Gina Payne, CBIZ

Contributed by Gina Payne, national director of wellness, CBIZ Benefits & Insurance Services, Inc., Leawood, KS

What do you consider to be best practices for wellness programs in small to medium size businesses?

Gina Payne: Best practices would be to create a culture of health at your workplace.  This could be done by doing the following:

• Adopting into the mission and vision of the business, a commitment to the wellbeing of its employees
• Top leaders of the business (President, CEO or business owner) participating themselves in the wellness program
• Regular and frequent communication from management that they care about the health and welfare of their staff
• Embed discussion of the importance of wellness and available wellness activities in staff meetings and in all-company business review meetings
• Make sure the workplace policies and practices support a culture of health with respect to time off, flexible work schedules
• Ensure the work environment supports a culture of health – stairwells clean, bright and welcoming, bike rack, workout/equipment room, showers/lockers, walking path
• Serve health food options in vending machines and at company sponsored meetings and events, hold a ‘farmers’ market’ on your campus once a week
• Adopt a three year strategic plan for accomplishing your wellness goals along with a scorecard that measures your success
• Provide employees with the ability to take a health risk assessment and biometric screenings
• Adopt a no smoking policy
• Encourage all employees to get their annual routine physical and preventive screenings (incentivize these activities)
• Utilize free or low cost programs available in the community and online (YMCA classes, community classes offered by local medical centers, American Cancer Society’s tobacco cessation program, etc.) for these primary areas:  exercise, health eating (nutrition), weight loss and tobacco cessation; if possible, include stress/resiliency training, depression/anxiety management, financial health course
• Exercise as a company – create groups, teams, take time out during the day (or extended lunch hour) to exercise, participate in community sponsored 5Ks
• Utilize social media and technology to provide wellness activities, events, and peer to peer bonding, encouragement and support for each other (there are free sites available to do this)

What are the best strategies to increase employee participation in wellness initiatives?

Gina Payne: The best strategies includes the use of both external and intrinsic motivation.  It is critical that employees are motivated so participation stays strong long term, and further, moves to improvements and achievement of desired outcomes.  An incentive’s purpose is to get employees to participate in the wellness intervention.  Incentives need to have a total monetary value of at least $300 annually and can be comprised of an array of different types (cash, premium contribution discount, bicycle, workout equipment, giftcards, t-shirts, etc.)  The most influential at the current time appears to be a premium contribution reduction.

Once participation is achieved,  the program needs to move beyond ‘compliance’ to ‘engagement’ to motivate a long term behavior change.  The importance of engagement is that it creates employees who are self-directed and responsible for making the choices that improve their own health status.  Engagement results from the application of principles from behavior change theories to provide individual intervention, coaching and counseling, coupled with the creation of  intrinsic motivation. Behavior is situational; if you want to change behavior, change the situation.

How do you get people to put in the energy to change their situation when a lot of them don’t want to do it?

Gina Payne:

• Give people new experiences that end up being motivating because people find them emotionally meaningful relative to their values and their ability to fulfill them
• Engagement and health improvement happen as a result of a participant making an emotional connection to the concept.  Engagement is strongly influenced by role models, the right leadership messages, and working daily in a culture of health.

A change leader is needed to start the process of creating intrinsic motivation:

• A process leader must assertively start it
• Start by giving people the new experience to do and build on it
• In the ‘doing’ focus on developing skills (the ‘how to’, not ‘the what’)
• Acquisition of skills increases clarity
• New experiences, skills and clarity stirs intrinsic motivation
• Intrinsically meaningful experiences equals engagement/ownership
• ‘Doing’ together with others generates shared ownership (peer culture sustains)