We’re bombarded with figures, statistics, numbers, and facts. If you’ve followed our blogs, read our white papers, viewed our Vacation Wellness™ Employee Benefit Program fact sheet, or used our business savings calculator (thanks, by the way!), you’ve undoubtedly observed that we love numbers. They help us answer important business and life questions: when? how often? how much? how many? how far? how expensive? how profitable? They’re a way for us to answer the real underlying question, which is always some form of “Is this particular issue important enough for me to pay attention?” But there’s an art to the science. Not all numbers are created equal. Just because someone studied it doesn’t mean you should pay any attention to it. Many of the “gee whiz” statistics that Southwest Airlines’ inflight magazine “Spirit” quotes are entertaining — did you know that Vanna White claps 720 times per Wheel of Fortune episode? Me neither. I wonder what penguin fell off the island in to make room for that little tidbit — but have no redeeming pragmatic value. Other statistics, however, prove to be very important after just a little more digging. Here’s an example: Americans drink 146 billion cups of coffee every year, which is just a smidge over 400 million cups per day (yep – same inflight magazine. Phoenix to Denver, in case you’re wondering). Interesting? Maybe. Important? Not so far, unless you’re in the coffee business. But here’s something that might make you sit up and take notice: In a Kaiser Permanente study, people who drank four or more cups of coffee per day were at 18% lower risk of hospitalization for heart arrhythmia. Mount Sinai researchers discovered that people who drank three or four cups of coffee a day were 25% less likely to develop Type 2 diabetes. If your business has employees (most do), those are numbers you probably do care about, because of these numbers: American businesses spend 16.5% of the gross domestic product on employee healthcare. Employee healthcare costs have risen by 12% every year over the past five years. The average employee benefits manager spends $13,000 per year per employee on healthcare costs. Hewitt Associates predict that by 2019, healthcare costs could exceed $28,500 per employee every year. Diabetes adds 35% per year to the average employee healthcare cost. Heart disease events cost an average of $8,523 per episode, and consume an average of 7.5 workdays. Suddenly, thanks to a few numbers helping us shed light on a relationship we didn’t know existed, the coffee maker in the employee lounge doesn’t look nearly as much like a creature comfort, and starts to look much more like a strategic employee health and wellness investment. There’s a similarly surprising, and some would say unlikely, set of data proving that wellness travel and employee vacations are an inexpensive but indispensable method to help control rising employee healthcare costs, reduce employee turnover rates, and improve employee engagement and motivation. You’ve seen all of these statistics running around our website and white papers, and probably already knew many of them anyway, but they paint such a great picture of an elegant solution to a common set of business problems that I can’t help but repeat them here: Traditional employee health and wellness programs focus on body fat, smoking, blood pressure, and cholesterol – four ailments that add only 20% or less to your annual employee healthcare cost bill. Without “incentives” (some would say “bribery”), those traditional employee wellness programs enjoy single-digit employee participation rates. Stress and depression, on the other hand, add 46% and 70% to your annual healthcare cost burden. Present together at the same time, they add 147% – costing upwards of $30,000 per year, per employee. Depressed employees’ short-term disability leave costs three to five times more than a control group. Vacation Wellness™ targets stress and depression directly, lowering the risk of employee depression by up to 300%. Regular destination vacationers are 32% (men) and 53% (women) less likely to have a heart attack. Three out of four workers describe their jobs as “stressful” or “very stressful” – alarming when you consider that stress has been linked repeatedly to the top six causes of death. A Duke University Medical School article describes vacations and wellness travel as a simple but necessary method to reduce stress, lower burnout risk, improve coping mechanisms, and restore important relationships. 82% of surveyed executives agree that vacations improve employee engagement and productivity. Vacation Wellness is a strategic employee retention program – essential when you consider that the average 100-person IT firm can save nearly $875,000 every year by reducing their employee turnover rates just 20%. I could go on (and I often do!), but that’s probably enough for now… In the meantime, those are numbers you can take to the ... Read More

