The Road to Wellville

Incentives and invitations are the first and perhaps easiest steps for a company to take, but investing for the long haul is critical to achieve real change. It takes time for individuals to internalize new behaviors and affect their own health and, in turn, affect a company’s overall wellness, Anderson says. “For someone to actually quit smoking or start an exercise program requires internal motivation,” he says. “At that point, financial incentives matter a lot less. People have to have high-value reasons—they want to feel better or they want to see their grandchildren grow up.” According to Pronk, that kind of change takes an average of six months.

Companies won’t reach every at-risk employee right away, so they must be prepared to revisit the campaign. “It isn’t a one-year fix and everyone will be healthy next year,” Anderson says. “Most people have to try something multiple times before they can succeed.” One quarter’s focus could be healthy eating; the next, healthy weight, Anderson says. Or an employer might re-energize a walking program by changing the goal: having team competitions where employees log their miles on their own; making time every day for employees to walk the stairs or the corporate grounds; or establishing a motivating mileage goal, such as the distance from your office to New York City.

For employees with several health risks, it’s critical to focus on one thing at a time. “The worst thing you can do is say ‘You’ve got 15 things to do,’” Fink says. Often, emphasizing exercise first is the way to go, because it helps people start feeling better, which in turn prompts them to make other changes. “If someone is a smoker, overweight, and physically inactive, most of the time smoking is not the number-one thing to address, since it’s a really hard habit to break,” Gagne says. “We might say first, ‘Let’s start a walking program.’”

Ka-ching: Measure Results

Andersen Windows will promote the health questionnaire again next fall. “The report will include results from both years so we can track progress year over year,” Lindstrom says. He expects the wellness initiative to save his company millions of dollars in claims through behavior changes and better health care utilization, a savings that will also translate into increased productivity. “To the extent that our employees can help save on health care costs, we improve company performance, so they benefit not only with better health but also in improved profit-sharing and stock prices.”

StayWell’s Anderson says companies will see increased productivity in the form of fewer absences over the first 12 to 18 months of wellness initiatives. Over the long term, they will also see reduced health care costs, disability claims, and workers’ compensation claims. Clinical data indicate that small changes reap big gains. For example, people most at risk for developing diabetes decrease that risk by 58 percent if they lose 7 percent of their body weight (and maintain the lower weight) through diet and exercise. Likewise, for every 1 percent reduction in blood cholesterol or one-point reduction in diastolic blood pressure, the risk of heart attack declines by 2 percent to 3 percent.

Just the Beginning?

Pronk and Anderson hope companies will take this nascent wellness movement and run with it. As a country, “of the 1.9 trillion we spend on health care costs, less than a percent of that is spent on protecting health and preventing illness,” Pronk says. A better balance, he suggests, would be a 20 percent allocation for prevention.

What should businesses’ share of that be? Anderson estimates that companies are spending close to $7,000 annually per employee on medical care, but less than 1 percent of that—$35 to $50 a year—on wellness. To dramatically slow the rise of costs, he estimates they’ll need to spend two to three times that amount. In the long term, he says, companies should plan to invest up to 5 percent of medical spending in wellness. “We’re going to need to be investing in proven programs somewhere at that level if we want to have an impact on costs.”