Passing the higher costs onto the employee

No matter what choice your employee makes when it comes to their lifestyles it is going to have an effect on their lives, this includes what they eat, how much they exercise, if they smoke, etc. But not only does it affect your employees lives it also affects your business's bottom line because their bad choices and unhealthy lifestyles are what makes the cost of health care rise each year. It has been shown through numerous studies that employers who have smoke free workplaces, offer wellness programs, etc actually have healthier staff and save money each year on health care costs. For employers the battle against their employees to choose a healthier lifestyle has been never ending, so they have decided to try a different approach.

Many employers have actually started to adopt an approach where they charge their employees higher health insurance premiums if they smoke or are overweight because it helps to make up for the extra cost that the employers have to pay out. And although employees actually support charging the higher rates for people who make the unhealthy lifestyle choices it is still considered discrimination in the workplace, in fact HIPAA actually addresses this issue. According to the new HIPAA laws that were just recently passed it is against the law for an employer to make employees pay higher premiums than other employees just because they smoke, are overweight, or they choose not to exercise.

So in order to get around these new laws that were passed employers have actually began to offer the employees who make better health decisions discounts on insurance premiums. How they accomplish this is they require employees to sign up for wellness programs that teach them about making better health decisions and then the employees are rewarded with a cash bonus that goes towards the insurance premiums. And the best part is that this has actually been proven to work to get employees motivated to change their health habits and it helps everybody save money.

In fact using incentives as way to get employees to change their health habits has actually increased from 14% to 39% and more companies plan on offering these kinds of programs before the year is out. Some of the incentives that companies include to help get their employees motivated are bonuses, reimbursement of health related expenses and discounts on health insurance premiums. These are usually the incentives that you will find offered at majority of the companies because they have actually been proven to work, what this means is that the people who are sitting on the fence tend to get motivated to change their lives when offered these kinds of incentives.

So if you are thinking about adopting a wellness program and offering your employee incentives take a look at how some of your employees health habits can cost your company money and just how much money these bad habits can end up costing you each year. But something else that you need to know is that by having a wellness program in place you can actually lower the number of medical claims for your employees by at least 27%, not to mention that your employees will use on average 15 hours less of sick time over a four year period. By looking at these costs alone and figuring out just how much money you can save each year per employee, not to mention it will help your company's bottom line you should be more than motivated to start offering a good wellness program as soon as possible.