Health and Wellness Programs - A must or are they just bust?

The other day I had a client ask me if she should implement a health and wellness program in her small, almost medium-sized company.  Dominated primarily by women, sitting at their desks all day long she was concerned that she was promoting a sedentary lifestyle and thought it might be a good idea to promote health and wellness in some fashion.

My first question, blunt as always was, "Why do you want to do something like that?"  She was rather taken aback with the question and stammered out, "I don't know - I just think it might be a good idea. It's what other company's are doing...right?"

Yes - many company's are definitely instituting some sort of health and wellness program.  And the health and wellness industry in itself has made major gains with corporations paying significant money towards the idea of being a healthier workplace.  But before any company decides whether or not to invest in health and wellness programs - they need to ask themselves the all important question, "Why?"  If you don't know the why, then how do you know if you are actually receiving a return on investment?

Here are some questions to ask yourself when thinking about implementing a health and wellness initiative:

1.) Are your insurance premiums high or rising every year? If yes, then you need to find out where specifically they are rising. (If it's massage/chiro etc. those are usually preventative, which IS a health and wellness program, but if it's prescriptions/specialist etc. raising costs, then perhaps you do have an unhealthy organization, and you can put a metric in place to see if your h/w program can change those costs).

2.) How many sick days does the average employee use in your organization? Several studies over the past few years have shown that the average sick days taken by employees are between 5.7 to 8.5 days.  If your average is higher than this, this is another good metric to put in place before implementing a health and wellness program.  However, the biggest strategy in terms of combating sick day over usage was not calling them sick days.  (This is a different topic altogether and is of great debate...giving personal days as opposed to sick days).

3.) Will the staff actually see this as a positive move or will they see it as self-serving for the company? If the employees are not going to take it as a positive step - then you're really spending money for the sake of spending money (no real return).

4.) What percentage of your staff will use the program?  Most health and wellness programs have between a 13% to 18% participant rate.  Is that worth it to your organization?

Some lessons learned...(and maybe where some of my cynicism comes from...)

A few my clients had introduced payment of gym memberships up to a certain dollar amount per month.  Issue 1: People with families complained that it took them away from their families, and asked if they could submit for a treadmill or a bicycle.  The clients agreed to this proposal. But then came along issue 2: Is yoga like a gym membership? How about kick-boxing? The client said sure, as it promoted fitness.  But then came issue 3: Are golf clubs fitness items? How about golf lessons, are they like a membership?  Can I include a locker in my gym membership? That's where the line was drawn and the client went back to "gym memberships only." Fed up with employees, it didn't matter if the program was working or not.  Publish the rules, make sure the rules promote what you want, and stick to them!

Another client started a program: Lose 10 lbs in 10 weeks.  Despite the fact that this seems to promote unhealthy weight loss, some people don't even need to lose 10 lbs. So participants were very few and far between.  The programs do need to be all inclusive - so in this case my recommendation was to change it to a percentage of body fat or the Body Mass Index (especially since it was a competition and had a $500 bonus attached to the winner.)   However, even a program like this, where it's administered internally, you have to be careful with sharing weight information.  I'm an "ok" size, but I'm not sure I want to broadcast how heavy I am to all my co-workers.

At another organization I worked at, I brought in a hypnotist to help our smokers stop smoking - $2,400 later - not one employee quit.  It seemed like the right thing to do, we even had a metric (they would stop taking so many breaks during the day and thus work more) but the problem is, none of them actually wanted to quit.  We didn't bother to ask - we just implemented it.  In hindsight (and it's always 20/20), we should have made sure the smokers wanted to quit.

If you want people to be healthier - get their buy-in with the programs first.  Ask them if they would participate.  If so, what would they like to participate in?  Tell them your goals of the program and help you come up with the outcomes -- trust me, this is a true lesson I learned and a great way to get your return on investment.

Health and Wellness is important - but at what cost and can you quantify it?

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