Shifting your wellness program into high gear

Employers are in agreement that offering wellness programs is a logical way to reduce health care costs. Health Care Reform further encourages employers to develop a wellness program or enhance the program they have in place. In fact, starting next year small employers will have access to $200 million in grants to fund health promotion programs and larger employers will be able to increase premium differentials in their wellness programs to 30 percent or more. At least a third of all U.S. employers offer financial incentives, or are planning to introduce them, to get their employees to lose weight or get healthier in other ways.

Clearly, there are plenty of incentives for employers to offer wellness programs. But just having a wellness program often isn’t enough of an incentive to engage the employees. For employers to truly recognize the cost-saving and productivity enhancing benefits of a wellness program, they need to increase employee participation.

The following is a list of some of the common challenges Ceridian hears from their customers when it comes to their wellness programs:

Disjointed programs. Using multiple vendors to deliver various wellness program components often leads to a disjointed employee experience. In addition, the employer is often burdened with significant vendor management and report consolidation issues.

Unclear outcomes. With top level company executives scrutinizing the return on investment for every program, many companies struggle to develop and produce a meaningful ROI for their wellness programs.

Budget challenges. Flowing from the demand to articulate an immediate ROI is the need to justify investments in programs that often don’t show results for 12 to 24 months.

Low program adoption rates. Many companies launch wellness programs but become quickly frustrated with lack of interest and participation in the programs. Low participation is often caused by a lack of program awareness, inconsistent communications and a lack of effective incentives that will truly drive participation.

This last common challenge demonstrates that you can have the greatest wellness program on the planet, but if your employees don’t know about it, it won’t succeed. It’s also not a matter of promoting the program just once during the launch. It has to be a strategic, ongoing effort with a promotional campaign at least each quarter.

Offering incentives is a great way to both promote your program and motivate your employees to act. Understanding your organization’s culture and demographics can help you recognize the right type of incentives to incorporate into your program. Incentives can include cash cards, a discount on health care premiums or a limited time membership to a fitness center. It’s important that your incentives reward behaviors for enrolling in the program and for finishing it.  

Read on to see how one of Ceridian’s customers successfully used incentives to drive engagement in their wellness program.

The Client: A retailer with 6,000 employees in various locations in the southeast United States.

The Challenge: With a high incidence of employee smoking during work hours, the company not only wanted to implement a smoke-free policy at all locations to reduce the impact on productivity, they also wanted to address employee morale issues and rising health care costs.

The Solution:  After consulting with their Ceridian Account Executive to discuss their objectives and unique environment, the client decided to offer a tobacco cessation program as well as sponsor nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) for their employees. During open enrollment in fall 2008, the program was rolled out. All smokers were told unless they enrolled in the tobacco cessation program they would be charged a smoker’s premium on the health insurance costs if they indicated they used tobacco products in the past 12 months. As a further incentive, it was communicated that a free eight week supply of NRT in the form of lozenges, gum or patch would be provided to those who enrolled in the program.

The Results: Baseline data indicated that 40 percent of the employees (2,363) were smokers. In year one, 974 or 41.21 percent of tobacco users enrolled in the program. Participation reports — a standard part of Ceridian’s solution — were provided to the client for administration of the incentives.

While the client considered the program a success based on first year enrollment, Ceridian provided benchmarking data that showed the client they had a higher incidence of drop outs than was typical in Ceridian’s book of business. Discussion with the client resulted in the conclusion that some participants were enrolling in the program for the incentive but then dropping out of the program once they had received the incentives. As a result, the client modified the program to include the requirement that employees or family members needed to enroll and stay engaged in the program for the full 12 months to receive the incentives.

Thus far in 2010, the client is beginning to see excellent outcomes from the program with a quit rate of nearly 34 percent and an ROI of more than $12 for every dollar invested.

What we can all learn: This case study not only demonstrates the importance of using incentives to encourage engagement, but also how critical it is to set clear objectives early on and to adapt wellness programs based on ongoing analysis.

Even the strongest wellness programs need ongoing nurturing and assessment to stay effective. Creating a culture of wellness, incorporating incentives and continually seeking feedback from employees to keep the program fresh is vital to your program.

Equally important is finding a vendor that can truly be your partner. When partnering with Ceridian, organizations can count on an effective working relationship with the power of our KnowHow on your side. Together, we can tailor a program to shift your wellness strategies into high gear and cultivate a healthier, more productive workforce.

Go to www.ceridian.com or call 1-800-788-1949.