Employee health and fitness: the state of the art.

Health care and health promotion measures currently are undergoing critical cost/benefit or cost/effectiveness scrutiny. An employee fitness program offers a convenient means for realizing community goals of lifestyle change but also has the potential to augment worker productivity. The costs of exercise testing and program development for an employee program ($100-$350 per participant year, measured in 1982 U.S. dollars) compare favorably with nonoccupational approaches to the promotion of fitness and a healthy lifestyle. The combined savings from a reduction of appraised age, improvement in lifestyle, decreased use of hospital and physician services, decrease in absenteeism and employee turnover, improved productivity, and decreased need for geriatric care substantially exceed the likely outlay. Given a 20% participation rate, the order of benefit from these factors is over $700 per year for each member of the labor force. In a company employing 1,000 people, a cost of perhaps $40,000 for 200 participants would yield a dividend of $650-$700,000 per year. Arguments continue on the specificity of exercise-induced gains in health and performance, but the burden of proof rests with those who maintain that equal benefits could be obtained from other tactics.