According
to Incentive magazines “Safety and
Wellness IQ,” almost 50% of companies today have some sort of employee wellness
program in place. The biggest difference
today is that most CEOs while eager to invest in wellness efforts, are
demanding a better return on these investments.
Healthcare costs and healthcare insurance are high, too high, and
companies are looking for everything they can do to reduce them. With an aging workforce these numbers may only
get higher.
A
study conducted by the Global Wellness Institute, “2016 Future of Wellness at
Work”, states the economic enormity of worker health is approaching 10-15% of
global economic output. Some economist’s
estimate this can amount to over $2 trillion each year. According to the research company Gallup, the
cost to U.S. employers is $153 billion a year just counting workdays
missed. Whether these global estimations
are pertinent to your company or not, unhealthy workers have been a
persistently growing problem.
Wellness
efforts of the past amounted to websites with articles about exercise and
nutrition with links to other resources; and wellness coaches and or company
nurses who did health risk assessments (HRA).
This communication effort often left it up to the worker to motivate
them to “get healthy”. Today, doing an
HRA is just the starting point, the admission ticket to the program. From a push using incentives to get employees
involved by taking the HRA, today the effort is on participating, doing
something to improve your health.
Programs goals have changed from getting employees to join to improving
health and fitness and thus reducing costs.
Participative
Goals
Another change in programs is not just focusing on people who are unhealthy, but getting to the rest of the employee base to ensure they don’t fall into chronic health conditions in the future. Today it’s about what your programs stress, what you want your employees to do. Incentives “2016 Safety & Wellness IQ” survey showed the top activities a program encourages are:
Activity
|
Included
in Programs
|
Physical
fitness (walking, running, cycling, swimming) etc..
|
68.5%
|
Regular
Medical Checkups
|
64.4%
|
HRA
Survey
|
56.3%
|
Smoking
cessation
|
54.8%
|
Monitoring
Health Issues (hypertension, diabetes, etc.)
|
49.3%
|
Gym,
Fitness Classes
|
41.1%
|
Obesity
Reduction
|
39.7%
|
As all of these goals have specific and easy to obtain measurement are participative and outcomes based, awards can be easily used to achieve thems. By using a wellness portal with video to provide advice and material on all of these objectives, you can appeal to your entire workforce, especially millennials. Challeng goals and team objectives can also add to the interest because you can have groups supporting each other.
For more
information on Ultimate Choice Inc.’s products or services or other white
papers please contact us at Ultimatechoiceinfo@cox.net
