9 Ways to Promote Workplace Wellness for Increased Productivity

In a world where business owners, HR directors, and office managers are competing with other businesses to attract a talented workforce, providing your employees with enhanced workplace wellness benefits can give you an advantage over the competition by improving your recruiting efforts while increasing the productivity, efficiency and satisfaction of your existing employees at the same time.

Designing an effective, competitive employee benefits package is more complicated than ever.
For many companies, providing coverage for employee healthcare is taking an ever bigger slice of the benefits pie as healthcare costs continue to rise for treating the top health threats facing Americans — heart disease, cancer, unintentional injuries, chronic lower respiratory disease, stroke and Alzheimer's disease.

Prevention of these expensive conditions in the first place can help drive down healthcare costs significantly. For example, there is conclusive medical evidence that controlling one's body weight can help prevent type II diabetes, which in turn greatly reduces the risk of cardiovascular health problems — including heart attack and stroke. Smoking cessation programs also reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke — as well as lowering the chances of developing lung cancer.

Reducing these major causes of mortality – e.g. heart disease, stroke, and cancer – through wellness prevention programs can really start to bend the healthcare cost curve downwards. To accelerate this change, healthcare payers (e.g. private insurers and government agencies) are beginning to change reimbursement programs for healthcare providers (e.g. hospitals and doctors) away from a traditional fee-for-service reimbursement model toward compensation based on successful patient outcomes.

Employers are doing their part to drive down healthcare costs as well. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) 2015 Employee Benefits Report, providing robust wellness benefits for employees has gone fully mainstream.

Let's take a look at some of the top trends for promoting wellness in the workplace.

Trend 1: Wellness Benefits becoming part of Traditional Health Care
According to SHRM, more than 80% of employers provide traditional employee health care coverage, including dental, prescription drugs, mental health, vision, and even chiropractic coverage. A minority of employers also provide coverage for acupuncture, laser vision correction, elective procedures and alternative medicine.

More than half of the employers surveyed offer wellness resources, including seasonal flu vaccinations and 24-hour nurse lines.

A minority of businesses offer their employees wellness health screening programs (including programs targeting chronic health conditions), paid sick leave, health fairs, and on-site sick rooms.

We've written before about how some medical experts have coined the phrase "sitting is the new smoking." According to the SHRM survey, one-quarter of employers reports that they now pay for their employees to acquire and use a Sit-to-Stand desk. (If you need to learn more about our line of Sit-to-Stand desks, check out this article which shows how they can help prevent lower back pain compared to traditional desks.)

Less than 10% of surveyed employers are providing coverage for experimental drug treatments. However, we feel that genomic personalized medicine is a trend that will become more prevalent as genetic tests for diseases – like cancer – become more common.

How individual employees pay for their medical coverage varies quite a bit. Over half of the employers provide flexible spending accounts, while a lower percentage offer health savings accounts, which allow employees to set aside pretax income to pay for medical expenses such as co-pays or other non-covered items.

Trend 2: Personalized Coaching and Fitness Programs to Encourage Healthy Lifestyle Changes
Nearly half of the employers in the SHRM survey report that they offer health and lifestyle coaching.

About one third offer a subsidy or partial reimbursement for attending a fitness center, and another 21% provide a fitness center on site for their employees to use.

Some employers are able to provide paid hours for their employees to participate in fitness programs, ranging from self-defense training to yoga classes (for improved posture and flexibility as well as stress management) to on-site Zumba sessions (high-intensity aerobic workouts).

Trend 3: Incentives can play a big role in encouraging healthy lifestyle changes.
In order to drive down healthcare costs, employers have turned to incentives to encourage their workers to participate in wellness programs.

40% reported they are offering rewards or bonuses for successfully completing health and wellness programs. A minority of employers are also providing discounts on health care premiums when employees get an annual health risk assessment or participate in wellness programs.

Many employers offer smoking cessation with healthcare premium discounts for those employees who participate.

Some companies are also providing fitness bands or activity trackers so that employees can monitor their physical activity throughout the day; often these are combined with company organized fitness competitions and challenges that offer prizes and/or bragging rights to encourage participation.

About a third of employers offer a weight loss program, and some also offer discounts on healthcare premiums for participation. Weight loss surgery is also offered by about one-third of employers according to the survey.

Trend 4: Don't Overlook the Wellness Benefits of Providing Good Nutrition
The vast majority of employers offer a break-room with a kitchenette for their workers.

More than half offer free coffee, but only a small portion offer subsidized snacks and beverages or full meals at an on-site cafeteria.

About 20% of employers are offering nutritional counseling...

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This release was published on openPR.