The CDC recently reported that more than 75% of health care spending is related to chronic conditions and lack of employee wellness.   This may come as no surprise, but the most common preventable chronic conditions attributing to this cost include heart disease, diabetes, obesity, respiratory and arthritis.

As workloads increase employees become more sedentary or have less time to work on disease prevention.  This downward spiral is only going to result in more health care spending for employers as the number of employees with chronic conditions increases.  Finding a balance to maintain productivity and employee wellness will help employers become more profitable in the long run.

How do employers improve employee wellness?  By offering an incentive-based employee wellness program to engage employees in healthy lifestyle habits.  It only makes sense since employees are currently incentivized to work by the paychecks they receive.  If an employee has a choice between getting paid and participating in a wellness program, they are going to choose the money.  Therefore to run a successful wellness program the same rule must apply.  A recent survey of around 600 employers, conducted by Towers Watson and the National Business Group on Health, reported that by 2012, 33 percent of employers would be adopting incentive-based wellness programs alone -- up from 6 percent in 2010.  Finding the right incentive-based wellness program is the key to success though.  For example, Tri Wellness offers a highly customizable incentive-based wellness program allowing employers to choose the program components they feel are going to have the most impact, along with branding the program to have the look-and-feel of the company brand.  Here are some other tips on what to look for when hiring a wellness company to provide an incentive-based wellness program:

1. Does it offer different types of programs (challenges, webinars, HRA, wellness coaching, onsite events) to meet the needs of different employees?  Ask for a list of all program offerings to evaluate what would be of most interest to your employees and/or do and interest survey.
2. Does access to the wellness program fit within an employee’s work day (i.e. paper tracking vs. online or both)?  Ask detailed questions or to even to do a demo how the employees would submit participation in the programs.
3. Will the correct type of reporting be provided by the Wellness Company to track the incentive-based programs?  Ask for sample reporting.