Why Employers Should Worry About Their Male Employee Health

June is Men's Health month, and if you are an employer with a large male employee population, you should be concerned with how much men are neglecting their health.

Healthy employees perform better and have less excess costs. It's both logical and robustly supported by data. It's not just the cost of doing business; it's a significant excess cost that can be mitigated with effective interventions. As health risks go up, costs go up, and not incrementally, but rapidly as you stack comorbid health and poor lifestyle factors on top of each other.

If you have a large male employee population, then this is a problem, because when it comes to health, men are falling behind.

Men are more likely than women to:

• Ignore symptoms

• Skip routine checkups

• Delay seeking care

• Lie to providers about the severity of symptoms, and

• Engage in behaviors that harm their long-term health

The consequences of these trends are stark: Shorter life expectancy, higher risk of chronic disease, and preventable early deaths. Men are more likely to die from heart disease, cancer, suicide, and unintentional injuries - and despite this, studies consistently show that men are less likely to engage with the healthcare system.

According to the World health Organization, men are twice as likely to consume alcohol at hazardous levels, and more likely to be overweight or obese, both of which increase the risk of chronic conditions and diseases like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.

The state of men's mental health isn't much better. While men and women report feeling loneliness at about the same rates, and women are more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety and depression, men are far less likely to seek help. Studies in some regions suggest that women are twice as likely to seek psychological therapies than men, and men are 4 times more likely than women to die by suicide.

Employers have both a vested interest and a unique ability to make a difference. If you have a male majority workforce, then curbing the excess costs, engagement, and productivity burdens that follow poor health can significantly benefit your business. The unique opportunity you have is to use the workplace as a captive environment in which to educate them and improve their health.

Knowing that men are less likely to be proactive with managing their health risks on their own, integrating effective health promotion into your workplace and organically engaging them in progressive health education and healthy behavior change while they work can be the most effective way to improve the collective health of men. Different from traditional wellness programs that are offered as benefits, in which men rarely choose to opt-in, strategically integrated health and wellbeing programs that engage everyone as a normal part of coming to work have been shown to be incredibly effective at shifting the needle on men's health risks and outcomes. HBD's integrated workplace health promotion programs have achieved positive health behavior change and improved health outcomes from as many as 50-70% of all male employees in largely male majority workforces. (Get in touch with us if you want to see examples of real programs and documented outcomes).

When consistent engagement in health promotion programming leads to such large majorities of employees improving their health literacy and making improvements to their health risks and behaviors, the benefit to the people themselves as well as the organization's workforce costs make it a truly win-win proposition.

Things that make health promotion more effective in workplaces with large male populations:

1. Appropriate branding: If your wellness branding and content looks too feminine, men will scoff at it. Too many cliche wellness pictures (hearts, apples, and people in yoga poses or meditating) will make men think they'll be ridiculed if they're seen participating. Men need social acceptance, so the health program and content needs to be socially acceptable if you want them to engage in the program.

2. Integrate into normal workflow or existing accepted routines (e.g. existing safety meetings or daily shift and team meetings). Talking about safety at work is well integrated into most organizations and accepted as a part of normal business. Plugging into those normal accepted channels of communication for simple initial health promotion messaging can be a way to normalize it as opposed to trying to convince men to engage in separate wellness benefits.

3. Commit to consistency: Having a health fair or one-off guest speaker and using participation as a gauge to see if men at your workplace are interested in health is a fool's errand. Single or isolated events will only ever be intermittently successful and rarely lead to meaningful outcomes. Consistent health promotion touch points with relevant information for your workforce demographic that can be built into your normal operations is a far more sustainable way to improve health awareness and acceptance.

If this Men's Health Month has you wondering about the state of health of your male colleagues and what you could do to make a difference, then take the next step and reach out to learn about how you can actually make an impact!