Compensation & Benefits: Wellness Programs Aren’t Living Up to Their Promise

There is now near universal commitment from senior managers across industries and parts of the world to the benefits of employee “wellness” programs.

The idea of wellness goes beyond ensuring employees are physically healthy and that they are able to manage their diet and exercise (all important factors that lead to an engaged and productive workforce), and also provides support to help them with the finances and their emotional and mental health too.

Of all initiatives that total rewards teams (those responsible for employee compensation and benefits) are responsible for, wellness was the one most commonly earmarked for more investment in the past 12 months. This is backed up by a recent survey from Willis Towers Watson which itself is the latest in a flurry of findings over the past year showing that firms are placing increasing emphasis on employee wellbeing.

Among the Willis Towers Watson findings — based on responses from over 1,600 different employers across the US, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia — is the statistic that 98% of organizations are committed to health and productivity improvement for their workforces in the years ahead, and health and productivity are core components of 90% of organizations’ overall health strategies.

Wellness Programs Not Working Well

All this emphasis on wellness programs is certainly appreciated by employees. A CEB survey of nearly 10,000 of them from 24 different countries shows that “wellness benefits” are nearly twice as valuable to employees as many other rewards offerings, including a 5% increase in base pay, or major changes to short-term incentive attributes. Furthermore, employees today place almost equal weight on emotional and even financial wellbeing offerings as they do on the more traditional physical wellness programs.

But even though there’s so much agreement on the value of wellbeing programs between both employees and employers, there is a lot less activity. Benefits managers in CEB’s professional network say that wellbeing initiatives have not achieved the results they had hoped for.

More data from the Willis Towers Watson survey showed a dearth of employee participation in wellness programs (only 38% participated in a wellbeing activity or health-related management program during the last year), and a lack of wellbeing-directed resources (41% of organizations say a lack of budget and staff, and a “fragmented” delivery program, hamper their approach to workforce health and productivity).

Two Ways to Improve Wellness Programs

Those running wellness programs should take two steps to make them more appealing to employees and increase participation in something so many employees say they want.

Firstly, increase participation in wellness programs, benefits managers should assess their HR and total rewards strategies, employees’ specific needs, and progressive practices today to develop an aligned wellbeing vision and program streams, and programs to prioritize. CEB Total Rewards Leadership Council members should look at the “Wellvolution” strategy that Blue Shield of California uses. The case study shows how the organization uses and then revisits this approach to continuously realign the wellbeing offering over time.

Secondly, companies can make the most of lean resources and simultaneously maximize the local relevance of wellbeing programs by dividing program ownership and delivery between global and local teams. Tau Company (a pseudonym) did this, creating global standards and encouraging local teams to tailor programs to be most relevant to their specific communities.

By dividing responsibility, central teams can then focus on creating efficiencies from the scale of working globally and helping teams in different locations share best practices.

Pursuing the right vision and programs, and dividing delivery responsibilities, total rewards teams can achieve their ambitious goals for wellbeing and meet employees’ needs.