Construction Informer

It doesn’t seem likely the increasing costs of health care in the US can be sustained. According to the National Coalition on Healthcare (NCHC), “Unless something changes dramatically, health insurance costs will overtake profits by 2008.” This was taken from a 2004 report by McKinsey and Company.

The NCHC and others show health care costs accounting for 16% of the gross domestic product (GDP) and one-fourth of the federal budget. Just to put that into perspective Switzerland, Germany, Canada and France all have health care spending between 9.5% and 11% GDP and those countries insure everyone. US health care spending is expected to reach 20% of the GDP by 2015.

Small businesses, the employers of the lion’s share of employees in the U.S., are struggling to keep costs affordable but are losing ground. So more and more of them are turning to Wellness Programs to help out. These programs focus on educating your workforce about healthy lifestyles and then offering opportunities for them to practice healthier lifestyles. There are companies you can hire that will do an assessment of your company and put together and even administer a program. But with some thorough planning you can implement your own.

A case study of one of the early adopters of a wellness program shows the company was able to keep health insurance cost growth to a very low level, drastically reduce employee turnover and send their worker’s compensation costs into a nose dive.

The Canadians have quite a bit of experience with this and at their Centre for Occupational Health and Safety they have a page with steps to developing a wellness program. Here is a Wellness-Program that I created using some of their information and adding some of my own to that. This will get you started at making your own program. You will need to assign resources and work with the hours. I set it up to be a project that was worked once a week on Wednesday so if you change those parameters to what will work for your organization then you can compress or expand the project accordingly.

For those of you who don’t have MS Project here is the same thing in MS Excel.

Information Improvisation: Men who are looking for weight loss options should not buy adipex if they are already using cialis. This may lead to hazardous drug interactions. For side effects like hair loss, one can use hair and skin care products and essentially stop smoking at once. Aromatherapy candles can be used to get rid of cravings for smoking.

We were on schedule. Things were humming along nicely and the work was coming in at quality. There hadn’t been any accidents. I had a few minutes every afternoon to analyze the schedule and make fine tuning adjustments based upon new information from subs and their availability. On top of that rosy picture, I wasn’t waking up at 3 a.m. to make notes in my Palm Pilot (I know, I know, there is newer technology, but I’m used to this).

Then, the owners said they wanted to accelerate the schedule. It had something to do with investors. I fired up MS Project, loaded the current building schedule and started adjusting things. About 20 minutes into this mind-numbing exercise everything came to a screeching halt when I came across the window schedule. The manufacturer was 400 miles away and already running behind. It didn’t matter if I could get everything else moved up since it would all come to a standstill once we needed windows. I got on the phone and after a few hours actually received a call back. No, they were maxed out and couldn’t deliver earlier. The discussion entered the realm of additional money, but still no go.

Just for kicks I finished out the exercise in adjusting the schedule only to find that even if the window issue could be solved I could only cut 5 days off the estimated completion given the current workforce. The owners were looking for 15 days and didn’t want to spend more money to hire additional shifts or otherwise fund increased production.

In a poll that is referred to in an article at Projects@Work the third most frequent reason cited for project failure is “unrealistic schedule.” The sad thing is that owners and others often operate under the mistaken perception that accelerating the schedule can save money. What often isn’t considered is that even if you can pull it off there are other factors that can end up costing additional money that wouldn’t have under the old schedule.

Suppose as part of the change the drywallers have to add a second shift and under labor law or agreements that shift gets a premium beyond regular pay. Five days saved just turned into two-days behind from a dollar perspective. It is always a good exercise to see how much you can tweek the schedule. When it is running according to plan you get the thrill of feeling like you have just improved on a fine Swiss watch. But you also have to learn to be content when the schedule is about as perfect as it can get…especially in an imperfect world.