Wellness
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compared to older workers. The institution
conducted an employee survey on what was
the motivating factor for doing the biometric
screening.
“The younger workers said they did the
biometric screening because of the $75
financial incentive. The older employees
ranked getting healthier as a top driver for
participation, noting that the onset of chronic conditions and the fact that their health
was not as good as they wanted it to be,” explains Stevens. Ridgeview’s wellness vendor, RedBrick Health, implemented several
touchpoints to reach workers, with e-mails
as the predominant tool to communicate
with employees. “If an employee doesn’t
have access to a personal e-mail account,
we don’t penalize the worker for using his or
her workplace computer to access e-mails
from the wellness vendor,” he adds.
Furthermore, for wellness programs to
achieve their goals, including engaging all
workers of all ages, they have to be flexible.
That means, in part, looking beyond the
wellness program itself and examining your
workplace policies, Stevens says.
“If you want to reduce smoking, look at
how you treat smoking on your campus.
Incentivize workers to become nonsmok-
ers by having them pay less on their health
insurance premiums, as we did,” he notes.
“If you rely only on the wellness programs,
I don’t think you will achieve some of the
goals you want.”
According to research by DMAA: The
Care Continuum Alliance, 53% of employ-
ers report their spending on health improve-
ment and wellness programs ranges from
$3 to $5 per member per month, while 20%
indicate spending $2 to $2.99 per member
per month.
In addition, 65% of employers project
their company’s budget for wellness programs in 2010 to remain within 5% of 2009
spending. In “Population Health Improvement: A Market Survey Report” by DMAA,
analysts report that 78% of employers purchase their wellness programs separately,
while 15% of employers purchase wellness
programs as part of their health plan.
In some cases, employers have to convince older workers that it’s never too late to
improve their health. “Some older workers
may believe ‘I been smoking or have been
overweight’ for most of their lives,” and may
resist efforts to get them to make lifestyle
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changes, says Carl Mowery, managing director at SMART Business Advisory and
Consulting.
Although the concept of wellness is relatively new to the workplace, younger workers have grown up in an era that routinely
preaches the importance of health and fitness. As a result, it might be much easier to
persuade them to participate in workplace
wellness measures, adds Mowery. Others
note, however, that Gen Xers and Yers are
not immune from the obesity epidemic.
“That’s the puzzle we are trying to unravel. As we become more aware of health and
wellness as a culture, we also have a food
economy that sometimes drives things in a
negative direction instead of a positive one,”
says Dr. Christine Paige, senior vice president of marketing and internet services at
Kaiser Foundation Health Plan.
At the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention,
the HR team is mindful of the company’s
age demographic, “but it’s not considered
as a driver to our decisions on health pro-
motion and wellness programs,” explains
Elizabeth Singh, HR director of training and
organizational development at USP, a non-
profit research company in Maryland. USP
employs about 600 workers, with the aver-
age employee’s age ranging in the mid-40s.
LIFE STAGES
Some question whether age is a predica-tor of how well individuals will perform in a
wellness programs. One’s body mass index,
however, does have a correlation with performance.
And as people get older, their BMI tends
to increase, says Mike Zani, CEO of Shape Up
The Nation. The company helps employers
to use social media to boost participation in
wellness programs.
Having a well-thought-out recruitment
and communication plan is likely to result in
a program that is inclusive, thus eliminating
age schisms among the program, explains
Zani. He also says his organization does not
customize its social networking programs
by age demographics, but realizes that some
older workers are less tolerant of clutter on
social media websites. They want greater user
interface that is not overly complicated.
Early this year, the fastest growing segment on Facebook was the 35 to 55 age group,
constituting 30% of the site’s user base, Zani
says. “We spend a tremendous amount of
time to ensure that we are not leaving anyone
behind, but some would just say that is good
user interface,” he adds.
“Our research shows that older individu-
als start to get more interested in their health,
in part, because the whole sense of being in-
vincible starts to fade,” says Paige. “We have
data that show people between the ages of
40 and 60 in our smoking-cessation program
have a quit rate around 60%, compared to
those under 40 who had a 70% rate.”
With wellness programs, some people
thrive in a social setting, while others pre-
fer individualized coaching, which can be a
face-to-face encounter or an online program,
explains Paige. Wellness is about offering
workers different options because not only
do people have different learning styles and
preferences, but they also have different fac-
tors that motivate them.
“A first-rate health promotion program
recognizes that each participant comes to
the program with varying degrees of motivation and outside support. Therefore, building
recommendations and communicating messages about health and wellness will have to
factor in those traits,” she says.
It’s also really important to give people a
chance to start where they are. For example,
“you want to get sedentary people at least
moderately active, so the message for them
is that 30 minutes of activity five days a week
will reap a lot of the benefits. You don’t want
those individuals to feel as if the goal here is
to run a marathon,” she adds. —L.C.B.