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say. –Emerson Congratulations! You’ve just rolled out your Vacation Wellness™ Employee Benefit Program to rave employee reviews (if you’ve just emerged from your cave and haven’t yet added this to your employee wellness benefit programs, start here), and are all set to reap the big business benefits of workforce healthcare cost reduction and decreased employee turnover rates. You’re eyeing the Savings Estimator results happily, ready to see the balance return to your company balance sheet. Don’t screw it up. You can still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. How? Simple. By continuing your workaholic ways. Whether you’re doing a good job of it or not, you’re setting the template for your employees’ behavior by your own. If you’re hunched over your computer for ten hours a day, don’t be surprised to see your staff doing the same. If you extol the virtues of wellness travel, and encourage your staff to take advantage of the many wellness vacation deals available as part of their Vacation Wellness™ program, but never take a vacation yourself, it doesn’t take much imagination to guess what will happen. Absolutely nothing. Your staff will do what you do. They may not like your sports team, or take up your favorite hobby, or begin quoting your pearls of wisdom with loving admiration, but they will certainly model their workplace behavior after yours. There’s a discussion on the Employee Wellness Network on this very subject, and Doug Hensch of DRH Group cites an example of this phenomenon. Good or bad, executive behavior becomes employee behavior with lightning speed. So if you’re not digging your toes in the beach sand yourself, you can’t expect your business to reap any of the benefits of your employee wellness vacation program, and your broader employee wellness benefit program results will suffer as well if you’re not putting your time where your mouth is. Perhaps it’s most helpful to think in more personal terms: Regular vacationers are up to half as likely to suffer a heart attack. Assuming you survived, how much would a heart attack set your career and family life back? Could you afford the financial expense? Taking regular vacations makes you three times less likely to suffer depression. What would suffering a six-month bout with depression do to your family? Job performance? Bank account? Vacation wellness reduces stress, which has been linked to all six leading causes of death. How would your stress-induced untimely demise impact your family? Friends? Coworkers? Taking vacations reduces likelihood of developing burnout, a stress-induced, performance-sapping condition that costs employers billions every year. Could your advancement hopes or business goals survive a bout of burnout? Wellness travel only serves to reduce employee healthcare costs, decrease employee turnover rates, and improve employee engagement and motivation if your employees actually take vacations. They won’t if you don’t. If you haven’t already, you should provide Vacation Wellness for your folks. And then you should go on vacation! See you on the ... Read More

Which is which, and what do they mean? Here’s our two cents. And a story. Employee Wellness: An employment cost mitigation effort designed to reduce employee healthcare expenses, improve employee motivation, increase workplace safety, and further a host of health-related goals. Many different employee health and wellness programs fall under the “wellness” umbrella, but all are aimed at helping employees live healthier lives. Travel: In the context of a vacation, travel is inherently a wellness activity. As Da Vinci said, “Every now and then go away and have a little relaxation. To remain constantly at work will diminish your judgment. Go some distance away, because work will be in perspective and a lack of harmony [will be] more readily seen.” (with thanks to Anne Dimon of TravelToWellness) Wellness Travel: A subset of both wellness and leisure travel, the wellness travel concept involves picking destinations and activities with the specific purpose of furthering physical, mental, and emotional health and well-being. Perhaps the concepts are best illustrated allegorically. Suppose Jane is the human resources employee benefits officer at ACME Roadrunner Traps, Inc. Jane has recently heard ACME’s CFO, Mr. Coyote, lament the ruinous cost of employee turnover (which is fast becoming another business crisis), bemoan rising healthcare costs (which is already a business crisis), and remark how he wished someone could hatch a few worthwhile employee wellness program ideas to help control rising employee turnover and healthcare costs. Having recently read Zoescent’s amazingly informational and brilliantly crafted (ahem) white papers on both healthcare costs and employee turnover rates, Jane has become aware that most employee benefits related to health/wellness shoot for the wrong target, and miss. Jane also used Zoescent’s Savings Estimate Calculator and discovered that Vacation Wellness™ can save ACME a bucket full of cash every year. Vacation Wellness™ reduces health care costs and employee turnover rates by leveraging the inherent wellness properties of destination vacations. Jane learned that taking a vacation is an employee wellness activity, because: Vacationers are three times less likely to develop depression, which is the costliest employee health condition. Taking regular vacations makes you 32% less susceptible (men) and 53% less susceptible (women) to heart attack. Going on vacation reduces stress, which has been linked to each of the six leading causes of death. Regular vacationers are eight times less likely to die prematurely than their non-vacationing counterparts. 