The wellness industry is shifting. Just a few years ago, corporations were eager to pay their employees to participate in Health Risk Assessments (HRAs) or other wellness-related activities. While the practice is still quite common today, most employers are realizing that if you have to pay people to do something, it probably means that your offer isn’t that exciting. Studies have shown that extrinsic rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation. Not to mention that participation rates decrease significantly if budget cuts reduce or eliminate the incentive. We’re all familiar with these trends.
Since people are coming to consensus on discontinuing financial incentives for wellness participation, the industry is now looking for the next best thing to explore.
I recently attended a WellSteps webinar exploring future trends in the wellness industry. One of the panelists, someone with a big impressive title whom I won’t name here to protect the (not so) innocent, shared his vision that wellness programs would become so exciting “that employees may pay us for the privilege to participate.”
I find this idea incredibly inspiring and totally odious at the same time.
Incredibly Inspiring
If we wanted people to pay for our wellness programs, we’d have to imagine and create the Disney World of wellness. What would that look like? How could we make the experience so magical that people would talk about each campaign for years to come? Instead of applying our creativity to schemes to entice people to participate, imagine devoting our full attention to designing programs so uplifting and effective that we’d have to plan for ways to give everyone a chance to participate, because demand would exceed supply.
Wow! That’d be extremely exciting. But of course, that’s not the whole story.
Totally Odious
If people have to pay to participate in worksite wellness, then participation would be more accessible to those who have more disposable income. Employees in lesser paying jobs would lose out – again. People “in lower social-class positions have higher rates of illness and death from virtually every disease,” says University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health Leonard Syme. Strategies disqualifying those who need our services the most are certainly not ideal.
It gets worse. If you’ve read our book, then you know that better sleep, food, mood and exercise habits all help improve productivity. Sufficient sleep improves memory, decision making, and resilience. Healthy food boosts mood and energy. A good mood improves our creativity and immune function. Exercise improves learning capacity, stress management, and self-esteem. Eliminating the less remunerated employees from wellness would make it that much harder for them to break through the glass ceiling.
For those who may think that survival of the fittest has been the way for thousands of years and that today’s poor are no exception to the rule, consider this: worldwide epidemiological data shows that in developed nations, high social inequality correlates with prevalence of a wide range of health problems. Countries higher on social equality, on the other hand, tend to have less mental and physical illness, less obesity, and greater well-being.
Wellness can act as a good equalizer. Distinctions between CxOs and entry level employees blur when they are sweating in the gym together, participating in a group meditation, or learning about eating for weight management. Let’s keep it that way, and defend our industry against measures that could damage that beneficial effect.
The conclusion is clear: if we want worksite wellness to be truly effective and sustainable, we need to make sure it stays equally available to everyone, regardless of hierarchical rank and social class.
In part 2, we will talk about some better ways to offer worksite wellness plans.