Archives by: The Lawson Group

Addressing Indoor Air Quality: Listen, Learn, Act

The Usual Suspects

Oftentimes, we hear complaints from customers who believe their indoor air problem is mold-related, but we hardly ever find mold at levels that would cause problems for employees. We usually find that the most common culprits behind employee discomfort are poorly maintained ventilation systems, inadequate building sanitation, and construction-related debris.

In buildings where many people are complaining about upper respiratory irritation or dry eyes, we frequently find that weather is a factor. For example, in the middle of winter in New Hampshire, humidity levels can drop below 10% meaning that any airborne irritants will exasperate dryness problems in the lungs or eyes.

Listen, Learn, Act

Through our years of experience, we’ve learned that we must rely on the employees who work in an environment every day to share with us their experiences to get a better understanding of the situation at hand.

To streamline this input gathering process while remaining thorough, we developed a 50-question survey to address various perceptions. Several examples of questions can be seen below.

• “What day of the week is the condition the worst?”
• “What time of year is it the worst?”
• “Do you feel that this is a dusty building?”

After gathering input from the people who live or work in the building, we’re able to target what we’re going to test for in a more meaningful way. When testing is complete, we display the test results in charts and graphs around the location to ease tensions and eliminate concerns.

Whatever the source of the disturbance, it’s essential to not allow panic or wild imaginations to drive decision making. Keep records of the types of complaints, including the time of day and the season in which they occur, and contact a professional to help you correctly diagnose the situation and mitigate the problem should one exist.

About The Lawson Group

Since 1978, The Lawson Group has been in the “White Horse” business. That is to say, we help companies do things that are ultimately beneficial for them that they are sometimes unaware of. Our first endeavor was worker health and safety, mostly related to OSHA compliance issues, focusing on the industrial hygiene side of that equation regarding chemicals and noise, indoor air quality, and lead and asbestos in the workplace. Since becoming a third-party administrator in 1994, we now manage the workers’ comp programs for over 300 New Hampshire employers. In 2000, we entered the employee wellness business. Our primary effort is to work with employers and their employees to make better use of their health insurance dollars by working to help them become healthier and better consumers of healthcare. We welcome your inquiries regarding our services. Contact us to learn more.

Innovative Material Handling Technology

A few years ago, Bensonwood made the proactive decision to install three high-powered vacuum tube lifting systems in their workshop in Walpole.

“Handling sheet goods had been the toughest ergonomic challenge we faced on the shop floor,” said Dennis Marcom, Safety Director at Bensonwood.

Depending on the material, the vacuum lift system allows workers to handle up to 230 lbs. with little effort. Employees are happy with the equipment, finding it easy to learn and simple to use. Material handling aids like this one can simplify jobs and move goods more quickly and easily throughout a work space. Not only does this improve efficiency, but it also reduces the amount of manual lifting and maneuvering that typically leads to injury.

“It’s early days yet, but we have a happier, more productive crew,” Dennis said.

Safety Innovation

The Lawson Group Loss Control Team sees our member companies constantly improving their operations to make them safer for employees. We are bringing more awareness to the wonderful improvements our members are making by periodically sharing Safety Innovations. If you have an innovation that you would like to share, please contact your Loss Control Consultant.

How Setting Realistic Goals Can Benefit Your Wellness Program

If you choose to begin your wellness program by utilizing a health risk assessment to get a baseline valuation of your population’s health level, you’re probably going to find, like we have in the hundreds of companies where we’ve done it, that you’ll have two groups of people: those who are smokers, and those who have dietary and weight issues.

• Smoking Issues

From a wellness standpoint, the difficulty in helping smokers kick the habit lies with getting people to actually want to quit. At The Lawson Group, we implement smoking cessation programs for organizations all the time. A true testament to our expertise, we have a higher than average cessation rate compared to many of our competitors who offer similar programs.

• Dietary & Weight Issues

For those in your population with dietary and weight issues, routine exercise and healthy eating habits must be established and emphasized in your wellness strategies. A common coupling, we typically find that the people in a population with weight issues also boast higher blood pressure, cardiac issues, are diabetic or pre-diabetic, or have joint problems. The reality of these related ailments makes dietary and weight issues a more difficult area to address as the solution calls for huge lifestyle changes in terms of diet and exercise.

Realistic Goal Setting

After using the health risk assessment, you’ll be able to analyze the overarching issues that your workforce population has as a whole and be able to design individual goals and objectives for people on a one-off basis. Whether it’s identifying the steps to lose x amount of weight or participating in a smoking cessation program, each person’s wellness journey must be viewed as unique.

