Crystal Wise
“I love what I do, if you can't tell,” says Jennifer Speer.
Experience and idioms tell us all about the best-laid plans.
They can unravel. They can hit a snag. They can go awry.
Fate remains undefeated.
“When I left high school, I was going to be a doctor,” says Jennifer Speer, “like no doubt.”
After finishing her degrees in health fitness and business management at Baylor, she had planned to go into the workforce to earn a living so that she could afford medical school.
Instead, she fell in love with health and wellness. A love story more perfect maybe than even Kelce and Swift.
“I love what I do, if you can't tell,” she says with what appears to be boundless energy and enthusiasm.
I can definitely tell, I reply.
“I’ve been here a long time, and I still love it.”
Here is Higginbotham, the Fort Worth-based insurance, human resources, and financial services firm, where since 2009 Speer has worked in the position of director of wellness and health risk management. In that position, she leads a team of health management consultants who advise Higginbotham clients and employees in wellness programs that meet specific needs within a corporation.
It’s wellness immersion.
“We take the medical data of our clients. We look at their culture. We look at how they do their business. We look at their locations. We look at any information that a company is willing to give us,” says Speer, 46. “Then we come up with a strategy of not just for medical cost containment, but to improve the culture of the workforce and embed wellness into everything that they do.”
She estimates that the number of companies her team works with in Higginbotham’s sphere is about 300 and thousands of employees, including their own across the U.S.
The cross section of clients goes from blue collar to white collar, truck drivers to attorneys and college students. Any industry with medical insurance.
“There are so many dynamics. When you look at the employees that we’re impacting, it’s huge,” she says.
Speer is based in Houston. She often travels between various Higginbotham bases. She and I spoke at the company’s base of operations in Fort Worth.
Instead of medical school, Speer earned a master’s in exercise science and organizational development at the University of Houston, which she earned going to night school. She says she was out no longer than seemingly a few steps from the graduation platform when the school asked her to teach a class. That began a relationship in higher ed. For the better part of 17 years, up until the beginning of the pandemic when everything went online, she taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Houston, working with students pursuing careers in worksite wellness.
She began her career out of undergraduate school at Lockheed Martin as the wellness program manager in space operations. A stint of five years on the job was interrupted by a dream opportunity.
Johnson Space Center. NASA.
“My baby,” Speer says affectionately.
Between the job at Lockheed and NASA, Speer worked in aerospace for almost 10 years.
At NASA, she designed, implemented, and managed worksite wellness programs for more than 17,000 employees.
Speer wasn’t looking to make a move to Higginbotham. “My heart was with my aerospace family.” But Higginbotham approached her about doing the same thing for it and its clients what she had done at NASA.
She would have access to much more data and a full range of creativity and innovation.
“I’ll never forget,” she says. “I was going home. I called my husband and I said, ‘Well, I wasn’t looking for a new job, but I think I’m going to take one.”
Higginbotham, she says, is also the only broker that doesn’t charge for the consultative service, breaking down a common disincentive.
Metabolic syndrome and specifically now Type 2 diabetes and inactivity are arch adversaries.
“It’s everything, and what we eat, I mean, and then being realistic,” she says. “Like I always tell my companies that I work with, you've got to be realistic with your expectation. I have one client, they're truck drivers, and they have this vending machine set up. So, when they check in, it’s junk. And they sit all day. And I'm like, ‘You're not providing a supportive environment. So you're telling them to do all these things, but you're not providing anything for them.’
“So, our team together — and we're in the process of revamping it; it's been so popular — put together a ‘when you're on the road and you stop at these places, what do you order?’ Just so they can pull it out and just look at it and say, ‘OK, I'm at Taco Bell.’ We call it ‘the better bet.’ Yes, fast food: The greatest? Probably not. But you know, if you're sitting there and you're trying to do something, let us help you any way we can.”
Some fast-food items are not as bad as others.
The pandemic, of course, caused a lot of handwringing, if not outright panic. Requests for mental health assistance increased, and the office environment was turned sideways.
Speer has added to her team one with expertise in musculoskeletal rehabilitation to develop an ergonomics program.
“It's predominantly going to be marketed to remote workers because I am seeing an increase in claims and orthopedic issues with my clients who have a remote workforce,” Speer says. “We'd like to think that if you're remote, you're up, you're moving, you're doing. You're not. For some of these individuals, the only activity they got during the day was going to work. And then they're at home sitting on their couch using a laptop with a cat on their lap.”
It’s merely one more of any number of issues she and her team meet head-on.
And it’s far different from the stethoscope and white coat she thought certain she would one day be wearing.
“You know what? I really feel like I'm impacting more people than I ever would have been able to if I went into medicine,” Speer says. “Thousands of people can benefit from what we do, and they don't even know I'm here doing it. I can come in and say, ‘Here, let's try these things, let's do this, let's move the needle this way.’ And once they do, it changes the quality of life. It's a cool feeling.”
Three wellness tips from Jennifer Speer
1. When working on your personal wellness plan, determine what activities bring you joy and go with it! If you hate running, don’t make running your main form of exercise. Find a yoga class, try a social dance group, do what mentally makes you happy.
2. Always try new things. Try new foods, try a new class, make a new recipe. Trying new things is essential for growth in every aspect of life. Keep growing!
3. Your health and well-being are more than diet and exercise. Be aware of what causes you stress and how you can successfully mitigate it. Stress affects our overall health significantly. Find something that you can be consistent with, find volunteer opportunities, be OK saying ‘no’ to stressful commitments or situations.