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Incentives to encourage weight loss
Employers are spending over $12 billion on overweight employees each year. In 2008, the healthcare costs jumped from $10,130 for a family of 4 to $12,250! This huge increase has employers becoming more and more frustrated with their employees that are overweight. Overweight employees automatically push the company into a high-risk health insurance pool because of all the health complications they have.
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Obese individuals are twice as likely to visit the doctor. They will pay an average of $330 more per medical bill. They are susceptible to a handful of medical problems including the following:
- Heart disease
- High blood pressure
- Cancer
- Diabetes
- Arthritis
- Chronic aches and pains that lead to expensive surgeries
To win the battle against obesity and rising healthcare costs, employers are using incentive-based wellness programs. The employer will create a timeline for their employees to lose weight and reach their goals. If they are able to achieve their goals, they will be rewarded with a nice incentive. Studies have actually found that employees that were given a reward for losing weight will actually lose the weight over the employees that are not given anything.
There are other incentives you can use to get them to lose the weight like extra paid-time off work, reduced office hours, job promotion, a vacations, and gift cards. Use some small rewards like t-shirts, pens, and mouse pads as your smaller incentives to encourage your employees to keep working hard at losing the weight.
Employers must contact their health insurance provider to let them know you are planning to implement a wellness program. The health insurance companies will often decrease their health insurance costs if employers can get at lest 20 percent of their employees to lose weight and get to their recommended body mass index (BMI). Anything over 30BMI is considered obese. When you have employees in this category, you are dealing with some problems. These individuals often have an addiction to eating and many of them are unable to control the amount of food they eat. The other hard part is that they are so out of shape that they don't like to workout. They will get fatigued quickly so it is important to help them work their way up to a larger exercise (like a 5K).
As you can see, employee participation is essential to reducing your healthcare costs. How can you inspire your employees to participate in the program? You can inspire them to participate by participating in the program with them. Let them see you working out in the company gym and eating healthier foods. If employees see how important the program is to you, they will participate in it with you.
You can also inspire employees to participate in a wellness program by offering additional time to exercise at work. Give them 15-20 minutes extra for lunch or for proper exercise at the office. Make it a rule that they have to use this time to exercise or else they forfeit the program and lose out of the big incentive at the end of the program.
If you can't afford to pay out big cash compensations at the end of the program, divide the money into 3-4 payments. Increase your employee's paycheck for a month or two; just make sure they are responsible for paying taxes on the money they have won. Incentives are a wonderful way to lose weight and to get your staff members in shape. If you haven't implemented a wellness program, now is the time to do it! It is far easier to pay for the costs of preventing health problems than it is to pay for the cost of treating an illness.
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