Everyday Wellness LogoEveryday Wellness

Taking Wellness from Blah to Aah

There’s good news and there’s bad news. We don’t want to bring you down, but the bad news is:

  • 71% of men and 62% of women in the U.S. are overweight or obese.1
  • 23% of Americans still smoke. 3,000 start each day.3
  • More than half of Americans are not physically active enough to realize health benefits, and activity levels decline with age.2

If that wasn’t enough to make your jaw drop, chew on this:

  • U.S. health care expenditures have exceeded $2 trillion dollars and costs are escalating at about 6.9% per year.1
  • Inactivity, obesity, and poor nutrition, which can lead to any number of chronic conditions (i.e., heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes), cause 35 – 40% of an organization’s health care expenses.1

The bottom line: Poor lifestyle choices contribute to ballooning health care costs. It’s time to pop the balloon.

This is where the good news comes in. Inactivity, obesity, poor nutrition, and other poor lifestyle choices, such as smoking, are behaviors that are reversible. In fact, change these behaviors and it’s estimated that 70% of an organization’s health care costs are preventable.1

So what’s an employer to do?
Studies by the Centers for Disease Control suggest that worksite wellness programs can help maximize employees’ health and well-being. Research validates the link between a company’s productivity and the health of its employees. It’s common sense—employees are more likely to be on the job and performing well when they are in good health.4

Let’s put it in dollars and sense. Graph
A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report in 2002 revealed that at worksites with physical activity programs, employers have:

  • Reduced health care costs by 20% to 55%
  • Reduced short-term sick leave by 6% to 32%
  • Increased productivity by 2% to 52%

Enough stats and enough talk—It’s time to create a culture of wellness and take a bite out of your costs. At Anderson Performance Improvement, we specialize in behavior-based incentive programs. We create custom programs for our clients that identify desired behaviors and reward for adopting those behaviors and achieving results. Along the way, we motivate, inspire, educate, and engage. Now we’ve translated what we do best into our Everyday Wellness solutions.

With Everyday Wellness, we’ve partnered with the best in the wellness industry to present you with a portfolio of wellness solutions. Our goal is to find the wellness solution that fits your goals and culture. We’ll help you put fun into your program. Guys Having Fun Image

Why Fun?
Wellness programs fail due to lack of participation. People don’t participate because wellness programs typically have not been fun, let alone engaging, motivating or rewarding. Because they are none of these things, there is little follow through. For example, a company last year got 90% of employees to take their health assessment once a year. But only 10% of the employees did anything to positively affect their health or improve any of the areas identified on the assessment. Guardian’s “Spotlight on Group Medical” research report drives this point home. It shows 6 in 10 employees believe workplace wellness programs are a good idea, but only 3 in 10 actually participate.1

NO FUN = NO PARTICIPATION = NO RESULTS

So how do we take a wellness program from Blah to Aah?
We get you and your employees jazzed. According to the 13th Annual National Business Group on Health/Watson Wyatt Employer Survey on Purchasing Value in Healthcare, more than half of all employers use financial incentives to encourage employees to participate in one or more types of health improvement activities, and 24% more plan to do so in 2009.1 This means more and more companies are becoming convinced that wellness works. But, many of these companies are just dabbling in wellness. We don’t dabble, we drive.

Everyday Wellness is about helping all employees—Gen Xers, Gen Yers, Baby Boomers—get healthy, and we know a cookie-cutter approach won’t work. That’s why Everyday Wellness offers a multi-faceted approach with a techie twist. We help you choose a program that’s right for you—one with activities that will get your employees up and moving and challenge them to take daily action to make healthy changes.

We can help you call your employees to action and motivate them to have fun while they’re learning and doing. Then we add a bit of tech. Activities are managed through an interactive secure website, tailored to each employee, that tracks health activities and stats, then awards and tallies points earned toward rewards. Team up your employees to add a little peer pressure and competition, and you will find your entire company buzzing about healthy foods, activities, and weight goals.