82% of executives agree that vacations improve employee motivation and productivity. Naturally, Jane was happy to show the numbers to Mr. Coyote, who, never satisfied, thundered “then why don’t we have Vacation Wellness RIGHT NOW!?!?” (he’s a tough boss). Luckily, Jane was able to enroll all of ACME’s workforce in a matter of moments right from her computer. Almost immediately, ACME’s employee motivation and engagement shot through the roof, absenteeism and turnover plummeted, and roadrunner trap engineers began designing and building a better, er, roadrunner trap. But it didn’t stop there. In any group, there are those who take things the extra distance, who put in the extra effort to make an even bigger difference. So was the case with ACME’s world-traveling, highly motivated, highly productive workforce. Many of them didn’t stop at just enjoying the inherent wellness benefits of travel. They went even further, and became devotees of the growing practice of taking wellness vacations. Instead of just relaxing on the beach, these wellness travelers exercised, practiced yoga and pilates, and played sports on the seashore. Instead of merely soaking in the resort sights, the wellness vacationers enjoyed massages, meditation, hot springs, and healthy gourmet cuisine. And in place of just gazing at picturesque mountain scenes, wellness travelers hiked and scaled the peaks in the summer and skied down the mountains in the winter. They discovered a wealth of enjoyable, relaxing wellness activities at all of their destinations. Best of all, thanks to Vacation Wellness™, even the finest of gourmet wellness vacations fit comfortably within ACME employees’ budget. Was anyone unhappy with these developments? The roadrunner population protested vehemently. As for Jane, she was promoted to the coveted corner office, though she chose the corner opposite Mr. Coyote’s. The moral of the story? Whether your employees choose wellness travel or just enjoy the health benefits of leisure travel, your business wins when you leverage the “wellness power” of ... Read More

Rising healthcare costs, a looming retention crisis, and the slow pace of economic recovery all have CFOs burning midnight oil to bring company ledgers back in balance. If you’ll pardon a little shameless self-promotion, we have news your CFO can use: Vacation Wellness™ saves money. How much? Prepare to be pleasantly surprised. A few examples: A business services company with 36 employees and an average annual salary of $69,000 can save $141,130 every year with Vacation Wellness™. A 150-employee IT firm that pays an average employee salary of $58,000 per year saves an estimated $408,000 every year. A utilities company with 1,250 employees and a $43,000 average employee salary saves approximately $2.68M every year with Vacation Wellness.™ How much can your company save? We’ve put together a calculator to help you figure out a conservative estimate. We love full disclosure, so here’s all the source information for our Vacation Wellness™ savings estimator: Depression costs an inflation-adjusted $8,415 in direct expenses, and causes 9.9 lost days of work. That doesn’t count lost productivity while depressed employees are at work. There was no good data for presenteeism costs, so we left that expense out of our computations – despite estimates that presenteeism is at least as expensive for employers as the direct depression costs. 10% of over 400,000 workers studied developed depression. (Source: Managed Care Magazine and Employee Benefit News). Vacationers are up to three times less likely to develop depression (Source: WebMD). Heart disease strikes 16.1% of American workers between the age of 25-64. It costs an inflation-adjusted $8,523 in direct expenses, and causes an average of 7.5 days of sick leave per episode (Source: The Centers for Disease Control and Managed Care Magazine). Regular female vacationers are 53% less likely to develop heart disease, and males have 32% lower heart disease risk (Source: The Framingham Heart Health Study). Even though the numbers are extremely well documented (the sample size for the smallest study was 46,000 people), we divided our estimated healthcare cost savings in half. We prefer to err on the conservative side. See more comprehensive research results here. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes voluntary employee turnover data by industry. We used an average of the last ten years’ data, which is summarized here. The cost to replace an employee is detailed here. We used a conservative replacement cost salary multiplier of 2.75 in our calculations. Salary.com reports that an effective employee benefits program is the top reason 20% of all employees stay with their employer. We used an ultra conservative 5% voluntary turnover reduction figure in our turnover cost reduction estimate. See the complete turnover report. Impressed? Pardon us for gushing, but we are too. It turns out that employee vacations are a powerful business cost savings tool. Make your CFO’s day – have her ask for a custom price quote and savings ... Read More

