There are almost different studies that have looked at the financial impact of wellness programs. These studies are not easy to do, they require extremely complicated ROI analyses, and they take years to complete.
In , a comprehensive review on the financial impact of worksite wellness programs was published. That study reviewed different research papers. The ability of a wellness program to reduce healthcare costs depends upon how effective the program really is.
Having an occasional lunch and learn about nutrition or just doing a biometric screening will not be enough to move the healthcare cost needle.
Comprehensive worksite wellness programs that improve employee behaviors will see a bending of the healthcare cost trend. Most often they will discover that the savings from program participation will be greater than the actual cost of the program. Almost everyone of these return on investment ROI studies show a positive return on investment.
Researchers from Harvard recently published another summary of the wellness ROI research. Source: Health Affairs. Among the 22 different studies that looked at wellness programs and healthcare costs, the average return on investment was 3. Last year researchers evaluated the impact of the WellSteps wellness program at a large school district. Here is the actual healthcare cost trend for this worksite.
After four years of wellness this worksite is actually spending less on healthcare costs than it did before the program began. Poor employee productivity can be defined as physically being at work but not working. This type of poor productivity is called presenteeism. It is estimated that the cost associated with presenteeism due to poor employee health is at least 2 to 3 times greater than direct health care expenses.
While the estimated cost of presenteeism dwarfs the cost of health care, it does not receive the same level of scrutiny among employers preoccupied with controlling the direct costs of poor employee health. There are a lot of reasons why employees have low productivity. They may not know how to use the equipment, they may be distracted by other employees, they may not know what they are doing, they may be tired, or they might be on Facebook.
One of the main causes of presenteeism is poor health. New understanding of presenteeism has been revealed in recent research published by the journal Population Health Management.
These findings demonstrate that poor health behaviors are strongly associated with high levels of presenteeism. In short, unhealthy individual lifestyle choices may result in substantially higher levels of lost productive work time.
Poor health behaviors eventually lead to elevated health risks and chronic diseases. The figure below shows how health risks such as excess body weight, elevated blood pressure, and high cholesterol increased the odds of having high presenteeism. The other health conditions in this figure further paint the presenteeism picture—the presence of risk factors, pain, and chronic disease, especially chronic depression, dramatically increase the odds of having high presenteeism.
These results confirm several ideas about the benefits of wellness. Presenteeism is associated with poor health behaviors as well as elevated health risks and the presence of chronic disease. Wellness programs that focus on helping employees have good health behaviors will eventually have an impact on productivity.
You can read about the connections between worksite wellness and productivity in a previous blog. There are over 50 papers that have looked at the connections between worksite wellness programs and reduced absenteeism. Worksites with comprehensive wellness programs can experience reduced absenteeism for a variety of reasons:. I summarized all of these studies in one monster paper that was published a few years ago. Any wellness program that can reduce absenteeism will experience cost savings.
Wellness programs have the ability to improve employee health and this can have an impact on whether or not individuals are absent from work. But there is another reason why wellness programs can have such a large impact on absenteeism.
Employees who have high morale are significantly less likely to be absent from work. I confess there is no published scientific data that shows that wellness programs will make a significant impact on your ability to recruit and retain employees.
There are a lot of factors that go into the decision to accept a job offer. It helps if you can offer a good salary and a rich benefits plan. I had the privilege of visiting the VP of benefits at the Microsoft corporate office in Redmond Washington. If you are fortunate enough to land a job at Microsoft you will get an amazing Microsoft benefits package.
The do this because they are all fighting with each other to hire and retain the best workforce possible. A rich benefits package makes it easier to get the best employees. However, wellness programs do have a strong impact on retention. Retention is the ability a worksite has to retain its workforce. Rich benefits also have a powerful influence on retention, but a good wellness program can help keep employees loyal.
