MOST IMPROVED TEAM: A. ZAHNER CO., team 1
RICK MANER, CHRIS MILLS, JO ANN MENDENHALL, JEFF MANN, TRAVIS JACKSON (not pictured)

This is what you get from a wholesale commitment to improving work-force fitness: For the second straight year, A. Zahner Co. has earned the title of Most Improved Team in the Fittest Execs and Fittest Companies Challenge. That quintet won the 2011–12 crown by the thinnest margin on record in the three years of the Challenge—a mere one-10th of a point.

Their closest competitors? A. Zahner’s other team. The five members of Team 1 averaged score improvements of 14.6 points, nudging past Team 2’s average of 14.5. “I was stunned” not just with a sweep of the top spots, but by the hair’s breadth margin, said Robert Zahner, the company’s vice president, who competed on Team 2.

This year’s performance was indicative of how seriously executives there view the need for improved employee health. “There was a bit of gentle ribbing and a small amount of competition” between the two groups, said Jo Ann Mendenhall, human resources manager. “But overall, it was more encouraging for all of us to do well—it is amazing that we came out so close. We didn’t have a clue that we were doing that well.”

Mendenhall noted that a founding principle of the Challenge—the vital role played by executive participation—was a contributing factor to the company teams’ success. Zahner served as team lead for his group, and chief financial officer Rick Maner headed up Team 1. “The most important thing to the two leaders and myself was encouraging our fellows in the plant to improve their fitness for their health,” Mendenhall said. “Seeing how hard they worked ended up being inspiring to all of us.”

Another success factor was providing those competing employees with structure.

“We had group meetings and discussed nutrition and keeping a record of food and exercise,” Mendenhall said. “We brought in a personal trainer who gave us advice, pointers and exercise plans. The most important item for me was the daily planners we gave out to each member of the team. I used that to record every bit of exercise I did and it was rewarding to see how much I was doing each week.”

Those efforts helped the company produce winners in two individual categories of the Challenge: Mendenhall repeated last year’s performance as Most Improved Woman Over 50, and sheet-metal journeyman Ed Belote bagged the Most Improved Man Under 50 title.

Inspired in part by a need for companies to address soaring costs of employer-paid health-care insurance, the Challenge has produced other benefits, Zahner said, particularly in an industrial setting.

“We’ve had a safety culture, but we’ve found that we have to have health as part of that culture,” he said. “There are two ways a guy can hurt himself; one, by doing something with a piece of equipment that causes injury, but also from heart attack, a bad back—about a million things that don’t have an equal emphasis as safety, but ought to have an emphasis that’s pretty close.”

Because unionized sheet-metal workers are covered through an association, and not directly by the company, there’s been little bottom-line change with health-benefits coverage to this point. But, as Zahner noted with the rest of the work force, “one of the neat things that we’re close to getting is a benefit to the employees for doing stuff like this, looking to give them a credit on their deductible. So they’re going to start seeing this in their wallets.”

 

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