Most U.S. employers and insurers offer financial rewards (or penalties) to encourage employees to make healthy choices like losing weight and quitting smoking. These wellness incentive programs soon will become ubiquitous because the Affordable Care Act endorses them and opens the door for bigger rewards.
Some companies utilize a carrot approach, while others carry a big stick. Many wellness incentive programs include higher health care premiums to directly penalize employees who make decisions that are costly and bad for their health – e.g., smoking or maintaining an unhealthy weight. Far from being positive and rewarding, for a typical worker already struggling to be healthier on her or his own accord, these programs behave like a credit card debt that never seems to go away. Such programs may even create anxiety that can stimulate the unhealthy behavior they're designed to cure.
Like this content? Subscribe to EHS Today Magazine and receive leading coverage of the EHS industry.
As wellness incentive programs proliferate, forward-thinking employers and insurers have discovered that taking some simple steps to create positive emotional engagement, perhaps supplemented with financial incentives, readily changes a program's character from unwelcome authoritarianism to something participants enjoy and appreciate, thus dramatically increasing its effectiveness. In short, making wellness incentives fun and exciting leads to widespread improvement in results and a morale-boosting charge that makes a hero – rather than a villain – out of the program's provider.
Effectiveness of Incentives
Recent research has demonstrated that the effectiveness of incentives varies tremendously based on how the incentives are designed and delivered. The most-cited academic research on wellness incentives, a 2008 medically supervised University of Pennsylvania study, divided the participants in a weight management program into a control group and an incentives group. The members of the incentives group essentially made a weight loss bet, committing to lose a certain amount of weight and putting some of their own money on the line with the promise of a sizable prize if they lost the weight. The incentives group was three times more successful at losing weight than the control group.
That Las Vegas-like approach bears little resemblance to typical wellness incentive programs that employ raw financial pressure, but little more, to address complex behavioral problems. Financial incentives must be carefully delivered to maximize the desired effect and minimize the amount of money needed to change behavior.
The process of making a wellness incentive program fun and thrilling for participants is not particularly difficult. Here are six key elements to include in any wellness incentive program:
- Write your winners a check. Everyone loves unexpected windfalls. The behavioral economics concept of mental accounting demonstrates that there is a substantial difference between a $200 discount on a large bill (e.g. your $7,000 health insurance bill) and receiving a $200 check in the mail. Calling your employees "winners" and rewarding them with a check will make the incentives more exciting, more fun and more effective.
- Reward winners regularly. Making rewards for good behavior tangible and immediate makes them more effective. For example, there's a big difference between receiving a reimbursement check at the end of the year if you visit your health club 150 times and receiving a weekly check for visiting the health club three times that week.
- Incorporate social incentives. It's fun to get healthy with friends! A Brown University study recently concluded that social networks (and teamwork) play a significant role in enhancing weight loss outcomes. In particular, researchers found that having more social contacts trying to lose weight is connected with greater weight loss intentions, and changes in physical activity are similar among teammates in a physical activity campaign. Similarly, Harvard researchers recently concluded: "Weight-loss interventions that provide peer support – that is, that modify the person's social network – are more successful than those that do not. People are connected, and so their health is connected." Companies have found great success in rewarding cash incentives as part of team-based challenges. This is because participants are motivated by not letting their team members down. The teamwork particularly is effective when coupled with competition.
- Make the incentives into a "bet." Incorporate some of the excitement of Vegas into your wellness program by giving your employees the opportunity to raise their bet and win more money for losing weight. Giving employees the opportunity to put some skin in the game and opt-in to your incentive programs will make them more committed and effective at changing their behavior.
- Have the chance to win a really big prize. Consumers are more motivated by the chance to potentially win a large prize than a guaranteed small prize. In the same way that consumers like the excitement of a lottery, a really large prize can be very motivating to catalyze behavior change. For example, a team weight loss challenges that incorporates a $10,000 grand prize captures employee attention and drives sign-ups and success in the weight-loss challenge.
-
Make incentive goals attainable. Incentives need to be attainable in order to be fun and change behavior. It is not realistic to expect all employees to get to a healthy weight in 1 year. Instead, employers and insurers should tie incentives to realistic goals like a 5 percent or 10 percent weight reduction.
David Roddenberry is co-founder of HealthyWage, which offers cash incentives to lose weight while offering social and expert-based support, tools, resources and goal-setting and tracking technologies to address our nation's obesity epidemic.