Is your wellness program visible at work every day? It could be!
We get whacky. Permission to have fun at work: granted. We have a number of ways to get employees involved and motivated. Maybe it’s accepting a daily challenge. Focusing on weight management, nutrition, physical activity, and stress reduction, the daily challenge is posted on calendars hung in strategic locations, available on the program’s website, or by email alerts.

Daily challenges are thought-provoking, educational, inspirational, and super fun. Maybe it’s taking five minutes to daydream about a special vacation spot, doing leg lifts while on a conference call, duck-walking down the hall, or even bench pressing the copy machine (just kidding on that one). The challenges are appropriate for all employees, and take no more than 5-10 minutes per day.

Or, how about a little fun-loving competition? Programs allow for individuals and teams to compete, or remain anonymous. No one can say we aren’t accommodating!

Employees are encouraged to catch and recognize one another for getting caught in the act of doing something healthy. “Caught” employees receive an Everyday Wellness Card and could earn points they ultimately redeem for cool rewards (more on the reward coolness quotient later).

When all is said and done, we guarantee your employees will learn a little something along the way. Education is the foundation of our programs, and we promise the education will be anything but stuffy. Who doesn’t want to learn something new that has a positive impact on their health and earns them rewards?

Tech-Triffic Tracking
Studies show that the best way to increase activity is to track it. What if your participants could wear a tiny computerized device on their shoe that measures activity duration, steps taken, distance covered, calories burned, and type of activity (walking, running, cycling … )? Take it a step further. What if the device stored all the information until users walk past a wireless receiver installed at the workplace, at which point the data is magically transmitted to the participant’s secure online account? Cool, huh? Talk about motivation in hyper drive!

Know Your Facts
Individuals can log in to the website to see their stats on the Home page. Team stats can be displayed for those who get revved by friendly competition.

We offer “I just gotta have it” rewards.
We want employees to keep their eye on the reward. Research shows that cash rewards just aren’t memorable and have little trophy value. That’s why our catalog features thousands of brand-name, cutting-edge, and just plain cool rewards. From the latest in electronics to the newest trends and everything imaginable in between, there’s something for everyone.

HIGH PARTICIPATION = BEHAVIOR CHANGES = REDUCED RISK FACTORS = LONG-TERM ROI

You care about your employees and their health is important to your company’s long-term health. Get the people excited and massive participation follows, resulting in improvements in healthy choices. This leads not only to improved health, but also to happier employees, stronger camaraderie and morale, fewer sick days, greater productivity, as well as reduced health care costs and a higher retention rate. It’s not rocket science—wellness programs are a win-win situation and organizations can no longer afford not to invest in wellness initiatives.

Still need more convincing?
Consider these case study findings published by the Wellness Council of America:

  • The city of Holland, Michigan has over 85% employee participation in their wellness program and is able to link individual participation to offset the rising cost of health coverage.
  • Johnson & Johnson, a long-time leader in worksite health promotion, indicated a reduction in medical care expenditures of $224.66 per employee, per year.
  • Jackson Kelly, a self insured law firm with 11 offices, attributed a 21% decrease in health insurance premiums in 2005 to their wellness program. The first of their offices to adopt a wellness program reduced its absenteeism by 33% in the first year.
  • Cianbro, an employee-owned open shop general contractor, servicing the Northeast through the Mid-Atlantic states, saw a 171% return on wellness investment (ROI) savings on projected cost/wellness cost in 2002 – 2005.
  • Cianbro had 86% of team members and spouses participate in a Healthy LifeStyle Program (HLP). At program start, the smoking rate in the HLP population exceeded 38%. One year later the smoking rate was a sustained 5%.

Other Jaw-Droppers:

  • In 2008, employers are projected to expend 46% more for health care costs than in 2003, an average of $9,312 per employee.2
  • More Americans have Type 2 diabetes than at any other time in history.1
  • A sedentary lifestyle—not getting off the couch—costs our nation $150 billion in direct health care expenses.1

1Wellness Council of America

2The National Business Group on Health

3Centers for Disease Control

4Partnership for Prevention