What is this about?

First, the good news… employer wellness programs have been proven to help people change their short-term wellness behaviors.  Now, the bad news… those same wellness programs have been shown to be pretty poor at helping people change their long-term wellness behaviors.   For our purposes, we will define “short-term” as 1 – 6 weeks and long-term as 6+ weeks.  We obviously need to help people make as many long-term wellness behavior changes as possible if we want health improvement and economic return.

In the WellCert Program, we refer to this phenomenon as the “chasm” between short-term wellness behaviors and long-term wellness behaviors. It is vital for employee wellness programs to help all participants “cross the chasm” and move from doing wellness over short periods of time to doing that same behavior over long periods of time. The long-term wellness behaviors that become long-term habits enable individuals and wellness programs to gain the higher order results of wellness programming.

These higher order results include HRA improvements, health status or biometric improvements, health risk mitigation, lower disease incidence and prevalence rates, lower health care utilization and claims cost, and positive ROI.  But without getting more people to adopt healthy habits and positive wellness behaviors over the long term we are not likely to realize the full potential of results that wellness programming potentially provides.

 Why is this important?

 This issue is absolutely critical to the future of the field of worksite wellness and it is also critical for the future competitiveness of our employee and employer communities.  This Solution Set document identifies 14 possible strategies that employers can use to help assure that their employee wellness programs help more people get “across the chasm”, and successfully adopt long term wellness habits. If we want more than just the lower order results from our employee wellness efforts (knowledge change, attitude change, readiness to change, and short-term behavior change), we have to use these strategies to secure those desired higher order results (long term behavior change, health status changes, health risk changes, improvements in disease and condition prevalence, health care utilization changes, health care claims changes and VOI and ROI). Without meaningful results our programs are not likely to be around over the long haul.

What can you do with this document?

• First, look the document over to get a sense of the range of strategies that are recommended.
• Next, examine your current wellness programming initiative for the present use of these strategies. Eliminate those strategies you are already using, but before you do that make sure they are now being deployed in an optimal way.
• Then, determine which of the remaining strategies offer the most potential to help participants …”cross the chasm.”
• Then, decide how you will introduce each of the applicable strategies into your program.
• Then, begin the process of introducing the various strategies.
• Then, determine how you are going to measure the effects of the various strategies on key metrics.
• Then, monitor the metrics to observe the change.
• Then determine your next steps.

In summary, this list of specific programming strategies for helping employee participants to ..”cross the chasm” and adopt more long term wellness habits is designed to significantly enhance the effectiveness of your employee wellness effort and to produce both more lower order and higher order program results.