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, below 60% of eligible employees and/or spouses participate in their organization’s wellness program.  Usually, this is because employers are not utilizing well-designed incentives with strong enough pay values resulting in relatively low levels of motive force (i.e. “motive force” is the percent of eligibles responding to the incentive opportunity).

A key starting point in overcoming this major challenge begins with finding out why your employee/spouse participation and engagement levels are low.  We often use a survey, focus groups or a series of interviews with key informants to nail down the underlying reasons for low participation. Once we have an idea of why employees are ignoring the wellness program we can then adopt the right counter-strategies to increase the general levels of participation among the eligible population.

In this edition of Connections Newsletter, we provide a useful table that allows you to match the major reasons for non-participation in the organization’s wellness program with one or more of 12 different participation enhancement strategies intended to increase employee/spousal participation levels in your wellness program.

Why is this important?

No participation – no behavior change.  No behavior change – no desired (or expected) results.  This Solution Set document from the Chapman Institute is a table that identifies the major reasons for low participation and then recommends specific participation enhancement strategies and the suggested order of their use.  This is important because it makes it much easier to select participation enhancement strategies that are specifically matched to the reasons for low participation in the group of employees you are working to serve.

High levels of participation are associated with effective wellness programs and much greater levels of both lower and higher order program results.  It is very important for our wellness programs to achieve both the lower order results (attitude change, readiness change, short term wellness behavior) 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.

What can you do with this document?

• First, read it over and make sure you understand the major reasons for low participation and the basic nature of the 12 participation enhancement strategies.
• Decide what methods you are going to use to find out why employees/spouses are not participating in the wellness program. (Survey of non-users, use of focus groups with non-users, or key informant interviews)
• Carry out your research methods and then summarize the results. Strive to prioritize the major reasons for low participation in your employee wellness program.
• Using that prioritized set of reasons and starting with the most prevalent reason for low participation, use the table to select the participation enhancement strategies from the Solution Set document.
• After implementing the participation enhancement strategies within your wellness program track changes in participation to determine the “lift” these strategies create in participation.
• At the end of the program cycle or year determine if additional participation enhancement strategies should be introduced.
• Monitor participation patterns and start the process over again if participation levels have not increased enough or participation is not at an acceptable level.

In summary, this Solution Set document can be used to help you select the most appropriate participation enhancement strategies for your employee wellness program, assuring you get the results you want from the wellness program.