It’s important to understand that completely remedying these at-risk behaviors is not easy and doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, we typically find that when first trying to implement a wellness program, you’ll be lucky to get 10-15% of your population engaged. Once people begin showing significant weight loss or are able to quit smoking, you’ll notice that your program will begin gaining real traction. Your employees will begin to realize the financial benefit of living well by saving on medications and monthly copays. Oftentimes, it’s seeing their peers succeed that serves as a trigger for other employees to become engaged in the process.

About The Lawson Group

Since 1978, The Lawson Group has been in the “White Horse” business. That is to say, we help companies do things that are ultimately good for them that they are sometimes not aware of. Our first endeavor was worker health and safety, mostly related to OSHA compliance issues, focusing on the industrial hygiene side of that equation regarding chemicals and noise, indoor air quality, and lead and asbestos in the workplace. Since becoming a third-party administrator in 1994, we now manage the workers’ comp programs for over 300 New Hampshire employers. In 2000, we entered the employee wellness business. Our primary effort is to work with employers and their employees to make better use of their health insurance dollars by working to help them become healthier and better consumers of healthcare. We welcome your inquiries regarding our services. Contact us to learn more.

Complaints of Mold: Is it Worth Testing?

In our decades of experience in health and safety consulting, many of the complaints we receive are employers voicing concerns over their indoor air quality. In most cases however, it’s rarely indoor air quality that is the problem. More times than not, it’s the indoor environment and the population reacting to seasonal symptoms.

Does It Warrant Testing?

A frequent call we receive is from prospective clients telling us that we need to go into their office and test for mold. Before we rush in there and conduct any testing, we always ask why they assume it’s mold. The typical response is that their employees are complaining about it to which we counter and inquire as to if there is any visible mold growing in the office: nine times out of ten, there isn’t. It’s because of this statistic that we recommend starting with other indoor air quality assessments before testing for mold.

Tis’ The Season

Naturally occurring, mold is everywhere. Like a flower mold grows, blooms and produces spores which get released in time under the right conditions. Especially prevalent in the spring when trees are beginning to bloom and many people begin mowing their lawns and turning gardens over, it’s nearly impossible to avoid mold which is the common culprit behind employee complaints relating to air quality. The hope is that when you move inside, the concentration of mold spores is significantly lower than what it is outside, and that types spores found inside are identical to those of the latter.

Time to Act

If you start to find mold spores indoors that are different from the ones found outside, it may be indicative of some contamination in the building that is likely a result of a water event or residual mold growth from the past. It is at this point that we would conduct proper mold testing and remediation to ensure a safe and comfortable work environment for you and your employees.

About The Lawson Group

Since 1978, The Lawson Group has been in the “White Horse” business. That is to say, we help companies do things that are ultimately beneficial for them that they are sometimes unaware of. Our first endeavor was worker health and safety, mostly related to OSHA compliance issues, focusing on the industrial hygiene side of that equation regarding chemicals and noise, indoor air quality, and lead and asbestos in the workplace. Since becoming a third-party administrator in 1994, we now manage the workers’ comp programs for over 300 New Hampshire employers. In 2000, we entered the employee wellness business. Our primary effort is to work with employers and their employees to make better use of their health insurance dollars by working to help them become healthier and better consumers of healthcare. We welcome your inquiries regarding our services. Contact us to learn more.

Wellness Challenges: It’s All About Balance

Since we’ve been doing wellness programs for well over a decade, one of the biggest problems that we find is trying to get people to deal with weight issues. It’s very hard in this day and age to get people to change their behavioral patterns to get them to focus on maintaining a healthy body weight.

The Problem

Today, most American families have kids that are involved in after-school school sports, dance, music and any other number of activities. As a result, both parents spend their evenings running in opposite directions to get their kids where that they need to be. With all this chaos, fast food, unfortunately, becomes an easy way to feed the family while running around.

So how do you find reasonably healthy food when you have little to no time to prepare it? Even if you want to eat well, it’s getting harder and harder to do with a family that’s always on the move. Our solution is to try and incorporate healthy alternatives within your busy schedule.

Challenge Accepted: Our Solution

From an employer/employee standpoint, we’ve found that creating different, six to eight week wellness challenges can improve population engagement and result in a better diet and healthy lifestyle changes.

