By Susie Lyons, member, executive board of directors, Recognition Professionals International
Organizations must address wellness and disease management incentives in 2008 for a number of reasons. If self-insured, they can use incentives to control health care costs. The goal is to see fewer employee sick days and higher productivity. By offering wellness, prevention and disease management program incentives to employees, organizations strive to accomplish this goal.
When staff shortages at your organization occur because vital employees are out sick, the result is high levels of stress. Some areas of the country now are seeing shortages in various health care professionals, for example, nurses and pharmacists, which further burdens sick employees and their employers. Wellness programs directly address this stress.
Strategic implications of recognition and incentive programs related to wellness programs are a positive work environment, increased productivity and elevated customer service and satisfaction.
Here are a few examples of wellness program incentives:
• Get a free flu shot and receive a T-shirt.
• Join a fitness challenge and receive a pedometer and a water bottle.
Trends include more offerings of workforce comprehensive fitness gyms, free on-site flu shots, annual free multiphasic blood screenings, partially or fully-covered smoking cessation programs, walking courses, risk assessments and health fairs.
Recognition has and will continue to play an important role as a way to reinforce and motivate desired behaviors in the workforce, and aligning employee engagement with an organization’s mission, vision and standards of behavior. The result: happy, fulfilled employees.
Kathy Gorzelsky, employee relations coordinator at Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center, puts it this way: “We are fine-tuning our recognition and incentive programs to be creative and to find the correct methods to make new generations of workers feel valued and part of the team. One of the greatest issues I see coming in 2008 is a change in our recognition and incentive methods. What has motivated baby-boomer generation workers, the largest part of our workforce, is not necessarily the same thing that motivates Generation X and Y employees.”
Programs that have worked in the past may become obsolete with the impending retirement of your baby-boomer generation workforce. By using Recognition Professionals International’s (RPI) Recognition Strategy Model (see Figure 1), organizations can assess their current programs by implementing RPI’s seven best practices in recognition.
One example of an organization demonstrating success with incentives is
Go for the Gold was rolled out in 2003. It rewarded employees for choosing healthy lifestyle behaviors, identifying their health risks, increasing activities to maintain or reduce their health risks, and promoting early disease detection. The program was phased in over four years with greater monetary rewards available each year as program components were added. In the first year, 10,349 (68 percent) employees participated, and the program has continued to gain momentum with even more participating in each successive year (10,736 participants in 2004, 12,590 in 2005 and 14,698 in 2006). Employees were able to participate in any one of three levels and received the cash reward in their paychecks each month (see Figure 2).
In year three, the program was expanded to make health a priority in the home by offering faculty/staff an additional wellness credit for their spouse/certified domestic partner’s participation. Participants earned up to $10 per month in addition to their bronze, silver or gold wellness credit by having a spouse/certified domestic partner complete the online health risk assessment (HRA) and wellness actions log.
The measurement tool is an overall wellness score, obtained from the HRA, which is a barometer of overall health. This score increased 3.9 points in three years, from 52.5 to 56.4. Research demonstrates that each point represents a savings of $30 in future health care costs. This translates into a savings of $4.3 million. Indirect costs are projected to be twice the cost of health care and represent a savings of $12.9 million.
Go for the Gold has had a significant impact in motivating participants to start or maintain healthy lifestyle behaviors. The greatest behavior change was seen in people exercising one or more times per week, which increased to 80.7 percent in 2006. Although the proportion of people in the United States who are overweight continues to rise, Vanderbilt saw a decrease in the proportion of overweight individuals among participants between 2003 and 2004. This number rebounded slightly in 2005 but remained well below the national average. The program also demonstrated decreases in sick time, smoking, stress and depression, as well as an increase in job satisfaction.
One of the most important metrics to track, according to wellness research, is the percent of participants who are low-risk (0–2 risk factors). This increased from 74.0 percent in 2003 to 79.95 percent in 2006.
There were several significant byproducts of the incentive program: many faculty and staff who had never used a computer began using them for other benefits communication, such as paycheck access and benefit information; faculty and staff responded positively and are appreciative of a fun program that keeps them thinking about ways to be healthier; and employees are now savvy health care consumers in addition to helping to control the university’s rising health care costs.
The success of the Vanderbilt program is directly tied to several factors which are important practices to include in your program:
• Marketing strategies. Multiple messages, multiple times, in multiple formats has become their mantra.
• Planning. Carefully and thoughtfully consider strategy, implementation, review and assessment.
• Input from employees on a regular basis.
• Continual benchmarking.
• Staying up-to-date on the latest research in the health promotion and recognition/incentive fields.
All organizations must stay up-to-date on the latest research addressing wellness and disease management in 2008. Skyrocketing health care costs, an aging workforce and the impending workforce shortage make it imperative for organizations to implement effective recognition programs. Employers are considering the implications of these issues and making changes to recognition and reward practices to ensure employee engagement remains high.
Susie Lyons is the manager of employee programs at
