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

The ultimate equation surrounding engagement is factored on avariety of forces that include leadership endorsement,committee/stakeholder development, planning, execution, anddelivery methods. We’ll focus this discussion on dissecting theselisted forces into more easily absorbable concepts, with the goalof providing a clearer line of sight to how to achieve and sustainhigher 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 multiplestakeholder groups is absolutely critical in order to betterguarantee member adoption and participation in changing theiroverall well-being.

You should begin with the C-suite and gather their input on whatthey want the program to achieve. These will represent your highestlevel goals. You will also need to ensure these individuals arewilling to lead by example and become vocal and participatoryproponents of the company’s wellbeing engagement. This gives you asthe program administrator/manager a lot of credibility as you moveto the next step of incorporating additional stakeholders, who inconcert with your C-suite champions, will help craft, refine andpush the program messaging on a day-to-day basis.

The additional stakeholder members should incorporaterepresentatives from every department and ensure representationfrom leadership, management, and line-staff. This broadcross-section will provide your program the broadest support fromevery peer group throughout the organization.

Noteworthy here is to also ensure that you are recruitingmembers from all fitness states, from the most energetic fitnessfanatic to the person who wants to begin positively changing theirhealth and wellbeing. Your team should be a representative sampleof your population; and consider that you most likely will not haveany difficulty inspiring die-hard exercise fanatics toparticipate.

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

Establish program goals

With endorsement and team composition out of the way, we need toturn our focus to writing your health and wellness plan. This is acritical factor that is easy to overlook in terms of itsimportance. Merely having a health and wellness solution in placedoes not automatically constitute having a plan to drive it,meaning that it is not as easy as activating the program andletting it run on auto-pilot. It has to be actively worked toparameters that your team has memorialized into goals andobjectives.

Think back to your conversations with your chiefs and bringthose goals to the team. Examine ways to operationalize them andincorporate feedback and goals that your team members have, as wellas design capabilities to capture and incorporate directparticipant feedback.

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

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

2. Activity/Incentive, which employs incentives to help driveparticipation

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

Employers can set a multi-year/phase approach to moving from oneplan design to another. Once this is decided, you should definitelyhave sound counsel review the type selected to ensure you aremeeting all related regulatory and compliance requirements and makeadjustments as recommended. This can be done through internal orexternal legal review, as well as, through your broker, if you haveone engaged.

Set an action plan

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

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

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

Partner for success

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

Sourcing a health and wellness technology through a vendorpartnership will likely be cheaper than attempting to build anin-house capability. A key consideration in selecting thebest-suited vendor-partner is how adaptive their solution is andwhether there are any costs associated with driving thatflexibility, e.g. how much administrative control do you have tochange core elements of the member interface? A way to measure thisis to determine exactly how many components of your plan areimmediately met during the vetting process because if you have tomake any adjustments/concessions with the current plan, chances arehigh that it will have difficulty evolving to meet anyto-be-determined future needs.

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

For you to be able to achieve sustainably higher memberengagement rates is that the program has to be 100 percentdesigned, delivered and driven by your unique cultural andorganizational needs. Off-the-shelf health and wellness packaging,through vendor technology or otherwise, will in no way match thetrue needs of your population and fall short of any goals you mayset.