Personnel is the most important asset in every organization. When you offer your employees a wellness program, you are showing them that you care about them. You are letting them know you want to do everything you can to keep them in good health and optimal performance. Employees know when they are appreciated. They know when feel welcome and valued as important parts of the organization. That knowledge can do a long way toward convincing employees to stick around: they can go find another job somewhere, but will they get treated and valued the same way?
The WellSteps wellness solutions has a performance guarantee. After three years we guarantee that your wellness program will have a positive return on investment. The secret is that after three years almost nobody cares about the ROI. That may have been a good reason to start their wellness program, but after employees start to engage, communicate with each other, feel valued and appreciated, the reasons for doing a wellness program change.
After three years we have found that our clients like to do wellness because they like the way it has changed their worksite culture. Employees are obviously healthier but more importantly they are happier. We are probably never going to have a good study that can evaluate that question. What we do have, however, is experience with hundreds of clients that have migrated away from the ROI of wellness and have moved towards the value on investment VOI of wellness.
You can read more about this here. The academic approach to wellness programs has limitations when we start talking about employee morale. It is a huge factor in the success or failure of any business and a good wellness program helps employees be happy and healthy. The pyramid shown below shows the different needs that we have as humans. The most important and life sustaining needs are the bottom of the pyramid, the base of the pyramid. One word: Naps. Then again, you could always take a day off, as the company offers unlimited PTO to help employees achieve work-life balance.
Daily yoga programs and free gym memberships are also offered at the software company. You can eat pretty well here, too. The in-house culinary team serves three, nutritious meals a day using fresh produce from local and organic farms. Find all jobs at Asana on Monster. Additionally, Draper offers onsite Zumba and Weight Watchers classes and holds annual health fairs filled with fun activities. Find all jobs at Draper on Monster. You can even pick up new personal and professional skills by taking cooking classes, coding degree programs, or guitar lessons, to name a few of the cool classes Google offers.
The search engine powerhouse also offers its workers financial wellness resources, such as access to financial advisors and financial planning services. Not to mention, employees are granted flexible hours, vacation time, and volunteer time, helping Googlers achieve work-life balance.
Find all jobs at Google on Monster. Find all jobs at Intuit on Monster. In , Song, Baicker and David Cutler, the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard, published a meta-analysis of prior research on wellness programs that found a roughly three to one return on investment for such interventions.
However, as the authors noted in that meta-analysis, much of the prior literature was limited by the lack of a robust control group, leaving open the possibility that estimates could be biased by confounding factors, and by limited sites, sample sizes and outcome measures.
To help improve the evidence on wellness programs, Song and Baicker decided to implement a large-scale controlled experiment. To eliminate the unwanted effects of self-selection and other biases inherent in nonrandomized studies, Song and Baicker randomized wellness program offerings across different worksites and tracked outcomes among all workers. The firms that choose to have a program may have employees who are already more health-conscious than those at firms without a program. This allowed the researchers to capture the effects that the program might have in changing workplace culture as well as individual behavior.
Among eligible worksites across the Eastern United States, the wellness program was implemented at 20 randomly selected sites with a total of 4, employees—the test group. The remaining sites and a total of 28, employees represented the control, or comparison, group. The wellness program comprised eight modules on topics such as nutrition, physical activity and stress reduction implemented by registered dietitians and administered by Wellness Workdays, a commercial operator of such services to corporate customers.
The month evaluation ran from January through June Administrative medical claims and employment data were gathered through June ; data from surveys and biometrics were collected from July through August The new study findings complement the results of a recent well-designed randomized controlled trial conducted at the University of Illinois, where individuals rather than entire worksites were randomized into a wellness program or a control group, Song said.
The working paper on the Illinois workplace wellness study is available at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Song said that experimental evaluations in the field of wellness promotion are still relatively uncommon. While this study provides important insights about some kinds of programs currently in use, many questions remain about the best ways to improve population health, he said.
One line of questioning directly related to the JAMA study is whether 18 months is enough time to see an impact from a program like this, or whether the kinds of changes in healthy behaviors the program produced take longer to yield measurable health benefits. Song has no conflicts of interest to disclose.
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