The associations of the national health and productivity management program with corporate profits in Japan

OBJECTIVES: Using a dataset from a survey on national health and productivity management, we identified health and productivity factors associated with organizational profitability. METHODS: The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry conducted an annual survey on Health and Productivity Management between 2014 and 2021. We assessed the associations of organizational health and productivity management using survey questions collected in 2017 and 2018, with the rate of change in profits from 2017 and 2018 to 2020. We identified factors associated with organizational profitability using eXtreme Gradient Boosting, and calculated SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) values for each factor. RESULTS: Among 1,593 companies (n= 4,359,834 employees), the mean age of employees at baseline was 40.3 years and the proportion of women was 25.8%. A confusion matrix for evaluating model performance had an accuracy of 0.997, precision of 0.993, recall of 0.997, and area under the precision-recall curve of 0.999. The most important factors related to an increase in corporate profits were the percentage of current smokers (SHAP value, 0.121), per-employee cost of health services (0.084) and medical services (0.050); the percentage of full-time employees working in sales departments (0.074) and distribution or customer service departments (0.054); the percentage of employees who slept well (0.055); and the percentage of employees within a company who regularly exercised (0.043). CONCLUSIONS: Employees’ lifestyle-related health risk factors and organizations’ management systems were associated with organizational profitability. Lifestyle medicine professionals may demonstrate a significant return on investment by creating a healthier and more productive workforce.