10 Tips for an Effective Wellness Program

Developing an effective wellness program can lead to insurance cost savings and a more productive, content and healthy workforce. Use the tips below to get the most from your health and wellness plan.

Incentivize: Choose incentives carefully focusing on those that promote a healthy lifestyle for employees and are accessible to anyone who completes the requirements of the program. Be sure to choose incentives that fit your organization’s culture.

Use Biometric Screenings as a Snapshot: Biometric screenings can be helpful for basic prevention as most measure employees' blood sugar, BMI, cholesterol and blood pressure. The screenings are useful for employees to evaluate their own health and can be collected in the aggregate as a tool to measure overall workforce health and improvements year over year.

Offer More Than Biometric Screenings: Biometric screenings are an effective tool that can help guide the development of the programs that will be most useful to your employees. Use the data to develop initiatives that target the health issues that face your workforce. While you may think wellness challenges would be fun to implement, if your employees are suffering from high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol levels, it may be beneficial to add programs on nutrition, healthy cooking and stress relief practices.

Don’t Use Scare Tactics: Success stories are more empowering and effective than deadlines or loss of privileges. Employer-based wellness programs work when employees and management feel vested in the outcome of their choices.

Consult Experts: A wellness vendor can help you develop a customized program that targets the health needs of your employees. If direct expert consultation is not feasible, pull health information from credible sources and stay up to date on the science of wellness. Fads and trends are just that and are not the type of wellness foundation needed for employees to build healthy lifestyles.

Communicate: The key to success in business as well as employee wellness is good internal communication. Employees need to know how to get involved and how to get questions and concerns answered. Good communication can get employees excited about the health and wellness plans offered. Develop a multi-faceted communications approach that will reach all employees.

Choose the Right Provider: There are many wellness providers that can make a program a success. Find the right fit for your corporate culture by asking questions and getting references.

Get Employee Feedback: An effective program involves employees and addresses their needs and interests while also placing value on their opinions. Feedback is a proactive way to ensure your health program is delivering what your workforce wants and needs.

Encourage Participation: Employees will participate in a wellness program that is proven to benefit them. Employers should refrain from forcing employees to engage in a program. Voluntary participation often leads to healthy results and an overall content workforce.

Wellness Should Be Stress-free: If employees feel stressed about meeting strict requirements or are uncertain about expectations, a wellness plan defeats its own purpose. Additionally, no health and wellness program is perfect. It needs to be tweaked, evaluated and reviewed on an ongoing basis to achieve the best results.

Wellness Workdays uses all of the best practices outlined above and can help you develop a program that engages employees and gets results. Contact us for more information.

Source

Visit Wellness Workdays for more information about our worksite wellness programs.

Executives Improve Health with Innovative Wellness Program

One of the six essential pillars of a successful, outcomes based wellness program is multi-level leadership support. As noted in the Harvard Business Review article, "What's the Hard Return on Employee Wellness Programs", employees won't buy into a program that's just about money. However, if executives make time for healthy behaviors, workers feel less self-conscious about taking a fitness break or signing up for a wellness seminar during working hours.

Wellness Workdays created an innovative program for senior leaders who wanted to make an investment in their own health and set an example for their employees.

The infographic below outlines their improved healthy behaviors and overall results within this 10-week program. Not only did the senior managers improve their health, they helped to shape and support their employees' wellness efforts.

Keeping It Legal -- EEOC Insight on Wellness Programs

When developing and implementing a wellness program, employers need to comply with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) regulations, portions of which are being finalized this year. Until then, the results of a recent court ruling in EEOC v. Flambeau, Inc. may be of assistance to employers in determining whether employee health information can be gathered to create a program that offers valuable incentives to participating employees.

In this case, Flambeau established a wellness program for its employees in 2011 – initially offering a $600 credit to any worker who participated. By 2012, the company required any employee who wanted to obtain health insurance to complete two of the requirements set out in the wellness program. The first requirement was a health risk assessment, which required employees to complete a questionnaire about medical history, diet, mental health, social well-being and job satisfaction. The second requirement was a biometric screening that included a routine physical exam – height, weight, blood pressure and a blood test. This information was aggregated and used to identify health risks and medical conditions among the workforce to estimate corporate insurance costs and set premium levels. 

One employee refused to complete both requirements and was dropped from Flambeau’s insurance coverage. The EEOC brought an action on behalf of the employee on the grounds of an Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) violation that bans employer-mandated medical examinations. The judge upheld the employer’s wellness program and ruled that the program fell squarely into the ADA’s “safe harbor” for insurance benefit plans because it met the following conditions:

• The wellness program requirement was a “term” of the employer’s insurance benefit; it was not mandated outside the realm of its insurance benefits offerings. It was also deemed critical by the court that the employer provided adequate advance notice of the wellness program requirements to workers through educational handouts, and that the assessment and testing coincided with the open enrollment period.
• The wellness program requirements were clearly intended to assist the employer with underwriting, classifying or administering risks associated with the insurance plan. The information was collected in aggregate and then directly used to classify health risks to calculate projected insurance costs for the benefit year. 
• The wellness program was not a condition of employment and employees could refuse to participate and remain employed – even though they would have to obtain health insurance elsewhere.
• There was no evidence of discrimination or disability-based distinctions against any specific workers or groups of employees, and the information collected was not used to treat any single employee differently.

Employers looking to establish a wellness program can gain insight from this case; however, the specific law on the ADA’s safe harbor and the administration of health insurance plans could vary based on jurisdiction.  It is advisable, therefore, to check with your counsel to ensure any wellness plan you develop is compliant.

Source

Visit Wellness Workdays for more information about our worksite wellness programs