Healthy Improvements

The Holmes Organisation hopes to improve the lives of its clients’ employees.

Dee Sink has been an agent for The Holmes Organization for over four years and has 22 years of experience in the insurance business. “We specialize in wellness and in what companies can do to help their employees obtain a healthier lifestyle and experience an overall increase in their quality of life,” she says. Pryer is just one company that has partnered with The Holmes Organization for help in looking after its employees.

“Insurance costs have continued to skyrocket at a rate twice that of inflation,” says Pryer’s Human Resources Manager Annette Johnson. “For a company like ours, it’s about controlling costs so that we can continue to grow and invest in the company and in our employees. At the same time, we want to provide the best possible care and benefits for our employees and their families, so health care and wellness are important elements of our business plan.”

Pryer, a family-owned business founded in 1965, manufactures sheet metal and machined components for the aerospace industries. Pryers’ diversified markets supply military, commercial, business jet, helicopter and general aviation with high-quality parts and assemblies that meet and exceed the stringent specifications of each of these industries.

The company is located in Tulsa and in Claremore and offers its more than 200 employees three separate work shifts in both facilities. Employment opportunities exist in all levels of manufacturing, supply chain, engineering, sales, marketing, accounting and human resources. Employees find Pryer to be a family-friendly culture that promotes many positives, including training for the aerospace industry. Pryer is known to recruit and train employees that have no aerospace experience and offers career development where 98 percent of the leadership has advanced from individual contributor roles. The employees enjoy a safe, secure, climate-controlled workplace where the management encourages employee suggestions to drive continuous improvement.

“Wellness is also very important to us as a company because we feel that our employees give us loyal and dedicated service, and we want to give back to them,” Johnson says. “One way is for us to help them and their families gain healthy lifestyles. This philosophy has been going on for years at Pryer. Some of our free programs include providing flu shots and presenting a lunch and learn series on topics such as healthy eating, diabetes, heart health, weight management and more with monetary incentives tied to employee participation. We also provide free and confidential health risk assessments to give employees data that focuses on key indicators and identifies the presence or potential risk of health conditions. In many cases, employees were completely unaware of very serious conditions and, with the right treatment, avoided larger medical issues. This made them and their families very happy.

“Recent programs at Pryer include the announcement that we were creating a healthy work environment by going tobacco-free and funding a cessation product reimbursement program of up to $500 per employee,” Johnson continues. “We also added healthy snacks and drinks in the vending machines. In the future, other types of programs will be considered to help our employees gain healthy lifestyles, such as health club membership reimbursement, weight loss programs and more.”

“We feel that anything we can do to help our employees be happy and healthy makes good business sense because our employees are the business,” mentions Johnson. “For a company our size, I think that our taking on the funding of many of these types of wellness programs says a lot about the type of family-friendly, employee-oriented company we are. With an employee turnover of less than two percent, it must be working.”

For more information, contact

The Holmes Organisation

(918) 359-6000

www.theholmesorg.com