An example of a wellness challenge could include a calendar where every day has two “events” or opportunities to earn points. In the first event, employees can earn a point if they exercise (we define exercise as being active for 15 minutes). This could be as simple as going for a walk, raking the lawn, or actually going to the gym if they’re a healthier person. The second opportunity to earn a point involves making healthier lifestyle decisions. Today, it might be sleeping eight hours. Tomorrow it might be drinking eight glasses of water. The next day, it may be encouraging somebody to quit smoking and so on and so forth.

Find a Healthy Work-Life Balance

The trick to designing effective wellness challenges is to find what works for your workforce given their schedules and daily routines. If you can create an activity or challenge that will work for everybody, you’ll see an increase in employee engagement.

The goal of these challenges is to get your population to be cognizant of the fact that being healthier isn’t just about dieting and not eating the foods they like, but it’s instead trying to be healthier in the way that they approach life and doing activities with their friends and family.

About The Lawson Group

Since 1978, The Lawson Group has been in the “White Horse” business. That is to say, we help companies do things that are ultimately good for them that they are sometimes not aware of. Our first endeavor was worker health and safety, mostly related to OSHA compliance issues, focusing on the industrial hygiene side of that equation regarding chemicals and noise, indoor air quality, and lead and asbestos in the workplace. Since becoming a third-party administrator in 1994, we now manage the workers’ comp programs for over 300 New Hampshire employers. In 2000, we entered the employee wellness business. Our primary effort is to work with employers and their employees to make better use of their health insurance dollars by working to help them become healthier and better consumers of healthcare. We welcome your inquiries regarding our services. Contact us to learn more.

Wellness Programs: Getting Started

We’re going to spend a little time today talking about wellness programs and the whole concept of companies that try to implement an employee wellness program. At the Lawson group, we talk about wellness programs and the fact that the business owners we talk to want a wellness program, but nobody wants to pay for one.

It is important to understand that there really is no actual definition in the workplace of what constitutes an employee wellness program. The general thought process is that everybody wants their employees to be healthier, but again, they don’t even know what that means. So, they struggle to come up with what a wellness program should include.

Our Approach

At The Lawson Group, the approach we take to wellness programs is twofold. First and foremost is to try to get your employees to be as healthy as they can be. Secondly, we try to teach employees to be better consumers of healthcare. Both things go hand-in-hand to hopefully make people healthier and spend less money when they’re not as healthy.

The Risk of Health Risk Assessments

A lot of people that ask us to do a wellness program want to start with something called the health risk assessment. This is a very popular term in the wellness space today. A health risk assessment can be administered in a variety of ways such as paper form, via computer, or as a questionnaire or survey. It can also be conducted by an employee or wellness coordinator engaging employees and talking to them about their dietary habits, exercise habits, smoking and drinking habits, and more.

Having done this for well over a decade, we’ve found that trying to administer a health risk assessment in the early stages of a wellness program will not necessarily give you the results that you want or need. We find that in companies who elect to begin their program with a health risk assessment, having never focused much on wellness to begin with, end up intimidating their employees because they’re not sure what you’re really looking for. When you start asking about their personal habits, a lot of people look at that as an invasion of their privacy and are less likely to give you honest and valuable answers.

If the goal is to identify the at-risk people in your population or to pinpoint risky behaviors to be mitigated by implementing a wellness program, we don’t always recommend leading with a health risk assessment.

One Step at a Time: Walking Programs

What we favor instead is starting with medium or low-level impact activities to introduce your employees to the idea of a wellness program. An example of this could be a walking program that involves people tracking their steps with a pedometer or making subtle changes like installing water fountains throughout the workplace to encourage people to drink more water.

Then, after five or six months of implementing these little changes, you can sit down with your employees and inform them that the walking program and water fountains are actually part of your wellness program, and that the next phase involves setting specific and measurable wellness goals. By slowly transitioning your employees into the program, you’ll notice that your population will be more engaged and likely to not only participate, but also provide you with valuable information that you can use going forward.

About The Lawson Group

Since 1978, The Lawson Group has been in the “White Horse” business. That is to say, we help companies do things that are ultimately beneficial for them that they are sometimes unaware of. Our first endeavor was worker health and safety, mostly related to OSHA compliance issues, focusing on the industrial hygiene side of that equation regarding chemicals and noise, indoor air quality, and lead and asbestos in the workplace. Since becoming a third-party administrator in 1994, we now manage the workers’ comp programs for over 300 New Hampshire employers. In 2000, we entered the employee wellness business. Our primary effort is to work with employers and their employees to make better use of their health insurance dollars by working to help them become healthier and better consumers of healthcare. We welcome your inquiries regarding our services. Contact us to learn more.