From our friends at the Healthcare Trends Institute:
With more and more employers interested in reducing their healthcare costs while improving their employees’ overall health, they have been turning to wellness programs to support their company-wide strategies. Employers are spending human and capital resources to implement and expand wellness offerings with the goal of increasing positive health outcomes for their workforce.
A recent study measures how they’re doing. As reported in the January issue of Benefits Magazine, the International Foundation gathered data from 372 U.S. organizations in a variety of industries and regions and analyzed the outcomes employers are experiencing in the study, A Closer Look: Workplace Wellness Outcomes.
Here are some of the article’s top takeaways from successful programs that participated in the study:
- Most employers, if they are calculating ROI, do so by outsourcing the analysis and reported on average a $2.80 gain per $1 spent.
- About half of the respondents are offering some type of insurance-based wellness incentive. Additionally, organizations are implementing them in a positive way rather than trying to penalize employees. Plus, companies with insurance-based incentives are offering a wider range of health and wellness initiatives to support their workers’ needs than those not offering incentive programs.
- Several participation factors were identified among companies with positive ROI, VOI, and great workplace cultures including: incentives, leadership communicating support, targeting employee health risks, asking for employee feedback, and remembering spouses and children.
- Organizations with positive wellness ROI are doing a little more to offer wellness initiatives to control or decrease health costs, while those with positive wellness VOI and great workplace cultures are more likely to offer wellness to invest in and increase employees’ health and engagement.
Many organizations reported that their wellness efforts are having a positive impact in terms of their ROI, workplace culture, VOI measures like engagement surveys, and very importantly their companies’ overall growth. The complete study will be available soon at www.ifebp.org.
