Should we incentivise workplace wellness?
There’s no doubt that incentives work in many areas of business, but can they work when it comes to making progress with employee wellness? The potential success of any incentives lies with the keyword, ‘appropriate’ so when it comes to improving the wellness of your staff, what kind of incentives should you consider?
Creating the right environment for wellness
The key to helping staff towards success with wellness is to create an environment where they feel comfortable taking responsibility for themselves, and wellness becomes something they want to get involved in, not something they feel they are being pressured to become involved in.
Think about the audience
In the same way that some people achieve fantastic wellness results by going to the gym, while others wouldn’t be seen anywhere close to a health club, some incentive schemes will attract and excite while others will leave staff cold. It’s important that you consider how your chosen incentives could inspire as wide an audience as possible.
Some offices are competitive and in many cases you can use competitions and the associated rewards to your advantage. All you need to do is include a prize or incentive for participation in wellness activities and you create a stampede amongst those who love to win, sometimes regardless of the nature of the competition or wellness initiative it relates to. Other organisational cultures contain fewer competitive individuals and so may benefit more from a team challenge, which feels as though it is more accessible to a wider audience and more inclusive.
Is it right to incentivise employee wellness
But, if you choose to incentivise wellness with prizes, what can you offer that will capture the imagination of your staff? Money? Treats? Time off? Any of these options could become expensive and what happens if you decide you no longer want to allocate so much budget to the incentives? Would people still pay attention to the wellness programme? Herein lies the problem. If you do decide to incentivise your wellness programme, don’t you run the risk of artificially propping up the success of your initiatives?
Some may argue that it’s results that count, and whether your wellness programme works because it has the best initiatives or the best incentives is irrelevant as long as it looks like it’s working. The results however need to be assessed over the longer term and when it comes to incentives, there aren’t many that will help staff maintain good results with wellness beyond the life of the incentives.
Arguably, there isn’t an incentive you could come up with that would guarantee long-term behaviour change. Even the most motivating wellness incentives such as an impending wedding or the £25,000 prize that Body for Life offer every year hit the buffers if they are not underpinned by the basic desire to look after one’s own wellness now and for the long-term simply because it underpins good energy and personal effectiveness, and because you want to.
Encourage personal responsibility in 5 steps
The only thing that will truly achieve this long-term success is an individual desire to continue experiencing the positivity, confidence and enjoyment that comes with taking responsibility for looking after yourself and your wellness. To encourage this personal responsibility and motivation among your staff, follow this 5-step plan:
- Pick a team wellness challenge that you know will appeal to the maximum number of people and that is easy for everyone to participate in without interrupting their routine. Communicate the incentives for participation.
- Let it be known this is a fixed term event and that during the event you will be offering staff access to a range of resources that will enable them to achieve their best individual and team results.
- Make sure that you do offer these resources.
- Calculate the winners, award prizes and publicise the results.
- Analyse which resources were most popular during the event and look to incorporate these in your future wellness programme.
Following this template will mean that you encourage participation by those who are already motivated when it comes to wellness, as well as those who are thinking about taking steps but haven’t done much yet. As these groups get stuck into the challenge you’ll also pick up other participants who like the look of what they see around them – people taking part, talking positively about the challenge and experiencing real benefits from getting involved.
About Author: Jeff Archer is Director of The Tonic, a corporate wellness company specialising in helping people achieve optimum energy and performance, every day.
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