ORANGE COUNTY AT WORK: CAREERS, COMPANIES, CORPORATE LIFE : THE FITTING SOLUTIONS : Firms Provide the Answers to Health Concerns

It’s lunchtime and instead of munching on sandwiches, sipping soup and lingering over drinks, a group of Fluor Corp. employees are pumping iron, jogging and getting sweaty.

They seem to enjoy every minute of it.

“When I go back in the afternoon, I feel like it’s a second morning,” said Bill Kirk, a senior systems analyst, as he strained against an exercise machine in the company’s fitness center, which includes a dozen different machines, a whirlpool and jogging trails around the company’s Irvine complex.

“It refreshes you, clears your head,” said David Copley, Fluor’s treasurer, as he worked up a sweat in a T-shirt emblazoned “Fluor’s Fit Factory.”

“The most important resource we have is our people,” said Stan Mintz, Fluor’s full-time health promotion director. By helping the employees keep fit and reduce stress, the exercise center “helps them reach their highest potential,” he said. About half of Fluor’s 1,500 employees in Irvine use the exercise facility regularly, and 500 others use it at least sporadically, Mintz said.

Back in 1978, when Fluor first opened its employee fitness center, corporate fitness centers were as rare a sight in American business as an executive in swim trunks. But confronted with ever-rising medical costs, many companies began investing in employee fitness programs and found that they paid extra dividends, such as greater productivity and reductions in absenteeism and attrition.

Today, tens of thousands of companies nationwide have in-house exercise facilities and thousands of others at least partially underwrite the costs of health club memberships for their employees. A recently completed study by the federal Department of Health and Human Services found that 60% of the 1,358 work sites surveyed had some type of health promotional activity, an “astonishing” percentage, a department official said.

Growth Industries

Fitness and wellness clearly have become growth industries in America, and although an exact count of companies that have started such programs is difficult to establish, Los Angeles-based Corporate Fitness magazine claims that its 19,500 subscribers are for the most part companies that either have fitness and wellness programs in place or are planning them.

Many executives say they established fitness centers at the company site because of the reality that most people become “couch potatoes” when they go home from work. Surveys indicate that about 10% of the adult population exercises regularly, but having fitness facilities at the company site lures normally sedentary workers and “that is where the payoff is,” said one executive.

“Those who have gone through the (fitness) program carry the torch for others to improve their health,” said Phyllis McHarg, a spokeswoman at EECO Inc., a Santa Ana electronics concern that sponsors aerobics and nutrition classes for its employees. Besides a savings in medical costs for its employees, EECO executives believe that absenteeism has been declining every year since the company implemented fitness programs in 1982.

Most company fitness programs began with a personal interest by senior managers. At the Irvine-based Robert P. Warmington Co., President Robert Warmington uses the company’s fitness facility every day. The developer and hotel builder’s offices include a basketball court, a racquetball court, a workout room and a hot tub. About 40% of the 90 employees who work for either Robert P. Warmington or his brother’s company, Warmington Homes, use the facilities regularly, said George Newland, assistant director of hotel operations for Warmington. “People seem to be getting more health-conscious,” he said, excusing himself to play in a company basketball game.

At Columbia Savings & Loan, health and fitness programs include comprehensive medical testing and individualized nutrition and exercise programs. To make sure the health gospel is taken home, the company gave all its employees a stationary bicycle for Christmas in 1985, said Marla Hughes, director of health and fitness at the company’s Irvine administrative offices.

Perhaps few companies have a health and fitness program as ambitious as that at Odetics Inc., an Anaheim robotics and information-processing company.

In addition to volleyball and basketball courts, a lap pool, two weight rooms and aerobics classes are all coordinated by a full-time fitness director. At the company’s annual health fair, Odetics underwrites the daily fees for doctors, dentists and other health professionals who come in and offer their services free to employees for that day.

Odetics does not have statistics to quantify the benefits of its wellness and fitness program, but Bill Pritchard, a company spokesman, says there is “no doubt” that the programs are a success, and he calls Odetics’ facility “probably the finest corporate fitness center in the country.”

Bill Horton, president of Los Angeles-based Fitness Systems Inc., said, “Well-run programs have a 30% to 40% participation rate.” Horton, whose company helps about 25 companies a year establish employee fitness programs, said such programs cost from $200 to $500 per employee annually, but projected benefits range from $600 to $800 a year. The savings come principally from reduced medical payments, but most companies also realize less-tangible savings, the results of more-productive workers who call in sick less frequently and tend to remain with the company.

Besides reduced absenteeism, health care costs and turnover, the real benefit for a company is “the sense of energy, the feeling the company cares for (the employees),” Horton said. Increasingly, the attention to fitness is being linked with company health care programs that include nutrition, weight loss and smoking cessation, Horton said.

In Orange County, for example, several companies have broadened their fitness programs to include health education programs such as stop-smoking clinics.

Most companies still have not implemented comprehensive health and fitness programs like those at Fluor and Odetics because information on the potential cost and productivity benefits has just recently been available.

Boosting employee health doesn’t necessarily require an on-company facility that rivals an expensive health club. Such sites often deter the truly flabby because they don’t want to embarrass themselves in front of their co-workers, said Lee Barkley, president of the Corporate Fitness Project. On a contract basis, Barkley’s Los Angeles company tests a company’s workers and then prescribes an individualized program of diet improvement and exercise.

Whatever their programs, many companies that have implemented them are so convinced of the benefits that they make no attempt to justify their investments in them with statistics.

“We don’t even try to measure; we just assume it has benefits,” Fluor spokesman Rick Maslin said.

“Healthy employees work better and cost less in terms of benefits used,” said Geno Effler, a spokesman for Newport Beach-based Pacific Financial Cos., whose integrated fitness programs include aerobics, weight control and stress management. “There are a lot of intangibles you cannot measure,” Effler said. “The attitude here is that if we take care of our employees, they will be happy and perform better and then everybody will be happy.”

Measuring happiness is difficult, Barkley concedes, but he cites studies indicating that company fitness programs result in a 3% increase in productivity, a 22% reduction in absenteeism and a 16% reduction in turnover.

Given those intriguing numbers, “the vast majority” of American businesses will have some type of health promotion built into their benefit plan within the next five years, said George Pfeiffer, director of the Center for Corporate Health Promotion in Reston, Va.

Interest by State

With so much attention on health and fitness, the state also is taking an interest. The California Department of Health Services is formulating and revising guidelines that will assist companies in assessing fitness and wellness programs for their employees and help them decide whether to establish their own programs or employ an outside service like Fitness Systems to set up and operate the program for them.

“We’re seeing a real upswing in (fitness and wellness) programs,” said Dearell Niemeyer, a health education consultant with the department.

The upswing has not gone unnoticed across the Pacific.

Japanese companies, generally regarded as among the world’s most efficient producers, are studying the vaunted productivity improvements associated with fitness programs. A group of about 20 Japanese executives and physicians visited Fluor’s fitness facility recently, and a group of Chinese officials also came to inspect the company’s center.

Although employee fitness programs are generally credited with improvements in employee productivity and efficiency, a roster of vibrant, muscular workers does not necessarily translate into a fiscally fit company.

In explaining his decision to buy health club memberships for all 45 of his employees, John Rinaldo, chairman of Costa Mesa-based American Home Mortgage, said, “Good health definitely means good business.”

That was seven years ago.

Today, American Home Mortgage is operating under the provisions of Chapter 11 of the Federal Bankruptcy Code, which protects a company from creditors while it tries to work out a plan to pay its bills.

There are some problems that exercise can’t resolve.