3 Tips to Ensure Wellness Program Success

Wellness programs are almost a requirement of employers’ benefits packages these days. Health and wellness has become such a large component of employees’ lives that employers have gotten increasingly involved in. But how can you measure your wellness program success? Here are three tips to ensure you can execute and measure your wellness program successfully by focusing on outcomes, accountability, and return on initial investment.
Stay Outcomes-Based To ensure wellness program success at your organization, stay outcomes-based. Don’t just focus on program implementation or activities like a company 5k. While implementation is important, and activities can increase engagement, focusing on outcomes will reap real long term success and ROI. Staying outcomes-based allows rewards to be earned and often for employers to help employees reach the most effective outcome, weight loss. Weight loss leads to the greatest ROI for employers given that weight loss prevents a host of other diseases and conditions that can raise total healthcare costs.
Stay Accountable Outcomes-based wellness programs also help long terms success by keeping employees accountable for their own wellness, which leads to overall wellness program success. Maintaining employee accountability helps keep the program focus throughout the first three critical years of a program. Keeping employee accountability keeps employees’ eyes on the prize, and employers focus on real measurable ROI.
Measure ROI Here’s the fun part for employers. Measuring ROI and proving that wellness program success can really make a difference in the bottom line costs of healthcare for your organization. In the first three to five years of a program employers should look to measure a 3-1 ROI on wellness programs, for every $1 invested, within 3-5 years employers should see $3 back. This is the endgame. Wellness program success can be measured by these metrics, and should be a guideline for employee accountability. Read more heath & wellness posts here.