect lifestyle diseases only after they develop, thus leaving employees with no option but lifelong medication or prohibitively expensive interventions. But personalized wellness programs, especially genomic solutions, can detect lifestyle disease risks years or decades before they develop and help in preventing them, thus empowering both employees and the company.

2. Delivers on Performance

Many companies hire expensive management consultants to fine-tune the performance of their workforce. But as most companies and HR departments have found out for themselves, these improvements are limited in scope and durability. This is not surprising at all, as truly optimized human performance of the body and the mind calls for immense mind-body synergy. Mental faculties essential in the workplace, like cognition, memory, problem-solving, fast & correct decision-making, etc., are governed by each person’s genetic & metabolic traits and are perfectly optimized only by personalized wellness programs that suggest lifestyle changes based on such personal traits.

3. Delivers on Cost Control

Rising employee health insurance costs are a major cause of concern for CHROs. Health insurance is a peculiar product that silently adds to employee CTCs, whether lifestyle diseases are detected or not. While insurance premiums for each unclaimed year go as a total waste, each claim spikes up next year’s premium. And for employees to benefit from health insurance, they need to seriously fall ill, which is really of no benefit to them or their companies. In contrast, personalized genomic wellness programs deliver way more than health insurance by proactively helping to keep lifestyle diseases at bay with a one-time investment, unlike the recurring nature of health insurance expenses.

4. Delivers on Productivity

Employee absenteeism is spreading like a plague across corporate workplaces, with productivity going for a toss. This trend has gathered strength post-COVID-19 as the world is on an edge nowadays, ready for knee-jerk reactions against news about infectious disease outbreaks ranging from seasonal flu to bird flu. CEOs & CHROs often wonder why absenteeism runs rampant despite heavy investments in executive health check-ups and health insurance. The only way out of this riddle is to address the crucial challenge of ensuring optimized immunity. Personalized genomic wellness programs have a head start in tackling this, as immunity is best optimized by genomic lifestyles.

5. Delivers on Teamwork

Corporate performance, quarter after quarter, is a difficult peak to scale each time, as it involves two seemingly opposing drives - the absolute need for teamwork and the absolute need for personal best from hundreds or thousands of employees. There is constant friction between employees and between departments, as employees race to meet personal deadlines and departments race to meet departmental deadlines. It calls for emotional intelligence of the highest degree in both team members and departmental heads. Fortunately, such emotional balance is a pleasant side effect of personalized wellness programs, as genes and metabolism play a pivotal role in emotion management.

6. Delivers on Destressing

Nobody understands the intensity of workplace stress like HR leaders. All kinds of stress ultimately wind up here, and there are great expectations that CHROs wield magic wands that can soothe the stress of all. While such expectations are unreasonable, what HR heads can do to soothe nerves is to act more on wellness and less on healthcare. More spaces for relaxing and taking deep breaths and more avenues for doing wellness routines like sports, weight training, treadmills, yoga and meditation would help in this regard. The destressing effectiveness of such routines would go up multifold if these are also based on each employee’s personal genetic and metabolic traits.

7. Delivers on Happiness

This is one question that all CHROs should be asking themselves: whether their workplace is inducing happiness or dread in employees. While challenges and deadlines are inevitable in the workplace, leading to some element of dread, the strategy should be to overwhelm such dread with a culture of happiness. Team activities can go a long way in kick-starting such a happy culture. Health tech can also prove to be a game changer in inducing happiness by empowering employees with health wearables and health super apps. For instance, smart rings can monitor progress in health metrics, while several super apps can take bloodless blood tests through AI Face Scans.

8. Delivers on Leadership

Most companies would love to have more and more employees acting like entrepreneurs in their own domain. This self-starter attitude, however, is natural to only a few, with the rest of them seemingly stumbling on self-doubt. But on close inspection, any wellness practitioner can discover that it is a lack of an integrated approach that prevents most employees from assuming such leadership qualities. For human performance to be optimized to achieve leadership class, lots of factors are needed - diet, exercise, supplements, sleep, mentoring - and it helps to have an integrated solution that can deliver all these.

9. Delivers on Branding

Which CHRO would not want their company to win accolades like a ‘Great Place to Work’? Deploying personalized wellness programs company-wide can go a long way in winning such branding recognition that can be a game changer in reducing attrition and ensuring exceptional productivity these days. Employees recognize the difference between run-of-the-mill healthcare services like executive health check-ups or health insurance and authentic wellness programs that ensure their well-being, immunity, performance and preventive powers. When employees are anonymously polled for such branding exercises, their response will reflect their appreciation.

10. Delivers on Loyalty

Capable employees who are also loyal remain one of the biggest assets of a company, and loyalty is something that cannot be bought, as by definition—if it can be bought, an employee would change loyalties for a higher paycheck. Such employees are authentic humans who respond to genuine care from the side of their companies and HR Heads. Several personalized wellness programs can help reassure them of this care, as it is capable of detecting risks for multiple lifestyle diseases, years or decades before they can occur, and help keep them at bay through personalized lifestyle modifications. They would, any day, prefer such a caring solution to regular corporate healthcare that acts only after diseases hit.

Author Bio

Dr. Sajeev Nair is a noted authority in personalized genomic wellness strategies and the author of the bestseller ‘The Making of a Superhuman’. He is also the Founder and Chairman of Vieroots, a health-tech startup. Also a successful peak performance consultant for corporates and a biohacking evangelist, Dr. Sajeev Nair has been the Chief Curator of the World Biohack Summit, Dubai, for the last two years.

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