Over the last 18 months, I’ve witnessed the wellness company identification and selection processes for more than 500 employers, representing more than 1,000,000 employee lives. The business that I started two years ago was built for exactly this purpose — to find the optimal wellness company for the unique goals and strategic objectives of an employer.

Based on the need for such a resource in today’s wellness marketplace, neither the volume of searches run through the Wellness Navigator nor the 1,000,000+ lives searched through the platform has come as a surprise. What has been a surprise however, are the purchasing trends we’ve begun to identify. My hope in sharing these insights is to help employers find the optimal wellness company for their needs, whether they’re starting their first wellness initiative or enhancing the resources of a program they’ve had for many years.

No silver bullet

The first thing to realize when implementing a wellness program is that you’re not going to snap your fingers (or pay a wellness company) and all of a sudden have healthy, engaged and productive employees. To successfully provide a wellness offering to your employees, you have to start by defining what success means to your company.

Are you offering a program to decrease absenteeism? Do you want to make your employees feel more cared for and promote employee engagement? Are you trying to slow the growth of your rapidly increasing health care costs? It is important to share this goal with all stakeholders involved in the process to ensure everyone is aligned in the mission. This includes vendors, consultants and most importantly, your employees.

Once you’ve decided why wellness is important to your organization, you'll have to come to terms with another reality; wellness isn’t simple. Empowering employees to change the behaviors that have created poor health, financial stress and unhappiness, cannot be accomplished overnight.

Time after time, I’ve seen an employer implement a simple wellness initiative, say biometric screenings and health risk assessments, with the thought that this step alone will make its employees healthier. They didn’t think that they would need to ingrain the “why” behind this strategic initiative at all levels of their organization and culture.

Employees don’t need a survey and a blood test to know they are overweight and unhappy. These tools can however be an important data gathering component to a properly designed wellness program, allowing an employer to identify areas to devote future resources and provide a means for measuring progress over time.

Read: 5 ways to encourage healthy workplace living

Apples or oranges?

Beyond the lack of a strategic plan around the welfare of their employees, the single biggest surprise that I have seen in the wellness company selection process is that most employers are strongly in favor of ”one stop shopping.”

Less than 10 percent of searches we’ve seen are for “supplementary” wellness programs such as tobacco cessation, stress management, diabetes management and financial wellbeing. These programs are often provided as a supplement to the employer’s core wellness offering and run through a separate third-party vendor. The data is indicating that employers want to limit the number of vendors they need to manage and this is creating an interesting dynamic in the wellness marketplace.

The “one stop shop” preference can drive the employer to select a “generalist” wellness company, who does a fair job of providing a wide range of services, as opposed to piecing together a group of specialist partners. In many cases, the generalists are not the best option to enact true behavior change within a population, but can be very good at coordinating the effort.

Once problems are identified (high prevalence of smokers, many diabetics, high incidence of depression, absenteeism, presenteeism, etc.), you want to engage the best wellness companies in each of those areas to support your employee population. The process is similar to the way your primary care physician would refer you to a specialist for a heart condition, but remains the vital advisor that coordinates these experts and personalizes your care plan.

Some of the most robust programs we’ve seen use their primary wellness company as the central hub to coordinate messaging and incentive design. Around this base, they incorporate specialized wellness companies to engage employees and target specific conditions (tobacco cessation, stress management, diabetes management, financial management).

In response to this buyer preference, wellness companies are evolving. You see more wellness companies taking the “hub and spoke” approach and making a concerted effort to identify the best strategic partners in services areas that are not their core competencies.

Driven by technology and the open API culture that we are living in today, there’s a greater ability to incorporate specialists into a program, while driving better outcomes for the employer. This also is leading to a groundswell of merger and acquisition activity in the space, which like the insurer space, is ripe for consolidation.

We’re seeing an influx of requests from wellness companies, looking for us to help facilitate strategic introductions to complimentary wellness partners. The product of these partnerships is providing many new and exciting “one stop solutions” in a quickly evolving market.

When you are looking for the perfect wellness company to partner with, decide what you want your wellness program to be and then understand that the partner you choose partner will have strengths and weaknesses. Don’t be afraid to work with them to identify other complimentary wellness companies that can shore up any weaknesses they may have. The health and productivity of your employees is worth the extra effort.

Instant Insights /

What to consider before starting a wellness program

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