Wellness That Works

Innovative Ag Services looks beyond the basics.

For Innovative Ag Services, wellness is about more than encouraging employees to take more steps or choose a healthier lunch. The cooperative has built a program that recognizes something many employers are learning: there is more to employee wellness than just physical wellbeing. Financial stress can affect mental health. Mental health can affect physical health. When employees are struggling in any of those areas, it can affect their ability to focus, perform and be their best at work. That is why Innovative Ag takes what Carla Elliott, Vice President of Human Resources, calls a “wellness triangle” approach, which focuses on physical health, financial wellness and mental health.

“If an employee is struggling in any one of those areas, it can impact the other,” Elliott states. “It’s all tied together. That’s why we have taken a holistic approach to the way we deliver our wellness program at Innovative Ag.”

While the approach is designed to benefit employees, it also makes good business sense. For a cooperative with a diverse workforce spread across multiple locations, creating a healthier workforce can support productivity, employee retention and long-term healthcare cost management.

FINDING THE ROOT CAUSE

Innovative Ag Services has made wellness a priority for years, with a goal that goes beyond simply offering a program. Their starting point was understanding that employers have a role to play in helping employees make healthier choices and giving them the tools to do that.

“As an executive of the company, it’s our job to make sure that we control cost,” Elliott explains. “And how do we do that? You have to get to the root cause of it.” That means making resources available to employees who want to improve their physical health, while also creating opportunities for employees to learn about financial and mental health.

Innovative Ag partners with Wellmark and ABC to provide employees with access to a wellness platform through WebMD. The program gives employees opportunities to participate in challenges, complete health activities and access educational resources throughout the year.

ABC’s cooperative model also plays an important role. Through the collective purchasing power of the cooperative system, ABC helps provide access to benefits and wellness resources that individual cooperatives may have difficulty securing on their own. For Innovative Ag, that partnership has helped make wellness a practical, ongoing part of the employee benefits strategy.

Elliott, who also serves on the ABC Board of Directors, sees the opportunity from both sides: as an HR leader implementing wellness for her own team and as a board member helping advance wellness across the cooperative system.

“It’s been a priority for ABC to devote time to promoting wellness among all cooperatives to help drive a healthier workforce across all of us,” Elliott says. “In turn, that helps drive down cost, and it increases productivity.”

BEYOND OPEN ENROLLMENT

One of the biggest strengths of the Innovative Ag program is that wellness does not disappear once open enrollment is over. In August, the cooperative hosts an annual health screening over a twoweek period, bringing screening services to 10 primary locations and coordinating with employees from other locations to participate. Employees have a variety of health measures checked, including blood pressure, weight, blood sugar and A1C.

Employees who complete qualifying wellness activities, an annual health assessment and the health screening can earn an incentive based on their participation. The program is also designed to be accessible to everyone. Employees who are not enrolled in the company’s health plan can still participate in the screening, and spouses can also receive a screening at no cost.

All the health information collected through the program remains confidential. Wellmark provides Innovative Ag with only the information needed to determine an employee’s incentive tier, not individual health details. That structure allows the cooperative to encourage participation while protecting employee privacy.

However, the annual screening is just one piece of the puzzle. Throughout the year, employees are encouraged to participate in quarterly wellness challenges, each designed to keep employees engaged. Challenges have included step competitions, drinking more water, walking challenges and educational webinars.

Some challenges even turn wellness into a virtual adventure, allowing participants to track their steps as they move through a park or up a mountain. The goal is simple: make healthy choices easier to engage in and give employees a reason to keep coming back.

WELLNESS MEETS FINANCE

The cooperative also recognizes that financial health can have a direct impact on an employee’s overall well-being. Rather than treating financial education as a separate benefit that employees have to seek out on their own, the cooperative brings those conversations directly to employees.

By partnering with Dupaco Credit Union, Innovative Ag provides financial wellness education at its locations. Dupaco sends a team of representatives to piggyback on location meetings such as a safety huddle and provides short presentations covering topics such as managing credit, saving for a home, balancing a checkbook or applying for a mortgage. The credit union’s team may also join employees during wellness screening events, giving employees an opportunity to ask questions or talk through financial concerns one-on-one.

