Registration for every event you do should be super easy. Your incentive plan should be simple to understand and painless to complete.
Arranging for a biometric screening appointment should be so easy a child could do it. In other words, to have a successful program you need to remove all of the barriers to participation. The easier it is for your employees to engage, the more likely they will be to produce positive outcomes.
There was a time when most wellness program participants used paper forms and printed materials to report on health risks or to participate in a wellness program. The logistics of creating, printing, shipping, and collecting these materials was burdensome.
For the most part, all of that has been replaced by giving employees access to the web. Whether on a computer or mobile device, it is a lot easier and more pleasant to participate than it used to be. Every corporate wellness program should be available on a computer and a mobile device. A wellness platform needs to have a mobile app that allows every employee to participate in every aspect of their program.
At WellSteps, we are seeing more and more employees participating in our wellness programs with the WellSteps app. In the very near future almost all employees will participate with a mobile device.
Well-designed and easy-to-use apps make it easy for employees to engage in your corporate health and wellness program. This helps them stay motivated to have healthier lives.
There are some companies and institutions that used poorly designed programs and all they accomplished with their wellness program was to reduce employee morale. Here is what they did wrong:. Unless motivated, most employees will have a hard time beginning and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Behavior change is one of the most difficult things that we do as humans. There are two types of incentives.
Negative incentives such as punishments or fines. Programs that use these are using the stick approach to employee behavior. They use punishments and fines to force employees to improve their health. The other type of incentive is positive rewards or reinforcements. This is the carrot approach to incentives. Just about everyone responds better to positive reinforcement then they due to negative reinforcement.
Corporate health and wellness programs that beat their employees into submission rarely get positive wellness outcomes. They almost always lower employee morale. We have yet to see the stick approach work. Some worksites have a very strong focus on employee safety.
Keeping employees safe from harm is a priority. These worksites would almost never ask somebody in the HR department to head up their safety efforts. They most often bring in a trained, qualified safety expert. The same is true for corporate health and wellness programs. Many small to midsized companies will start a wellness program by asking somebody in the HR department to take charge.
The pros and cons of this approach are listed below. In almost every case these wellness program fail. Asking a current employee who already has a full-time job to take on the extra burden and challenge of running a an effective wellness program is a recipe for disaster. It may start off well, but eventually the lack of time and expertise to manage and administer a comprehensive wellness program becomes apparent. These programs usually fail because of neglect.
Many worksites initiate a corporate health and wellness program with limited leadership support. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a limitation on the effectiveness that the program will have.
Worksites that have strong leadership support also have a functioning, effective wellness committees that help guide and direct the wellness program. The wellness committees give ownership of the program to the employees themselves.
When you have a wellness committee your employees feel like the program is theirs and not something that management is trying to do to them. Companies with strong leadership support have leaders who participate in the program in very visible ways.
They participate in campaigns, they participate in team challenges, they talk about the wellness program, they are involved in the evaluation and reports of the program and they personally believe in the benefits of having a healthy lifestyle. In this previous blog post you will find the complete guide for gaining leadership support.
It contains everything you need to get your leadership to support your wellness program. Every employee benefit was started by company leadership at some point. The decision to start employee benefit is a big one because employee benefits are easy to provide but difficult, if not impossible, to remove.
Strong leadership support is always necessary before offering an employee benefit. If you are going to start a wellness program, you need to be committed to a long-term approach to improving employee health. Treat the decision just like you would any other benefits offering. Adopting healthy behaviors is actually fairly easy. The challenge is to maintain these healthy behaviors for the rest of your life. Worksites that can create health-promoting environments and a culture that supports healthy living will experience a variety of positive wellness outcomes.
We like to help every single client take a good look at their worksite culture using our free tool called the Checklist to Change. Each quarter the wellness committee and worksite leadership pick one thing to change within their environment. After several years of small, consistent, culture changes, the entire organization begins to look and feel like a place where people want to work and be healthy.