There’s quite a buzz about wellness travel as an effective and affordable employee wellness benefit program (get a detailed fact sheet here). Many businesses are adding wellness vacation options to their employee benefit plans to leverage the surprising business results that arise from employees taking regular destination vacations. The research shows that vacations Reduce healthcare cost Lower heart attack and depression risk Reduce employee stress Improve workforce turnover Enhance worker productivity So how do you get the most out of a wellness travel employee benefit plan? Make sure that it provides a cost shelter against rising travel costs. Why is that important? Two words: baby boomers. New York Life reports that one baby boomer will retire every 8 seconds for the next 18 years, adding 10,800 new retirees every day. The same market force that made millionaires out of health club owners in the 80’s, mutual fund managers in the 90’s, and mortgage bankers in the 2000’s, will drive unprecedented volume into two major market sectors: healthcare and travel. We’ve already detailed the boomer impact on healthcare costs, and there probably isn’t anyone alive who believes that cost increases in this sector will do anything but accelerate. The boomers are having the same effect on the travel industry. The World Travel and Tourism Council estimates the travel industry at $8 trillion annually – with an increase of over $1 trillion last year alone, during what many have started calling the “Great Recession.” Travel grew by the size of the entire telecommunications industry last year. There are currently 44 cruise ships under construction – in addition to the 81 new cruise ships the industry added over the previous seven years. Why? Boomers. Everywhere Baby Boomers spend their money, prices inevitably increase. It’s Econ 101. That’s why your employees need a budget wellness vacation plan in order for your business to reap the positive business benefits of employee vacations. Through industry-unique relationships, employee members’ wellness travel costs are 1/3 to 2/3 less than market average. That’s an important advantage – and a best practice for employee retention, by the way – for employers who see the value in investing in the health and productivity of their workforce. The research shows that wellness travel really isn’t an option, it’s a necessity. Your business needs your employees to take wellness vacations. And your employees need a cost shelter to keep wellness vacations within their budget as the Boomer Factor continues to drive travel prices through the ... Read More

If your company is like most, your employee benefit plan has become a bit flaccid over the past couple of years. Where’s the first place most execs cut costs when the going gets a bit rough? Yep. Benefits. What’s the big deal? Every other human resources employee benefits shop has had to do the same thing, right? It’s not like you’re alone in this “Great Recession.” But the times are changing, again. While you might not be feeling it quite yet, the recovery has begun. Small businesses – widely regarded as a reliable economic bellwether – have been hiring since mid-2009. The “jobless recovery” isn’t quite as jobless as many believe, which means two things: Your top talent is more valuable now than a year ago. You need to employ high-return employee retention techniques. Among the best practices for employee retention are so-called “employee retention wellness programs” – a unique double-duty category of employee benefit packages. The moniker comes from such programs’ pedigree as employee benefits related to health/wellness, designed to lower healthcare costs, improve productivity, and reduce workplace stress. But these programs also have exceptional value as employee retention techniques. This is due to three key factors: Nearly two out of three employees are quietly searching for jobs right now. You read correctly – almost 2/3 of your staff is peeking over the fence, looking for greener pastures, even during this time of scarcity. They know that top talent comes at a premium during a downturn. 