What is this about?

The vast majority of U.S. employer wellness programs suffer from the major challenge of relatively low levels of employee participation.  Typically, less than 50% of eligible employees and/or spouses participate in their employer’s wellness program.  Usually, this is because employers are not utilizing well-designed incentives or not using incentives at all!  If they chose to use well-designed incentives, they would likely have many more employees participating in their employee wellness programs and doing wellness.  With a set of well-designed incentives, you can usually get 90%+ of eligible employees and spouses actively participating and engaged. Technically we usually refer to participation in incentive programs as the “motive force” of the wellness incentive, which computationally is the percent of eligibles that participate in each incentive opportunity. Participation is obviously a prerequisite for engagement, so therefore you clearly want the highest level of motive force that you can get from your incentive efforts.

A key starting point in overcoming the major challenge of low participation begins with the sound design of your wellness incentive feature or program. A well-designed incentive has several key attributes. This includes:

• Good promotional activity
• Easy entry for participants
• Reasonable qualifying behavior(s)
• Appropriate choice and magnitude of reward(s)
• Efficient record-keeping and tracking
• Good administrative follow-through on the provision of the reward(s)
• Follow-up reporting that reinforces future participation

In this edition of Connections Newsletter, we provide a useful Solution Set document that allows you to test your incentive design knowledge and to learn how to maximize the motive force of any wellness incentive that you use.  In this document we look at a wide range of possible qualifying behaviors including: attendance at a health fair, completion of an HRA, attendance at a lunch and learn series, use of a fitness facility, completion of preventive screening, use of an e-health portal, participation in a walking challenge and achievement of multiple wellness criteria.  You can first test your knowledge on the worksheet provided and then consult the answer sheet to find out more about how to design the incentive to get the highest level of “motive force” or participation.

Why is this important?

Incentives are one of the only ways we have of attracting the roughly 80% of employees who are not intrinsically motivated toward wellness and usually ignore our employee wellness programs.  If we don’t have people participating in our wellness programs our science says they are not likely to change their wellness behavior. No wellness behavior change- no health improvement – no health improvement – no desired (or expected) economic results.  This Solution Set document from the Chapman Institute is a tool you can use to improve your ability to design effective wellness incentives.  This is important because a well-designed incentive is a key to achieving high levels of participation and producing the desired results that management wants from our worksite wellness efforts.

We believe that high levels of participation by employees and their spouses are associated with effective wellness programs and much greater levels of both lower and higher order program results.  (Remember the Results Hierarchy for Your Employee Wellness Program?) It is very important for our wellness programs to achieve both the lower order results (attitude change, readiness to change, short term wellness behavior change) and the higher order results (long term wellness behavior change, health risk mitigation, lower chronic disease prevalence, lower health claims cost) desired by senior management. Well-designed incentives are critical to this program calculus.

What can you do with this document?

• First, read the Worksheet and put your own answers into the worksheet related to identifying the expected motive force, key issues and improvements for each of the 8 incentive examples.
• Then compare your answers to the ones provided on the Answer Sheet.
• Summarize the common strategies that are reflected in the suggested improvements on the Answer Sheet and relate these back to the key attributes of effective wellness incentives.
• Use this document to help volunteers and staff improve the design of future wellness incentives.

In summary, this Solution Set document can be used to help you improve the design of your wellness incentives helping you get the participation and results you need from your employee wellness program.