Offering incentives to employees to lose weight

With over half of the United States population overweight, it is no wonder why employers are starting to crack down on their overweight employees. Employees that are overweight raise health insurance costs because they bump everyone into a high-risk pool. This is because overweight employees are known for visiting the doctor more, and they have a handful of health problems. Some of the common health problems overweight employees experience includes the following:

• Increased risk for cancer
• Diabetes
• Heart Disease
• High-blood pressure
• Joint pain
• Chronic knee pain
• Back pain leading to major back surgeries

These overweight employees are hurting their co-workers that only visit the doctor to get their yearly check-up and vaccinations. They hurt them because they are forcing them to pay more money each month to keep their health insurance. To combat this, several employers have begun penalizing the employees that raise health insurance costs. If you are a smoker or you are obese, you are out of luck. Most companies will give you a few months to lose the weight or quit smoking or they will start charging you more money for being unhealthy.

Another thing employers are doing is offering incentives to employees to motivate them to lose weight. The health insurance companies have even begun partnering with companies that are taking an active role in improving their employee's health. They will decrease their health insurance costs if they can get at lest 20 percent of their employees to lose weight and get to their recommended body mass index (BMI).

So what are some of the common incentives? Of course money is the most popular motivation method. Employees are willing to drop 20 pounds if they know they will get at least $50 for it. Even if you can't offer $50 to your employees, they will still lose weight it you offer them a little money. You can break up the amount of money you pay them and include it in their paychecks over a set amount of time. This will give your company enough time to build-up the money to pay for them and the employee will get larger paychecks for a month or two. 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.

In order to motivate your employees with incentives, you need to participate in the program with them. They need to see you eating healthier and spending time in the gym or outside walking around. Several companies have had success with weight loss because they gave their employees and extra 15 minutes for lunch. For that extra time, they made it a requirement that the employees had to exercise or do something to improve their health. If you are going to make requirements like this, you need to provide your employees with facilities to exercise. This can be a small room with just a treadmill or you can provide them with an outdoor walking trail, whatever it is, you need to give them an option for exercising at work.

A fun way to motivate your employees to exercise is to buy video games that force you to move. The Nintendo Wii is full of games that make you use your whole body. During their lunch hour, encourage the employees to play these games. If they can be active for at least 20-30 minutes each day while they are at work, they will start to improve their health.

You can offer incentives to your employees each quarter or you can space it out over 6 months. Decide how the incentives will work for your company and make sure you have enough money to cover the cost of the incentives.