Poor outcomes are more likely when

Poor outcomes are more likely when the affected business units don’t get involved with corporate-health measures. Best-practice manuals delivered from on high tend to be ignored or scorned. By contrast, the best companies encourage business units to play a meaningful role in determining how to translate health-related goals into a handful of metrics on which to act.2 Since some of the metrics will be new—and, often, qualitative—senior executives should work with leaders of business units to make sure that the metrics are “owned” by employees and remain up to date and effective, and that business units have the investigative skills to gather the necessary data from multiple sources.