A Review of Employee Health and Wellness Programs in the United States (original) (raw)
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Corporate Wellness Programs: Implementation Challenges in the Modern American Workplace
2013
Being healthy is important for living well and achieving longevity. In the business realm, furthermore, employers want healthy employees, as these workers tend to be more productive, have fewer rates of absenteeism, and use less of their health insurance resources. This article provides an overview of corporate “wellness” efforts in the American workplace and the concomitant challenges which employers will confront in implementing these programs. Consequently, employers and managers must reflect upon wellness policies and objectives, consult with professionals, and discuss the ramifications thereof prior to implementation. The authors herein explore how employers are implementing policies that provide incentives to employees who lead “healthy” lifestyles as well as ones that impose costs on employees who lead “unhealthy” lifestyles. The distinctive contribution of this article is that it proactively explores wellness program implementation challenges and also supplies “best practices” in the modern workplace, so employers can be better prepared when they promulgate wellness policies, and then take practical steps to help their employees become healthier and thereby help to reduce insurance costs. The article, moreover, addresses how wellness policy incentives—in the form of “carrots” as well as penalties—in the form of “sticks” could affect employees, especially “non-healthy” employees, as well as employers, particularly legally. Based on the aforementioned challenges, the authors make practical recommendations for employers and managers, so that they can fashion and implement wellness policies that are deemed to be legal, ethical, and efficacious.
Workplace Wellness Programs: Services Offered, Participation, and Incentives
Rand health quarterly, 2015
This article leverages existing data on wellness programs to explore patterns of wellness program availability, employers' use of incentives, and program participation and utilization among employees. Researchers used two sets of data for this project: The first included data from the 2012 RAND Employer Survey, which used a nationally representative sample of U.S. employers that had detailed information on wellness program offerings, program uptake, incentive use, and employer characteristics. These data were used to answer questions on program availability, configuration, uptake, and incentive use. The second dataset included health care claims and wellness program information for a large employer. These data were analyzed to predict program participation and changes in utilization and health. The findings underscore the increasing prevalence of worksite wellness programs. About four-fifths of all U.S. employers with more than 1,000 employees are estimated to offer such program...
Wellness Programs in the Workplace: An Unfolding Legal Quandary for Employers
2014
This article is a legal and ethical examination of "wellness" policies in the American workplace. The authors will examine how employers are implementing policies that provide incentives to employees who lead a "healthy" lifestyle. The authors also address how these policies could adversely affect "non-healthy" employees. There are a wide variety of lawsfederal and statestatutory and common lawthat impact wellness policies and practices in the workplace. The authors review these laws in the context of wellness policies to ascertain when these policies could result in legal violations of employees' rights. The authors, moreover, provide an ethical analysis of wellness policies, based on major ethical theories, to determine the morality of wellness policies in the workplace. Based on the aforementioned legal and ethical analysis, the authors make practical recommendations for employers and managers.
Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 2011
Objective: To assess long-term changes in health risks for employees participating in Vanderbilt University's incentive-based worksite wellness program. Methods: Descriptive longitudinal trends were examined for employees' health risk profiles for the period of 2003 to 2009. Results: The majority of risk factors improved over time with the most consistent change occurring in physical activity. The proportion of employees exercising one or more days per week increased from 72.7% in 2003 to 83.4% in 2009. Positive annual, monotonic changes were also observed in percentage for nonsmokers and seat belt usage. Although the largest improvements occurred between the first two years, improvements continued without significant regression toward baseline. Conclusions: This 7-year evaluation, with high participation and large sample size, provides robust estimates of health improvements that can be achieved through a voluntary incentive-based wellness program. From Health & Wellness, Division of Administration (
Health Promotion Practice, 2018
Background. Many employers now incentivize employees to engage in wellness programs, yet few studies have examined differences in preferences for incentivizing participation in healthy behaviors and wellness programs. Method. We surveyed 2,436 employees of a large university about their preferences for incentivizing participation in different types of healthy behaviors and then used multivariable logistic regression to estimate associations between employees’ socioeconomic and demographic characteristics and their preferences for incentives for engaging in healthy behaviors. Results. Compared with nonunion members, union members had higher odds of wanting an incentive for eating healthily (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 1.60, 95% [CI; 1.21, 2.12]), managing weight (AOR = 1.53, 95% CI [1.14, 2.06]), avoiding drinking too much alcohol (AOR = 1.41, 95% CI [1.11, 1.78]), quitting tobacco (AOR = 1.37, 95% CI [1.06, 1.77]), managing stress (AOR = 1.37, 95% CI [1.08, 1.75]), and managing back...
Health and Wellness Programs: Why Employees Don't Participate
2019
Excerpt] Eighty-five percent of large firms and 58 percent of small ones currently offer at least one program to promote health and wellness (H&W) among employees. Usually these have the twin goals of reducing companies’ healthcare costs while improving the quality of employees’ lives. Research shows that well-designed programs often attain both goals. But even the best of them frequently experience low participation rates, particularly among employees who are most likely to benefit from taking part. Why is this? More specifically, what factors do employees see as the major barriers impeding their participation in these types of programs? This study provides some answers to these questions. It is the first step in a larger research effort to identify interventions that are – and just as important are not – successful in overcoming barriers to participation in H&W programs. The study is taking place in a Fortune 500 company. The present analysis focuses on data provided by 3,000 of t...
A Parcourse for Health Promotion Programs in the Workplace
Springer eBooks, 1989
Over time, there has been a steady increase of workplace health promotion programs that aim to promote employees' health and fitness. Previous research has focused on such program's effectiveness, cost-savings, and barriers to engaging in workplace health promotion. The present research focuses on a downside of workplace health promotion programs that to date has not been examined before, namely the possibility that they, due to a focus on individual responsibility for one's health, inadvertently facilitate stigmatization and discrimination of people with overweight in the workplace. Study 1 shows that the presence of workplace health promotion programs is associated with increased attributions of weight controllability. Study 2 experimentally demonstrates that workplace health promotion programs emphasizing individual rather than organizational responsibility elicit weight stigma. Study 3, which was pre-registered, showed that workplace health promotion programs emphasizing individual responsibility induced weight-based discrimination in the context of promotion decisions in the workplace. Moreover, focusing on people with obesity who frequently experience weight stigma and discrimination, Study 3 showed that workplace health promotion programs highlighting individual responsibility induced employees with obesity to feel individually responsible for their health, but at the same time made them perceive weight as less controllable. Together, our research identifies workplace health promotion programs as potent catalysts of weight stigma and weight-based discrimination, especially when they emphasize individual responsibility for health outcomes. As such, we offer valuable insights for organizations who aim to design and implement workplace health promotion programs in an inclusive, non-discriminatory way that benefits all employees.
Workplace Wellness Programs: Empirical Doubt, Legal Ambiguity, and Conceptual Confusion
Health Economics eJournal, 2019
Federal laws that protect workers from insurance discrimination and infringement of health privacy include exceptions for wellness programs that are ‘voluntary’ and ‘reasonably designed’ to improve health. Initially, these exceptions were intended to give employers the flexibility to create innovative wellness programs that would appeal to workers, increase productivity, and protect the workforce from preventable health conditions. Yet a detailed look at the scientific literature reveals that wellness program efficacy is quite disputed, and even highly touted examples of program success have been shown to be unreliable. Meanwhile, the latest administrative regulations on wellness programs were vacated by a district court in January, leaving the legal scope of wellness programs in flux. The U.S. District Court of Connecticut now has a case before it that could start a national overhaul of these programs. In this article we give a scientific and legal overview of wellness programs, an...