Comprehensive Wellness Programs and Why they WORK

Wellness programs are a great way to increase health awareness among your employees. There are many great companies out there that can provide health assessments, life health consultations, and overall benefits management. They offer great tools that can help keep the healthy people healthy and assist the unhealthy towards moving in the right direction of health. 

A great tool to help your employees track their health is the American Heart Association's Heart360 Program. https://www.heart360.org/Default.aspx

Here your employees can track blood pressure, blood glucose, physical activity, smoking cessation, and weight management.  There are reporting capabilities here that you could instill in your employees and have them report their progress to you.  In order to encourage participation and create the most promising results, incentives are always vital to the success of a program like this. 

A great system that has worked for one of our clients is using this reporting system for their employees. Each month the employee tracks their activity and the client reports this activity to us at Bukoo to load the points into the system. The points they earned during the month turn into buying power for items on their customized rewards site.

Other options are to seek out agreements with local gyms for your employees if you do not have the budget or space to put a gym in your office or on your campus to promote physical activity.  Bring out the competitive side of your employees by holding a contest for who can lose the most percentage of their body weight over a given period of time. However you choose to implement a program, know that it is a great investment of resources and you will save in healthcare costs, and maybe even save a life. 

Pump People up with Incentives!!!

Everything that we do in life has an incentive attached to it. If we get up in the morning and go to work, we make money. Money buys things like food, a roof over our heads, and clothes among other things (iPhones?) So the incentive is to be able to have things to get up and go to work.  Once we are at work, we do our jobs. How well do we do our jobs? Some of us would say enough to not get fired.  If you are an employer, this is not something you are looking to hear from your employees. You want to hear from them, "I do my job to the best of my ability, 40 hours a week, or more! Without additional pay because I love my job so much I don't care!" This however, is highly unlikely.  For many, not all, but many people, an additional incentive is needed to achieve maximum productivity.  I'm going to tell you how you can pump up productivity with an incentive program. 

 Incentives are a great tool to encourage the behaviors that promote the most successful results for your business. Are you having trouble getting reports from your employees on time? Give an incentive for turning them in early.  Too many production errors in printing or manufacturing? Give an incentive for catches or doing a job perfectly.  Anything that you need to improve in the office, warehouse, store, etc. can be promoted through the use of incentives.  While we would all like to think that we can see the greater good of our actions, most people are very short-sighted, and selfish, in how much work they do and why. It is simply human nature.  A way to circumvent the negativity in a workplace associated with this intrinsic behavior is to give extrinsic motivation. Tie an incentive to an action that will reach into your employee and pull out productivity.  

A great way to give value to the behaviors you need from your employees is a points program.  By associating points with behaviors, your employees can watch these points build up in order to redeem them for products they want.  For instance, if you give an employee 50 points every time they turn in a report on time and they want a product that is listed at 500 points, this means that you will get AT LEAST 10 reports from them on time.  Their behavior will reflect their desire for that product which will positively impact the company's bottom line.  

This 3 element approach is very effective because the employee gets immediate recognition by acquiring hte points, short term rewards if they choose to redeem quickly and long-term awards in which they will see their hard and timely work prosper into bigger ticket items if they choose to accumulate their points.  For more information about incentive programs and the steps to implementing a process with worthwhile products go to our web page all about incentives.