Building an employee wellness program is not easy. The sheer range of choices you have, from team activity challenges through biometric tracking and on to stress and mindfulness training, can make it hard just to get started. You've also heard the just offering wellness-related services is not enough - you need to “change the culture” to truly have an effect. All of that doesn’t even account for the disruption of COVID-19 or the challenges of remote work.

If you’d like some inspiration to help you up your game, though, take a few minutes to see the experiences catalogued here by Dr. Ron Goetzel of the Institute for Health and Productivity studies: Extraordinary Workplace Wellness Programs. 

As documented in this video, it is entirely possible to move the needle on employee wellness! Closer to home, Dr. Goetzel analyzed one of BSDI’s clients, Federal Occupational Health Services, a few years back. Over three years, we saw measurable reductions in obesity, hypertension, physical inactivity, glucose, and much more. ROI has rather fallen out of fashion for reasons that Al Lewis has documented but we found a bit of ROI as well ($2.79 if you are curious).

Of course, ROI depends critically on what aspects of wellness you study and how you measure it. This is why you see dueling research programs with some showing no benefit of wellness programming and others showing great gains. Ultimately, it depends on what you measure and how!

In our experience, programs that increase activity with a fun, team-oriented approach are both easy to implement and can provide a real boost to morale and engagement. It is, however, difficult, and imprecise to measure any financial payout from them. It isn’t that they don’t have benefits, they do! But their benefits come in a form that is difficult to quantify in dollars. Focused Intervention programs, on the other hand, provide large and easily quantifiable ROI. These programs use claims data to identify employees with chronic disease and risky behaviors such as prescription compliance failure and to provide them with guided counseling and tailored programming. The problem is that such programs affect so few employees that most employees are not even aware they exist. They don’t build a strong, more active, more engaged culture.

Whether you expect a defensible, dollar-denominated ROI from your program or see it in global terms of culture and engagement, the good news is that a good program, fully embedded in your culture can be a source of inspiration and good health for your employees. As documented in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, they can be good for your bottom line as well! Summarized, the authors found that companies distinguished by their commitment to their workforce's health, safety, and well-being outperform in the marketplace. So, what are you waiting for?