“It’s all these different topics,” Elliott shares. “They present short, 30-minute conversations with our employees to give them financial education.” That gradual approach matters. Financial wellness does not have to mean a one-time seminar or a complicated financial planning session. Sometimes it is simply giving bits of information employees need at the moment they need it.

For employers, the lesson is important: financial wellness is part of the broader wellness conversation. Helping employees better understand how to control their finances may reduce stress and give them greater confidence in managing the challenges that come with everyday life.

ROOM TO TALK

The third side of the wellness triangle is mental health. Innovative Ag provides employees with access to an EAP, including counseling visits at no cost, educational webinars and resources covering a range of personal and professional challenges. Topics can include grief, financial concerns, workplace issues and other situations where employees may benefit from support or coaching.

For an agricultural workforce, where employees may be accustomed to handling problems on their own, making those resources visible and normalizing their use is an important part of the strategy. The same philosophy applies to the wellness program as a whole: the resource is only valuable if employees know about it and feel comfortable using it.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

Even the best wellness program will not work if employees cannot figure out how to participate. Innovative Ag has learned that one of the most effective ways to increase engagement is surprisingly simple: help employees get started.

“If someone comes to us frustrated, ‘Hey, I want to do this, but I’m not tech savvy,’ we will sit and help them,” Elliott shares. Instead of leaving those employees behind, her HR team works with them directly.

That hands-on support is part of a larger communication strategy. Innovative Ag communicates wellness opportunities through multiple channels, including email, posters, internal communications and managers. Employees may hear about an opportunity more than once, with reminders as a deadline approaches. Elliott believes that consistency and repetition are critical.

“You also have to believe in what you’re doing,” she emphasizes. “You can put a program in place, but if you don’t actively promote it and work to get employees engaged, it’s not going to work.”

The cooperative also has a designated wellness coordinator who helps manage the wellness programs, coordinates screening events, communicates with locations and works with Wellmark on quarterly communications. Elliott and the wellness coordinator join together on communications, with leaders throughout the organization helping reinforce the message. That structure helps turn wellness into part of the culture.

A RETENTION TOOL

Wellness is more than a benefit. It’s part of how the cooperative shows employees they matter.

“This is a retention tool,” Elliott states. “Not all companies are offering these kinds of programs, so we’re getting in front of the employee and explaining the benefit of it. It lets them know they matter to us.”

The incentive Innovative Ag offers is one tangible benefit. Employees who participate can earn additional money in their paychecks throughout the year. But the broader benefit is access to resources that can help employees make healthier choices, manage stress, improve financial knowledge and address concerns before they become bigger problems.

MEASURING PROGRESS

Like any effective business strategy, wellness needs to be evaluated. Innovative Ag has enough experience with its program to see the longerterm results. The cooperative is seeing employees move into higher wellness tiers in the Wellmark program and improve their overall health. At the population level, Elliott says the cooperative has also seen improvements in areas such as cholesterol and diabetes management.

However, the program is not without challenges. With multiple locations and competing priorities, it can be difficult to maintain consistent participation and enthusiasm. Wellness is not a “set it and forget it” benefit. Programs need new challenges, fresh communication and continued leadership support to remain relevant.

For Elloitt, the success of Innovative Ag’s wellness program also points to a larger opportunity within the cooperative community. Because cooperatives participating in the same ABC health plan ultimately contribute to the same larger pool, the health of the entire group matters.

“We all move the needle together,” Elliott states.

That’s the philosophy at the heart of the cooperative model. When organizations work together, they can share resources, learn from one another and create stronger outcomes.

Innovative Ag is one example of what that can look like in practice: a wellness program that reaches beyond physical health to address the financial and mental well-being of employees, supported by leadership, reinforced by managers and designed to make participation as easy as possible.

For cooperatives considering how to strengthen their own wellness strategy, the lesson may be the same one Innovative Ag learned over time: start somewhere, make it easy to participate, keep the conversation going and remember that a healthier workforce is good for employees and the organization alike.