The Job Video: Stew Leonard's-Health & Safety

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>> One of the reasons that people like to work at Stew Leonard's is because we have great benefits for them and their families but it's also important to share the importance of health and wellness. My name is Jill Leonard Tavello and I am Vice President of Culture and Communication for Stew Leonard's. We try to be a company that is constantly working towards being as healthy as we can be so we have all sorts of programs. We not only incent them to get physicals every year but we incent their spouses to get their physicals every year. We have Benefit Bucks which they earn money that can go towards their deductible of their medical insurance but the whole thing is that we want you to be healthy. We want you to be aware of what your numbers are and how you're doing and what can you do to be healthier next year than you were this year and I think by walks that we do or baseball teams that we have or just sort of the initiatives. We're one of the few stores that have our own health care center right inside our store where team members can go up and speak to a nurse and can ask questions about their health and wellness, about a diet, about a sore throat, about an ear ache, an eye infection, anything and be able to get the assistance that they need right on the spot. So we found that helps preventively tremendously.

>> From a business standpoint it makes sense. My name is Karen Mazako, Vice President of Human Resources. There are challenges every single day. I mean there's challenges in controlling health care expenses and typical of the way we approach other problems, the way that we help to control health care costs is not only investing in health and wellness but engaging our team members in helping to solve the problem. So we hold classes where we educate our team members on what is the cost of health care, what can they do to help control health care costs like using generic drugs versus brand name drugs, using more cost effective quality facilities than perhaps a hospital setting perhaps which can be more expensive. We also look at the number of team members with chronic diseases and one of our goals is obviously to help that group to improve their health and wellness. One of the things that we're very proud of is that we have close to 85 percent of our team members and their spouses who are up-to-date with their physicals and our insurance carrier has told us that they've never seen this statistic that high so the focus is really on engaging the team members and they're part of the solution.

>> We really make health and wellness and wanting to be healthy fun. Hi, my name is Rena and I'm the Human Resources Manager at Stew Leonard's in Newington. We have a wellness committee that gets together and we come up with programs for example, Stew Leonard's has a challenge. He wants to lose weight personally himself. He wants to lose weight and he's challenged one of our team members in a weight loss. We have a Couch to 5K program last year in Newington. We have 21 team members who for the first time ever ran a 5K so we had this program and we offered the steps on every eight weeks what you need to do to run a 5K and they felt so good about themselves what they achieved and it's great.

>> My name is Elizabeth Arveido [phonetic] and I'm an HR Coordinator in the Yonkers store. I participated in a Weight Watchers program last year so someone from Weight Watchers actually came in the building and I lost 40 pounds just doing Weight Watchers and yeah, it was amazing. I just couldn't believe that they would come here and actually help us every week and seeing my managers being in the class and talking about their problem or their weight problems that everybody has, not only like us but managers, supervisors so that was nice.

>> I think they care so much because when you're working at Stew, Stew don't think of you as an employee. He think of you as family. Hi my name is Christian. Stew Leonard's is a great place to work because when you come here they teach you from A to B how to work, how to lift, how to move things around and then this is how you can keep up and they educated you how to do everything.

>> We think safety is so important that ten years ago we hired a director of safety and wellness and that is his focus every single day. We have in each of our stores we have a safety committee which is comprised of team members on the store floors as well as management and they meet monthly to discuss any areas of concern and we have different goals that we set for each of the stores. For example, if we go a 30 days without any kind of accident or injury they'll get a free pizza party and last year we had a record breaking year. We had our lowest claims, the number of accidents and injuries in the last ten years, as far back as I can remember.

>> Any benefit that you do really translates to the bottom line because you're taking care of your people and when they're so busy on the store floor having to help customers and there's just one customer after another after another they remember that you're taking good care of them and so they want to give that extra great customer service so by doing that you end up having happy customers in your store and happy customers shopping. And we also hear from all our customers the thing that they love the most about Stew Leonard's is our friendly people. So we just want to take care of them so that everyday they're thinking how can I put a smile on a customer's face?

PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS IN COMPLETE SENTENCES BASED ON THE TRANSCRIPT INFORMATION PROVIDED ABOVE. THANK YOU!

1. What kinds of wellness programs does Stew Leonard's have? What are the advantages of such programs for the company?

2. Why, if Stew Leonard's has a director of safety, is it important for them to also have a safety committee that includes team members on the store floors?

3. All of the people in the video talk about how important it is for the company to control health care costs. Do employees gain anything when health care costs are lowered, or is it just the company that benefits?

PLEASE MENTION SERIAL NUMBER IN YOUR ANSWER LIKE ANSWER 1 ANSWER 2 ANSWER 3