Business case for pursuing a recreational sports application

Rec Program

The company has been in business for a number of years but is faced with the fact that a percentage of its 20,000 employees are either obese or overweight. This leads to a less than healthy environment and is the leading reason why there are a large number of employee absences and an above average use of sick days. The company wishes to reverse this trend and provide a viable recreational program for its employees.

A recreational program via the intranet will allow for users to logon to a secure site within the company's intranet. Users will be able to choose from a variety of templates that will allow them to plug-in their initial statistics, including height, weight, age and gender. The company currently employs over 20,000 individuals and methods of incorporating advertising into the company's website is a consideration. The company wishes to provide a healthy environment for its employees, but does not wish to absorb the entire expense of doing so.

The proposed recreational program is primarily for employee participation, but could be used to provide data for programs seeking to study the effects of such participation, and whether the program can be cost efficient. At the same time, the employees logging on to the intranet site can be shown advertising from other firms (who will pay for the privilege), job openings at the company, and even educational information to enhance the viability of the employees. The current primary use of the corporate website as well as the company's intranet is for marketing purposes.

The problem the company faces is that the cost of employee insurance is twenty percent higher than the industry average.

That is not the only problem facing the company. Additionally the company's employees are obese or overweight based on the Body Mass Index (BMI). These problems, however, provide an opportunity for the company to take the lead in establishing an Integrated Health Management (IHM) approach that will address these problems and provide the employees an incentive for getting healthy. A recent article shows that such an approach "brings the company direct economic benefits" (Zwetsloot, p. 115).

The program can also provide educational information for the employees to further prod them in their efforts to become healthy. Such information can include items on illnesses, diseases and the effects of ill-health that being obese or overweight exacerbates.

A recent study shows that "chronic exposure to stressful situations such as work overload, poor supervisory support and low input into decision-making have been cross-sectionally and prospectively linked to a range of debilitating health outcomes, including depression, anxiety, emotional exhaustion, immune deficiency disorders and cardiovascular disease" (Noblet, p. 347). A program such as the one being proposed can help to alleviate such outcomes.

The opportunity exists for the company to expand its intranet services, using the provided services not only to track the individual employee's progress, but provide each of them a personalized report that allows for individualized goals and objectives that are consistent and reachable.