AAA Northeast’s Virtual Health Fair (VHF) invites employees to learn and explore wellness benefits through an immersive, self-directed, virtual board game. This learning experience takes employees and their families into a digital world to discover the company’s health plans, vendor relationships that provide mental and emotional support resources, and financial wellness strategies.
The VHF has created new experiences and themes that showcase health/benefit information in engaging and interactive ways. The fair’s unique programing and interactive model transcends the communication of employee benefits and wellness education through its use of self-directed and gamified navigation.
The club’s adaptive use of this design and learning technology bolsters employee engagement and has made this program a factor in the winning of the Best Places to Work RI award and the Training APEX Awards, while enhancing AAA Northeast’s reputation as a leader in Learning & Development innovation.
Program Details
When embarking on new endeavors, one often asks, “Where do we start?” The VHF started from necessity. Prior to the pandemic, AAA Northeast hosted an in-person Health Fair, like other organizations. In 2020, two significant challenges plagued the Health Fair: being mindful and respectful of in-person gatherings and a decline in fair attendance from previous years.
Since a live fair was not an option, the AAA Northeast team pivoted and innovated, creating the club’s first completely virtual health fair. To meet the challenges of distance learning and remote interactions, AAA Northeast leveraged eLearning tools to craft an adventurous and interactive experience.
A completely digital and anytime learning environment through the VHF was exactly what employees needed. The traditional model health fair invited employees to come meet vendors; the VHF flipped the narrative and brought the vendors, partners, services, and rewards to the employee. The data reveal learners are more interested in attending and engaging with the fair’s content when they can learn at their own pace, explore content in private, and create a tailored learning experience through their fair navigation. The VHF’s combination of easy access, creative hands-on learning, and personalization makes it a captivating annual organization-wide learning experience.
Threefold Strategy
Behind the effective execution of the VHF is a threefold strategy that incorporates current technology, organizational culture, and innovation.
- Focus on interactive and company culture-building activities during the fair. AAA Northeast’s company culture of service, care, inclusion, and collaboration is a source of pride for our organization. As a learning-centric organization, our team realized the value of interactive and culture-building activities within the fair from the very beginning. In 2021, the fair hosted remote cooking demonstrations, benefits office hours through MS Teams, and live employee-led “jam session” broadcasts. As a team, we decided that even though we could not meet in person, we could still cultivate and craft our organizational community. This strong emphasis on togetherness and unity forged in the pandemic years continues to propel the excitement and engagement of our current VHF.
- Leverage technology in unusual ways to create innovative learning experiences. As technology continues to evolve, designers are confronted with the ever-present challenge of pushing the limits of design tools and platforms. VHF’s use of virtual reality/video game-style navigation with an emphasis on learner centricity created a smooth and seamless experience for learners, incorporating video transitions, gamification, learner prizes, and much more in a completely virtual world.
- Support a spirit of innovation annually by always looking for actions, ideas, and cross-team collaboration for the fair. At AAA Northeast, our team is always looking for opportunities to grow and make something good into something great. Fostering a spirit of innovation does take a village. Each year as the VHF returns to the design phase, our team looks for actions, ideas, and new ways to collaborate and build cross-team engagement. This “rethinking” of the fair’s engagement methods and model requires critical analysis as the team examines all aspects of the fair—from the theme and structure to the games and live sessions.
Beyond innovation is evolution. AAA Northeast has come a long way since its first Virtual Health Fair. The VHF has evolved into a dynamic experience for benefits education, which now focuses on three areas of evolution.
- Digitization: As the fair evolves, content that was once static PDFs has become interactive digitized documents. This has been achieved using new authoring tools in the platform, enabling all employees to access information as electronic materials that were once picked up in person.
- Cost savings: The digital nature of the fair reduces costs in printing, employee hours, and design costs. As the virtual elements of the fair continue to grow, print materials and in-person costs have dropped exponentially.
- Hybrid sessions: Since the fully remote learning requirement is ending, the live learning and wellness sessions are becoming hybrid—meaning the sessions are broadcast remotely but watched with a live audience of employees at our headquarters.
VHF Results:
The VHF was a game-changing program for both fair attendance and the bolstering of our wellness rebates program. Year-over-year attendance at the VHF increased significantly. In 2022, attendance and participation in the fair increased by 20 percent, jumping from 2,100 in 2021 to 2,600 in 2022. In 2023, attendance and participation in the fair skyrocketed by 74 percent, rising from 2,600 in 2022 to our best attendance ever at 3,520 in 2023.
The goal of improving the use of wellness rebates also grew by a tremendous 116 percent in one year post-fair. Our organizational goal for rebates was to raise usage and awareness by a moderate percentage. However, the data reveal that the VFH was a direct catalyst in the successful completion of this goal.
As organizations seek to reproduce similar results, don’t be afraid to dream of the impossible. The only way to pursue innovation is to be adventurous. Look for opportunities to break the status quo and innovate. Moreover, seek others within your team and across your organization to help you break down the barriers and discover new frontiers.