Establishing an employee wellness incentive program

Setting up and employee wellness incentive program is a very good idea for many businesses and can provide ways to save both you and your employees money.But establishing one that will be run properly can be a challenging task and requires some serious thought and effort.Here is some information you need to know when planning and setting up your employee wellness incentive program.

There are many different answers to the question of how a wellness incentive program should be set up.Most companies take a gradual approach to the process and try to ease employees into a wellness program.At first, they will make incentives available to employees who want to participate in the program which gives the program some time to get off the ground.The next year, the company is normally more assertive with the program and requiring more employees to participate.This is especially true when they have seen significant gains and benefits from the program, especially financial benefits.These benefits can be quoted to the employees who chose not to participate the first time in the program and distributed to the company as a whole.Having positive examples is a great way to motivate people who were hesitant at first to participate.It's important to quantify the experience as much as possible so that people will see how the program can really benefit them in their health and also in the pocketbook.

There isn't any way that someone can be forced to change the way they are living no matter how hard you try.There are things you can do to try and convince them that they need to participate in the program, but you cannot force them, especially if they were employed before the program was started.Requiring that someone participate in the program as a condition for employment is unethical and in many cases would be considered illegal.The person has to have the desire to improve their health inside before they will commit to making the change.Imposing a penalty for not participating in the program or changing their lifestyle will simply not work, so you need to consider each case individually and make sure that you are being fair and equitable in your decisions.There is only value in an employee wellness program if it provides more benefit than harm to the company.If you lose some of your most valuable employees because you are pushing too hard to participate, then the program could be doing more harm than benefit.When you are choosing how to implement a wellness incentive program, try and make sure it is in line with your company culture and the expectations employees have of the company.

A surprising study found that about 52% of employers weren't even offering any kind of incentive to participate in an employee wellness program.Of the remaining 47% that did offer an incentive, about 29% provided monetary payments as an incentive for participating in the program.People like feeling good about themselves and the intrinsic rewards that go along with better health, but they also like getting paid some kind of money for their efforts as well.15% of those who offered incentives provided a reduction in medical copayments which can really result in substantial savings especially for families with children with all their doctor and dentist visits in a year.30% responded that they provided reimbursement of some kind for a program cost.This could include counseling, medical treatments or tests, or even personal training sessions to get into shape.48% also indicated `other' in the study which could include contributions to funds used for medical expenses such as an FSA account.There were also raffles and prize drawings as well as paying for screening costs and additional time off work.