Employee engagement in health and well-being programs is a challenging goal to the majority of plan sponsors. On its face, the thought is that people would naturally prefer to be healthy versus unhealthy. So it should be easy to provide a program that focuses on improving health and getting members to participate, right? Unfortunately, the answer is not that straightforward because there are a multitude of impacting reasons that go beyond what is occurring at the individual member level.

The ultimate equation surrounding engagement is factored on a variety of forces that include leadership endorsement, committee/stakeholder development, planning, execution, and delivery methods. We’ll focus this discussion on dissecting these listed forces into more easily absorbable concepts, with the goal of providing a clearer line of sight to how to achieve and sustain higher member engagement rates.

Identify your well-being champions

The first step begins with building a plan and gaining support. Let’s start by examining the latter of that statement. Organizational support through the endorsement of multiple stakeholder groups is absolutely critical in order to better guarantee member adoption and participation in changing their overall well-being.

You should begin with the C-suite and gather their input on what they want the program to achieve. These will represent your highest level goals. You will also need to ensure these individuals are willing to lead by example and become vocal and participatory proponents of the company’s wellbeing engagement. This gives you as the program administrator/manager a lot of credibility as you move to the next step of incorporating additional stakeholders, who in concert with your C-suite champions, will help craft, refine and push the program messaging on a day-to-day basis.

The additional stakeholder members should incorporate representatives from every department and ensure representation from leadership, management, and line-staff. This broad cross-section will provide your program the broadest support from every peer group throughout the organization.

Noteworthy here is to also ensure that you are recruiting members from all fitness states, from the most energetic fitness fanatic to the person who wants to begin positively changing their health and wellbeing. Your team should be a representative sample of your population; and consider that you most likely will not have any difficulty inspiring die-hard exercise fanatics to participate.

Your biggest challenge will be to move those in the non-exercise category to a state of active participation. If the team of daily champions is exclusively comprised of the physically well-shaped, it can and most likely will present as an engagement barrier to those who are less so.

Establish program goals

With endorsement and team composition out of the way, we need to turn our focus to writing your health and wellness plan. This is a critical factor that is easy to overlook in terms of its importance. Merely having a health and wellness solution in place does not automatically constitute having a plan to drive it, meaning that it is not as easy as activating the program and letting it run on auto-pilot. It has to be actively worked to parameters that your team has memorialized into goals and objectives.

Think back to your conversations with your chiefs and bring those goals to the team. Examine ways to operationalize them and incorporate feedback and goals that your team members have, as well as design capabilities to capture and incorporate direct participant feedback.

As part of this process, you will need to determine what plan design type fits your present needs and how that might part of a phased approach to morph over time. The three basic plan type buckets are:

1. Full voluntary, as a means to promote organizational culture and recruit/retain talent

2. Activity/Incentive, which employs incentives to help drive participation

3. Outcomes-/Health-contingent, which makes use of individual health performance metrics on a year-over-year basis to determine such things as how much their health plan premium contribution will be (per federal guidelines), HSA/FSA contributions, etc.

Employers can set a multi-year/phase approach to moving from one plan design to another. Once this is decided, you should definitely have sound counsel review the type selected to ensure you are meeting all related regulatory and compliance requirements and make adjustments as recommended. This can be done through internal or external legal review, as well as, through your broker, if you have one engaged.

Set an action plan

Now, move to feedback. Every level and corner of the organization has to have a voice in the construction and/or maintenance of the strategic plan in order for it to be successful. As an example, one of your C-Suite goals may be to establish a baseline and increase member participation by 20 percent from one year to the next. That’s a fair goal.

Your team members will have ideas of how to accomplish that by adding their input on types of activity challenges to be deployed, communication strategies, how to engage members from different fitness levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced), etc. All of these elements serve as subordinate goals to the master of a 20 percent increase and have to be clearly defined, scoped, and placed on a timeline with responsible parties to take action.

Based on each goal interdependency, you will need to establish metrics to help you analyze effectiveness of every task and how it is supporting and driving accomplishment of the main objective.

Partner for success

All items to this point result in the next component for consideration—a technology to engage members and drive your plan. Living in a digital world, this represents a very critical step in that it will be the daily mechanism for managing how the program operates, how members engage, how you track results, how it extends and enforces your corporate culture, etc.

Sourcing a health and wellness technology through a vendor partnership will likely be cheaper than attempting to build an in-house capability. A key consideration in selecting the best-suited vendor-partner is how adaptive their solution is and whether there are any costs associated with driving that flexibility, e.g. how much administrative control do you have to change core elements of the member interface? A way to measure this is to determine exactly how many components of your plan are immediately met during the vetting process because if you have to make any adjustments/concessions with the current plan, chances are high that it will have difficulty evolving to meet any to-be-determined future needs.

Another key factor is what communication capabilities does the technology possess that enables participant integration, meaning that everyone is able to get a sense of being part of a larger group? It should pull members into the experience and ensure that executive endorsement and participation is able to be showcased, e.g. custom messages from the C-Suite and other leadership participants on how they are progressing, leader boards, custom images of members engaging in their transformation processes, etc.

For you to be able to achieve sustainably higher member engagement rates is that the program has to be 100 percent designed, delivered and driven by your unique cultural and organizational needs. Off-the-shelf health and wellness packaging, through vendor technology or otherwise, will in no way match the true needs of your population and fall short of any goals you may set.

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How to design an engaging employee wellness program

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