Time for a Wellness Program Check-up

How well do you feel today? Is your health satisfactory or is it time to take a few days off?

Employers have tried to eliminate their spending on health care and increase their productivity by encouraging their workers to stay healthy by adapting wellness programs.

Although this new trend has swept the nation, only 37 percent of employers take the time to measure the success of these initiatives.  Measuring the effect of these wellness programs might be a good idea for everyone.  Perhaps, there are some adjustments in these programs that could be made for employees to get the health care that they need and employers to feel that the money is going to be well-utilized when they sign hefty checks for these programs.

In 2011, HR professionals can expect increased emphasis on finding ways to analyze the financial effectiveness of these wellness programs and what these programs have really meant for their recipients. The difficulty in analyzing HR programs such as wellness plans is that their results are not routinely monitored. Some HR departments have used self-reporting from their employees along with metrics from leave balances to determine the efficacy of wellness programs. However, most have left the program unchecked, and the programs therefore become viewed as a cost and not a benefit. With proper analysis, wellness programs have been shown to provide significant cost reductions. If you run a wellness program without analyzing the results, expect to be soon challenged to justify its cost.