YOU'VE HEARD the phrase "salad days," but perhaps the bright green of romaine and the spicy flavor of arugula would seem odd in the pinstripe environment of a Seattle office tower's conference room. Lettuce and bean sprouts are not the work of a fancy caterer, but part of the potluck donations of a dozen King County employees. They come together to create a group salad once a week, just one part of a comprehensive plan that aims to save money by encouraging workers to get healthy.

One of those salad eaters is Brooke Bascom, director of communications for the county's program, called Healthy Initiatives.

"It is part of creating a community of wellness," she explains.

Whether it is a salad potluck or a group stair-climbing club, these measures fall under the heading of social networking. That, according to Seattle consultant Neal Sofian, is one of the big trends in employee-health programs.

"All the cost-shifting ways to save money have already been done," he explains. Sofian works to help employers nationwide strategize about reducing health care costs.

Cost shifting is the practice of getting workers to pay for more of their own health care, often in the form of higher deductibles or co-pays for office visits. But cost shifting only goes so far in saving employers money. The drastic increases in costs of the past few years are driving employers to take steps to directly improve their employees' health and reduce their risk of expensive chronic diseases. That means changing behavior.

Johnson & Johnson recently released some figures this year about the savings gained from paying attention to employee health, especially as related to cancer screening and treatment. As part of a program aimed at cancer prevention, J&J estimates it saved $225 per employee in annual health costs. CEO William Weldon recently told Fast Company magazine that he's hoping to sign up other companies to what he calls the CEO Roundtable on Cancer, which is trying to establish corporate practices to prevent cancer in the workplace.

While anti-smoking campaigns and free flu shots are common, initiatives aimed at colon and cervical cancer screening and social networking belong to a new menu of employer options.

Among those new options is something getting promoted in television advertisements by health insurer Regence Blue Shield. The giant insurer covers about 3 million members in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Utah. Regence members can participate in online chat sessions about their diseases or about parenthood in a program called My Community. Regence has operated the chat community for about a year, launching it with its own 8,000 employees as the initial participants.

In My Community, a Regence member in say, Redmond, might post his profile as an asthma sufferer who is looking for someone to jog with in his neighborhood, and find a matching jogger who will understand if he needs to take time to use an inhaler halfway through the run.

Tim Williams, the online member experience director for Regence, says interaction between peers, such as sharing advice about asthma, helps individuals take responsibility for their own health. This is one crucial step in the long path toward healthier behavior, and good management of an expensive disease like asthma, where each hospitalization can cost thousands of dollars. Across America, an estimated 14 million people have the disease. If the Redmond jogger manages his asthma carefully and stays healthy, he can save his employer a lot of money and do better work on the job.

Chatting and salad sharing, or running with others, belong to a whole segment of peer networking that some researchers believe has the potential to make people live healthier lives. People who share tips and recipes are more likely to actually change their eating habits than people who don't, consultant Sofian says. He has a current client in Minneapolis who is creating a social networking site just to promote this sort of informal person-to-person contact outside the workplace and doctor's office.