Inspiring Employee Health and Wellness with Incentives

Last week I posted an entry on tips for successful wellness incentive programs and I wanted to follow up this week with a similar article on how to inspire employees to encourage participation in an employee wellness awards program. Emily Tipping provided helpful insight and advice in her article Their Good Health: Inspiring Wellness with Smart Incentives that I thought would be relevant for anyone trying to lower healthcare costs in the workplace by providing inspirational wellness programs. The core of her report centers on the idea that as healthcare costs continue to rise, American companies are in the perfect position to offer wellness incentives as a way to improve employees' lives and the organization's bottom line.

After all, both employees and employers are the ones that foot the cost of healthcare and can mutually benefit from lowering these costs. Tipping points out that healthcare expenditure is projected to reach more than 2.8 trillion dollars per year by 2011. It came as no surprise when I read her statement that increasingly, organizations are looking to implement wellness incentive award programs to help mitigate these rising costs. Wellness programs have moved past being a supplement of a corporate incentive program and are becoming the central focus of incentive programs for many of my clients.

Over three fourths of healthcare claims, Tipping mentions, can be attributed to an individual's lifestyle and that an astonishing one third of deaths each year in the United States are attributed to tobacco use, lack of physical activity and poor eating habits. When an organization decides to implement wellness incentives, in an effort to educate employees and provide social support to inspire them, a healthy culture of wellness can be instilled. This in turn can lead to numerous cost savings for employers.

"Properly designed health promotion programs can have a positive impact on financial outcomes," Tipping quotes Dr. David Hunnicutt, president of WELCOA, The Wellness Councils of America, in a 2007 interview. "Companies can start by looking at impacting the costs associated with their health plans. After that, they can turn to things like sick leave costs, workers' comp costs and costs associated with disability. Finally there's another area where businesses might not even realize they're losing money: productivity-related [presenteeism] costs."

As Dr. Hunnicutt brought up, presenteeism is a measure of lost productivity costs due to employees actually showing up for work, but not being fully engaged and/or productive mainly because of personal health and/or life issue distractions. Designing a wellness program that has goals targeting these five areas mentioned by Dr. Hunnicutt, will inspire employees to lead healthier lifestyles and earn brand name awards for their efforts.

When workers and organizations work together because of a wellness incentive program, employees will be inspired to have lower body weight and better physical fitness while employers, according to the Employee Rewards and Incentives Blog will incur lower healthcare costs and have reduced presenteeism and absenteeism rates.