20% of employees report that your employee benefit package is their most important stay-or-go decision consideration. If your staff doesn’t like your employee wellness benefit program, they are four times more likely to leave your company in the next year. The point is that you’re going to have to spend some money on your employee benefit plan -which must include a high-profile and high-value employee wellness program – to keep your turnover costs under control as the recovery takes shape. And when you spend money on benefits, you should employ the following five employee retention techniques to make sure you get the biggest bang for your benefits bucks: Go for employee benefits with high perceived value. Figure out what’s important to your employees, and give it to them (within reason). There is a small but meaningful list of benefits, like Vacation Wellness™, flex time, telecommute options, and education assistance, that are nearly universally appealing for employees. If you’re not yet a believer in employee health wellness programs, it’s time to get on board. Healthcare costs are out of control, which is reason enough, but effective employee wellness benefit programs are exceptional retention tools as well. Differentiate. Develop a unique employee benefit plan “selling point” that sets your offering apart from your competitors. If you’re coming from behind in this regard, you don’t need to add everything your competitors offer and then some, you just need to make sure that your additions are meaningful, valuable, timely, and have a high perceived value for your workforce. Foster employee work-life balance. The most effective employee wellness program ideas are those that give your workforce time, space, and permission to take care of themselves and their families, cultivate outside interests, and enjoy time away from work. Wellness travel is among the most cost-effective and attractive options in this category. Make your employee benefit package fun! Don’t inundate employees with drab, dry, complicated, esoteric benefits. OK, you can make the strong argument that many of the benefits necessities are always drab, dry, complicated and esoteric, but there’s no need to stop there. Add something that grabs their attention! Make them feel part of a community, and demonstrate that your company has gone the extra mile to look after their interests. The biggest takeaway is to consider employee wellness programs as employee retention plans in disguise. When you approach them strategically, you’ll reap twice the ... Read More

If you’re in the market for employee health wellness programs – and who isn’t, after the passage of the recent healthcare bill – it’s important to maximize return on your investment while the economic recovery picks up steam. It’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Many employee wellness benefit programs sound appealing, touting physiological screening for likelihood of disability, behavior modification, and diet and exercise as cornerstones, but there are two key questions to ask: How much will I have to bribe my employees to participate? Will this employee wellness program target the highest costs? The answer to both may surprise you. Human nature is working against traditional employee health and wellness program efficacy: Only 4% of smokers participate in cessation programs. Just 5% of obese employees participate in weight management programs. Fewer than 10% of chronic disease sufferers participate in programs designed to alleviate their symptoms. And traditional wellness programs don’t target the highest-cost employee maladies: stress and depression. Depression is six times costlier than obesity. Stress is nearly five times as costly as smoking. Traditional employee health and wellness programs largely shoot for the wrong target. And miss. So it’s time to go non-traditional. Get out of the wellness rut. Do something that’s designed to alleviate stress and prevent depression. Embrace wellness travel. Implement Vacation Wellness. Incorporate it into your work culture. Vacations are good for productivity. Vacations reduce stress. Vacationers are two to three times less likely to suffer from depression. Vacationers stay at their jobs longer. Vacationers suffer up to 53% fewer heart attacks. Vacationers live longer. So think outside of the wellness box. In fact, think outside of the country. Get your employees’ toes in the sand, or get them on a wellness vacation. We’re confident you won’t have to bribe them to participate in your Vacation Wellness employee benefit ... Read More

The relationship between effective employee benefit packages and employee retention is clearly defined: it’s nearly impossible to improve the latter without paying for the former. If your workforce doesn’t like your employee wellness benefit program, they’re four times more likely to leave your company for greener pastures. While most execs aren’t thinking much about employee retention at the moment, they should be. Two out of three employees are quietly job hunting right now, according to a recent salary.com survey. There’s a staggering financial impact associated with having ineffective employee retention plans. The average 100-employee professional firm burns between $3M and $4.5M on turnover costs every year. On average, an $80,000/yr salaried employee costs $240,000 to replace – costs that arise from