Worksite Wellness 101 for Small Businesses

Small businesses make 2 big mistakes with workplace wellness:

1. They don’t do anything at all
2. They go overboard and make their employees hate wellness

 

A better strategy for small employers is to start small and ease your way into wellness.  Just as a baby has to crawl before they walk, you have to get your employees to buy-in to small changes before you make significant changes.

 

Here are 4 tips to get your small business started with workplace wellness:

 

1) Review your health insurance carrier’s wellness tools

 

Every major health insurance carrier offers wellness tools for you and your employees as a part of your premium.  In fact, you’re paying for wellness tools through your premiums so you’re losing money if you aren’t using them.

 

As the owner or administrator for your small businesses health plan, you should have an employer login and an employee login.  The best way to familiarize yourself with the carrier tools is to login to their website and look around, both as the employer and the employee.

 

Start by logging in as the employer and see what kind of wellness tools they have for you as the employer.  Here, you’ll find educational materials, flyers, email templates, campaigns, and calendar tools to help you decide what to do as a company and administer the process.

 

Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the employer portal, log in as an employee.  Look around at the tools available so you can talk with your employees about the options they have.  Then decide where you want to start as a company.

 

Personally, I’ve always been a fan of “step” programs where employees are challenged to see who takes the most steps every week.  Amazon has numerous pedometers ranging from $5 to $30 each.  Many health insurance carriers will even give you a discount on devices like Fitbits.   Fitbit even has employer specific packages to help employers administer such programs.

 

Step programs are fun, low stress, and it helps employees remember to get up and move around during the day.  This can help with body weight issues as well as back, knee and other pains.

 

 

2) Let the employees get the benefit from their efforts

 

Today, health insurance carriers are offering premium discounts for employees achieving certain milestones.  These are all “task-based” milestones.  Essentially, you get points for doing certain health-related activities and once those point accumulate to certain milestone levels employees can get a discount on their health insurance premiums.

 

Occasionally, an employer will ask, “do I have to give that money to the employee?”  To which I’ll answer, “Only if you want this to be successful.”

 

I advise my client to set their contribution amount on the lowest discount level and leave it to the employee to earn lower premiums.  For example, Humana will discount premiums by 7% for reaching silver level and 15% for reaching platinum status.

 

Silver level is very achievable and everyone should achieve it.  So, if one of my clients pays 100% of the employee premiums, I will suggest that they only pay 93%.  Then we’ll educate the employee on how they can reach silver level status and get their insurance for free.  Depending on participation, I’ll then recommend, we set the employer contribution to 85% and further push the employees to reach for platinum status.

 

But under no circumstances, should you ask your employees to get involved with wellness, then keep the premium breaks for yourself.  You’ll get your part as the premiums stop increasing so quickly years down the road.

 

 

3) Track and measure your results

 

Measuring progress is essential to reaching any goal.  Specific key performance indicators for small business wellness plans include:

• Number of employees to registered on the website
• Number of employees to reached silver level (or similar) status
• Work attendance numbers before and after the wellness program began

 

Another KPI would be to listen to your employees for feedback and get a sense for how they like and are using the wellness tools.

 

20% of your employees are already health conscious.   These folks aren’t putting much stress on your healthcare premiums.  While we absolutely wan them to participate, they aren’t who we are most focussed on.

 

The people I’m most concerned about are the middle 60%.  How are they responding?  These are the employees that the bottom 20% will feel most comfortable following.  If one of these 60% employees finds out something life changing, the high utilizers in the bottom 20% are most likely to follow their lead.

 

The bottom 20% will hate anything you do and reject any wellness efforts when you begin to push wellness.  They will have a lot of excuses.  This group is probably also driving 80% of your claims.  Don’t give up on them.  The 60% group above will do a better job of motivating them to participate than you.  Advertise any kind of successes from specific members of the 60% crowd.

 

4) Look for ways to expand and improve

 

Once you see some success from your efforts, make small changes every year.  Eventually, you’ll have a robust wellness program and a population that’s healthier than average.  This is where you start to see long-term premium savings.

 

A few ideas for wellness expansion:

• Include dependents in your wellness initiatives
• Make it difficult for employees to smoke
• Make it easy for employees to eat healthy snacks
• Consider on-site biometric screening

 

 

Final Thoughts

 

Worksite wellness is not about turning average Joes into triathletes.  It’s about helping your employees make small lifestyle changes that lead to improvements in their health, well-being and life.

 

The best thing anyone ever told me about wellness was “It’s not about lowering premiums, it’s about helping people hang around long enough and being healthy enough to fully enjoy their grandchildren.”

 

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