There was a time when all you had to do to get a corporate wellness programme up and running was to put a few posters on the wall encouraging people to take the stairs instead of the lift. These days, on the other hand, companies are going all out to take care of employee wellness – even if that means putting in the big bucks, or threatening to take money away as an incentive for workers to start taking better care of their wellbeing. According to Adam Stavisky, a Fidelity benefits consultant, employers ‘feel that if they pay more they’ll get a better result.’ But is that true? Which incentives are really worth the money?
Stephanie Pronk, health and wellness consultant with Aon AON Hewitt, the human-resources business unit of Aon PLC, says, ‘Incentives themselves are not the silver bullet. It’s really important to change up the incentive design and keep people on their toes.’ If you’re going to get your employees in shape, then, you need a whole host of ideas and tricks up your sleeve to keep the momentum going, so let’s take a look and the popular kinds of corporate wellness incentive programmes being used today – including their advantages and downsides – to see what might work for your company:
1. Rewards for risk assessments: You offer your employees an incentive to complete activities that assess their personal health. This may mean filling out a medical history questionnaire or taking a screening for cholesterol, blood pressure and other factors. The Lockton Benefit Group state that your incentives need to be worth at least £60 to get about 75% of employees to participate, otherwise you’re looking at a participation rate of 30-50%. The pros here are that you introduce your workers to healthy behaviour and personal risk factors, as well as being able to tailor future endeavours to employee needs. However, your workers about their health risks won’t necessarily lead them to take action.
2. Action-based incentives: In this wellness programme, your employees take action to improve their health to earn awards or to avoid penalties. Houston city employees, for example, have to complete three tasks in order to avoid a $25 monthly payroll surcharge. These include filling out a health-risk assessment, taking a biometric screening, talking to a health coach, signing up for a programme like Weight Watchers or getting a screening such as a mammogram. As a result, 90% of employees have completed three of the tasks or more, so you can see how motivational this model is. However, the con of this model is that the incentives don’t encourage long term healthy behaviour, only enough to complete the required programmes.
3. DIY incentives: You offer your employees incentives for an array of tasks, with bigger and complex tasks corresponding to bigger rewards. The plus point of this approach is that you give your workers to freedom to choose their own health activities, which they enjoy. JetBlue Airways Corp is one such company who goes in for DIY incentives, offering anything from $25 for a teeth cleaning, to $400 for completing an Ironman triathlon. Pronk notes that a wellness programme that lays out a tempting trail to follow will have more success keeping people involved. Still, the variety of options can be overwhelming for your employees, and you might be wasting your money on activities that aren’t effectively addressing your workers’ biggest health problems.
4. Progress-based Incentives: Your employees earn rewards whenever they hit an optimal benchmark for cholesterol, blood pressure and weight. Paul Terry, CEO of StayWell Health Management, comments that this approach motivates your employees without penalising them for not being perfect. However, rewarding employees for simply showing up to a wellness programme doesn’t mean they will actually get healthier.