This incentive actually gets workers to stick with a wellness program (Hint: It's not cash)
One thing weighing down the booming $8 billion workplace wellness industry is that many workers opt out of participating in these programs. While a 2017 UnitedHealthcare consumer study found that 70% of companies now offer a workplace wellness program, less than a third of employees are willing to spend more than an hour a day improving their health and well-being, such as cooking healthy meals over getting takeout, or squeezing in the recommended 150 minutes of exercise a week.
And what the researchers found was that while cash was the preferred reward selected by most employees, those who opted for the gift card were 25% more likely to actually complete a wellness challenge compared to the groups who received the cash or the physical gift. The study authors suggested that the gift card hit the “sweet spot” between the fungibility of the cash, which allowed them to treat themselves to whatever they wanted, and the mental separateness from salary that a physical gift gave them. “People keep mental accounts,” wrote David Wood, one of the study’s co-authors, from BYU’s Marriott School of Management. “If you work and make $10, that’s your work money. If you find 10 bucks on the ground, then that’s free money.
Indeed, previous research has questioned the efficacy of workplace wellness programs. Researchers with the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently published a randomized controlled trial of two groups of workers — one population had access to a workplace wellness program, and the other didn’t — in Scientific American. They found that these well-being initiatives “didn’t change employees’ behavior or health care costs in the first year.
They theorized this was because most of the employees who joined the workplace wellness program were already quite healthy, and their health care costs were already low, so there wasn’t much room for improvement. They added that their results also called previous RCTs of workplace wellness studies into question, since these could have suffered a selection bias skewing toward healthier participants who were already well and motivated to participate.
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