job advertising, interviewing, vetting, onboarding, training, and periods of low productivity while the new employee learns the ropes. This turnover cost cycle occurs every 2.4 years, on average. The potential turnover cost savings are on an equal scale. Convincing one $75,000/yr employee to remain on staff for ten years can save over $675,000 in turnover costs. Reducing turnover by just 20% can save the average IT firm over $875,000 every year. Finding employee retention techniques that keep just one more $90,000 per-year salaried employee on staff this year will save over a quarter of a million dollars. So how do you implement best practices for employee retention without breaking the bank? It’s not that difficult to do, but your human resources employee benefits folks have to put in a little sweat equity, and the executive suite has to invest a bit of money, to realize the savings. Your employee wellness benefit programs have to be well thought-out, valuable, perceived positively, and given far more than just lip service. The key is to leverage the power of perceived value in your employee benefit package. Wellness travel in general, and Vacation Wellness in particular, provide an inexpensive and extremely high-return employee retention tool because of their high perceived value. Employees have literally jumped up and down with excitement at Vacation Wellness rollouts – certainly a compelling phenomenon when you’re considering how to bolster your employee retention plans. You have a lot of choices among employee retention wellness programs. Wellness vacation programs, and wellness travel in general, are highly lucrative, low-cost additions to your employee benefit ... Read More

Employee healthcare costs are up 12% per year over the past five years, and are expected to double in the next six years. Nobody believes that the new healthcare bill will do anything but accelerate those expense increases. Few debate that the smart money is on reducing healthcare expenses on the demand side, leading to a predictable – and overdue – increase in employee health and wellness programs. But not all employee wellness programs are created equal, and most target the low end of the employee healthcare cost spectrum. Obesity, hypertension, smoking, and sedentary lifestyle habits add 21% or less to your healthcare cost burden. Stress adds 46%. Depression adds 70% When they’re present together, stress and depression add up to 147% more cost to your average healthy employee’s healthcare coverage and care expenditure. And if you’re like the average employer, you’re already paying $13,000 per employee per year – for healthy employees! Depression and stress together could bring that total closer to $30,000 per year. Those are compelling cost figures – you’re undoubtedly considering a wide array of employee benefits related to health/wellness, and likely have a stack of employee wellness program ideas ready to consider for the short list. Add one more program: wellness vacations. This program is different than most employee wellness benefit programs. It doesn’t involve pleading, begging, or bribing your employees to engage in activities they’d rather avoid. You’re not required to swim against the inexorable current of human nature to achieve your cost reduction and productivity enhancement goals. The wellness travel concept leverages the strong correlation between destination vacations and positive health outcomes: Male vacationers are 32% less likely to suffer a heart attack. Female employees who vacation regularly are 53% less likely to suffer a heart attack. Regular vacationers are up to 3 times less likely to develop depression than their non-vacationing peers. Vacations reduce tension, lower adverse stress hormones, provide distance for effective coping, and reconnect employees with their families. Employees who take regular destination vacations report greater job satisfaction, and are less likely to leave your company. Vacation Wellness travel comes in all shapes and sizes: Employees can choose a gourmet wellness vacation experience, sampling famous cuisine from exotic regions. Ecotourism provides opportunities for staff to make a difference while getting away from the daily grind. Employees may also choose a budget wellness vacation, with a slightly less exotic destination or slightly shorter stay, to reap most of the positive health and productivity benefits of vacationing. Fortunately, the Vacation Wellness employee benefit package brings even the most exotic trips within most employees’ financial reach. Take a wellness vacation that focuses on physical and mental health. Just getting away is terrific, but your staff can go the extra wellness mile and elect to enjoy massages, exercise, practice yoga or meditation, and re-center physically and emotionally. Employee health and wellness programs don’t have to be painful. In fact, the broccoli, blood draws, and bribery model is on its way out – it just doesn’t work as well as it should. Consider a more elegant and cost-effective approach: wellness ... Read More