The Checklist to Change is delivered through the wellness portal and it helps organizations create a culture of health. Done correctly, the incentives you offer your employees will motivate them to be healthy. To get the most out of incentives they need to be used in the right way. To have an effective wellness program, you have to help employees adopt and maintain healthy behaviors. Your incentives should be used as rewards for healthy behaviors. Many times and employer want to offer an incentive just for completing a health risk appraisal.
Health risk appraisals are important to track the progress of your program but they have very little impact on health behavior. These behaviors have a direct impact on chronic disease prevention and the amount of money you spend on healthcare costs.
There are a lot of extremely good wellness programs that use incentives. Unfortunately, some employers believe that having an employee wellness website is the same as having a wellness program. They mistakenly assume that all their worksite needs to improve employee health and reduce health care costs is get their employees to go online.
A wellness website is not a wellness program. Many insurance carriers claim to have wellness programs for those companies they insure. More often then not, this program consists of a web portal with educational videos and articles about health and wellness.
The problem lies in their inability to improve health. Think about somebody you know that lives a healthy lifestyle. In , Song, Baicker, and David Cutler, the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University, published a meta-analysis of prior research on wellness programs that found a roughly three-to-one return on investment for such interventions.
However, as the authors noted in that meta-analysis, much of the prior literature was limited by the lack of a robust control group, leaving open the possibility that estimates could be biased by confounding factors, along with limited sites, samples, and outcome measures. The new study findings complement the results of a recent randomized control trial conducted at the University of Illinois by Damon Jones, associate professor at Harris, and co-authors. This study, where individuals rather than entire worksites were randomized into a wellness program or a control group, found the impact of such programs is negligible, and incentive-based programs may act as screening mechanisms to attract healthy employees.
To help improve the evidence on wellness programs, Baicker and Song decided to implement a large-scale controlled experiment. To eliminate the unwanted effects of self-selection and other biases inherent in non-randomized studies, Baicker and Song randomized wellness program offerings across different work sites and tracked outcomes among all workers. The firms that choose to have a program may have employees who are already more health-conscious than those at firm without a program.
This allowed the researchers to capture the effects that the program might have in changing workplace culture as well as individual behavior. Song said that experimental evaluations in the field of wellness promotion are still relatively uncommon.
While this study provides important insights about some kinds of programs currently in use, many questions remain about the best ways to improve population health, he said. One line of questioning directly related to the JAMA study is whether 18 months is enough time to see an impact from a program like this, or do the kinds of changes in healthy behaviors the program produced take longer to yield measurable health benefits?
Presidential inauguration. Top Stories. Aug 24, Emotional Wellness. And then the worst case scenario happens. Despite your best efforts, your wellness program … fizzles. And we have good news.
Helping companies rescue their workplace wellness programs from failure is very much what we do. You can prevent your program from failing if you make some needed changes.
For a companywide program to succeed, it needs buy-in from leadership at the very least. And ideally, it should have active and visible participation among senior executives.
So, asking the brand-new chief financial officer to spearhead this program may not work in your favor, no matter how enthusiastic they are. This person is going to be your main influencer. Make sure their participation is highly visible so employees are more encouraged to participate. Your senior executive influencer may also serve as the chairperson for your Wellness Champion Network.
This team of people works together to plan and promote wellness activities. The team members should be representative of your entire employee population, including diversity of ethnicity, gender, lifestyle, race, religion, disability, location, job level and other factors.
They need to know what to expect. Wellness programs that fail are typically missing three things when it comes to program structure:. Successful wellness programs usually have seasons of challenges that begin around the same time.
The challenges may vary but the structure remains the same. For example, you might start your individual challenges in February. Everyone knows that sign up starts in January. And they know how to earn and redeem points for rewards. This consistency and predictability make it easy for employees to participate.
Your wellness program is ultimately designed to improve the overall health of your company.
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