You’re not crazy to have concerns about updating your company’s wellness program—the pain points of corporate wellness are real.
Companies spend an estimated $6 billion per year on wellness programs, according to studies by the RAND Corporation (Stover, Douglas R., and Jade Wood. “Most Company Wellness Programs Are a Bust,” Gallup Business Journal (February 4, 2015). Retrieved at http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/181481/company-wellness-programs-bust.aspx). On top of that, companies continue to spend on incentives to keep employees engaged. The average maximum annual incentive offered by businesses was $693, up from $430 in 2010, according to Fidelity and the National Business Group on Health (Taking Action to Improve Employee Health: Sixth Annual Employer-Sponsored Health & Well-being Survey,” Fidelity and National Business Group on Health (NBGH) (March 25, 2015). Retrieved at http://www.businessgrouphealth.org/pub/29d50202-782b-cb6e-2763-a29a9426f589).
When you add in the stress of achieving executive buy-in, let alone the time spent on program implementation, it’s no wonder you’re hesitant to open up the purse strings. But not everything you do needs to break the bank. Here are five low-cost ideas that are proven to make an impact on your wellness program:
1. Think outside the (in)box. E-mail is one way to reach your employees, but it’s not the only channel. As you consider your employee communication strategy, think about the different ways to reach your employees throughout the day. Sometimes the barrier to program participation is simply that employees do not understand your program. The remedies: better quality and more varied communication.
Consider leaving leaflets on people’s desks or hanging flyers in the breakroom. Better yet, take a cue from Atlantic Packaging, a packaging and transportation company whose employee population is always on the go. In addition to e-mail, Atlantic Packaging tapped its network of wellness champions—essentially employees passionate about improving their health who volunteer to work together and with the wellness program to improve workplace health and culture. The wellness champions played videos highlighting their step challenge during lunch, and brochures were consistently posted on a centrally located wellness bulletin board. Wellness coordinators also had one-on-one meetings and phone calls with employees to make sure they were aware of upcoming wellness activities.
2. Just ask! Sometimes the best policy is to be direct. Reach out to your employees to better understand their health goals, and how you can help them achieve those goals. Indiana University Health used surveys to give employees a standardized way to self-report their health behaviors. The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which organizes the annual Consumer Electronics Show, realized that, as is the case with most companies, it had some inactive or sedentary employees. To remedy that, it asked for input from its employees to better understand their barriers to fitness.
3. Use competition to your advantage. There’s nothing like the spirit of healthy competition to get employees moving. Sure, implementing a fitness challenge in your wellness program is one way to get started. But how do you keep employees motivated throughout the competition?
Houston Methodist and Kimberly-Clark held fitness challenges spanning several weeks or months, and implemented several creative tactics to maintain excitement throughout their challenges. Houston Methodist started top-down: It had departmental CEOs challenge their teams to beat their average daily step count. Step count to beat? 16,000. As for Kimberly-Clark, its health services team painted markers in the parking lots of one office to indicate where employees could maximize their step count. The farthest parking spots were in the green zone, since parking there yields the highest step count. The closest parking spots were marked as red, and spots in the middle were orange.
4. Recognize their efforts. Gold stars go a long way. Recognizing employees who have achieved a health goal—whether it’s smarter eating, weight loss, or increase in physical activity—is meaningful to the individual and motivating to the rest of your team. Indiana University Health used its own internal communications to recognize employees with the highest step counts, while CTA gave employees certificates for a more formal stamp of achievement.
5. Enable employees to be stakeholders. You don’t have to go it alone. Empower your team, whether it’s employees or executives, to rally the rest of the organization behind the cause. The key is to make them feel responsible as stakeholders and give them a vested interest in keeping the rest of the company motivated and moving.
Houston Methodist made its executives stakeholders with its “Beat the CEO” challenge. Another health-care system, Emory University and Emory Healthcare, created a network of more than 50 wellness champions across their locations.
For smaller companies, you can try working with managers. As an added step in ensuring clear communication, Atlantic Packaging’s wellness team checked in with departmental managers to make sure they were up-to-date with the company’s wellness initiatives.
End Results
Your efforts can pay serious dividends. Houston Methodist’s wellness program saw a 90 percent participation rate. Atlantic Packaging employees lost a collective 630 pounds over the course of their wellness challenge. In the last three years, Indiana University Health has seen a 60 percent decrease in body mass index (BMI).
Beyond program results, a successful wellness program can transform your whole organization—87 percent of job seekers use health and wellness benefits as a determining factor when deciding where to apply (Virgin HealthMiles and Workforce. “The Business of Healthy Employees: A Survey of Workplace Health Priorities “ (2013). Accessed via: https://www.dropbox.com/s/92ikd0tcm9mdaiu/2013_Workforce_Virgin_Business_Healthy_Employees.pdf?dl=0 ), and companies are more likely to suffer a loss in talent in the next year when employees are not satisfied with wellness promotion (Independence Blue Cross. “Employee wellness as a strategic business imperative.” (November 2013). Accessed via: https://www.ibx.com/pdfs/employers/employer_resources/wellness_whitepapers/wellness_whitepaper_112013.pdf). For the employees who stick around, the increase in job burnout and depression is strongest among those not engaging in physical activity and weakest to the point of non-significance among those engaging in high physical activity (Toker S., Biron M. “Job burnout and depression: unraveling their temporal relationship and considering the role of physical activity,” Journal of Applied Psychology (May 2012). Accessed via: https://en-recanati.tau.ac.il/sites/nihul_en.tau.ac.il/files/RP_226_Toker.pdf).
It sounds like common sense for a reason. After all, who doesn’t want to be happy going to work?
Amy McDonough is VP and general manager of Fitbit Wellness, Fitbit, Inc. For more information, visit http://www.fitbit.com.