There’s a growing group of smart wellness folks gathering in a new online community called the Employee Wellness Network. It’s where all the cool kids in wellness are hanging out. And we’re there too (snuck in while nobody was looking). There’s an interesting discussion unfolding around the topic of wellness program ROI. We’ve quoted wellness ROI studies and results in our white paper on healthcare cost reduction, and in various posts and pages around our site, but haven’t delved deeply into the statistical underpinnings of the studies and surveys we’ve cited. There are three good reasons for that. First, not many folks have funded wellness studies. Second, not many of them are peer-reviewed, rigorous, scientific studies. Many of the statistics available on the topic are survey-derived, without a great deal of academic rigor beneath them. We cite our sources, of course, but don’t lift the lid on all of the statistics. Third, and most importantly, it doesn’t really matter. If your CFO isn’t getting the wellness picture, you’re likely not going to win her over with ROI math. What follows is an excerpt of my contribution to the aforementioned wellness ROI discussion on tEWN (I mention that here because we have also listed Zoescent on the site as a wellness vendor, and I’m a big fan of full disclosure): There’s an unasked question, though: should we even be trying to nail down a number? Wellness stands more on the qualitative argument that holistic employee lifestyle improvement enhances productivity, reduces adverse healthcare cost trends, and creates a positive and attractive work environment (which speaks to recruitment and retention). Because it is but one part of a far more complex business whole, it’s difficult to nail down a return multiplier with any degree of precision, for all of the reasons above. However, just because there isn’t a tremendously reliable, scalable, and universally applicable formula for wellness ROI across a broad scope of wellness implementations and business climates does not mean that the argument for wellness lacks teeth or merit. [Regarding] publication bias, I think the phenomenon is endemic to studies of all kinds in all industries. Wellness is not unique in that regard. You can’t apply bias in methodology within the study and survive even a rudimentary peer review, but you sure can apply bias in what you choose to publish, a favorite trick of industry backers for ages. I think there are two takeaways. First, effectiveness depends entirely on execution. I’ve seen brilliant programs in myriad categories fail catastrophically due to poor implementation, leadership, or both. And even a modest program can work wonders when applied energetically, enthusiastically, and smartly. Second, when you make the wellness argument to numbers-oriented decision makers, I think it’s important to address the disparity in ROI. Mention that some companies achieve in the high 5’s while others barely return their outlay (again, the numbers really do depend on whom you believe). Then make the winning point that execution makes the difference between winning big or breaking even, which is precisely why your program is postured for success in your expert hands. Until we really can nail down a quantitative argument (an extremely difficult proposition), I think ROI has to be a supporting player in a more qualitative game. Most execs I’ve worked with recognize circumstances where trying to nail down the numbers is like eating soup with a fork, and can sense when a decision can be made by feel rather than by precise metrics. At the end of the day, unless your business utilizes commodity labor, the argument isn’t really whether a program that keeps employees at work rather than on sick leave, and producing more effectively while at work, and experiencing positive personal growth, is a sound business decision. Rather, the real argument is which suite of programs, which providers, and which methods are most effective. Is there enough available information to make a rock-solid qualitative argument for wellness? Absolutely. Is there also enough high-quality data available to demonstrate positive quantitative outcomes? Absolutely. That’s not the hard part. When’s the last time a car commercial spent time convincing us that automotive transportation was necessary or beneficial? It’s all about differentiation, niche, and functionality. And that’s where we need to take wellness as well. Not if, but when. Not whether, but which. There’s not really a profitable long-term alternative for businesses, particularly in light of exploding healthcare costs, and the fact that the majority of remaining domestic employment requires relatively high degrees of ingenuity, innovation, engagement, intelligence, and expertise. Personally, I think we’re right around the corner. As healthcare legislation realities start to come home to roost, wellness programs will seem much less like a leap of faith and much more like a business imperative. Which, ironically, will make the ROI math substantially ... Read More