How to engage your workforce in health and wellbeing benefits
Ill-health linked to lifestyle is one of the biggest challenges people face in the workplace and wider society today.
Even despite continued growth in the wellness industry globally and an explosion of digital wellbeing solutions, the UK is still getting less healthy.
According to the most recent Britain’s Healthiest Workplace survey, 25% of employees are obese, 10% risk anxiety and depression, and 20% are suffering burnout.
A leading cause of this is our lifestyle, given that 38% of people are inactive, 52% eat an unhealthy diet, 25% exceed alcohol guidelines and 9% smoke.
Employers face three challenges
Against this backdrop, employers in the UK faced several challenges when it comes to employee health and wellbeing.
On the one hand, effectively encouraging people to change habits and make healthy lifestyle choices is not easy. And, without meaningful employee engagement, changing behaviour for the better in the workplace can be difficult.
Additionally, even though almost half of the preventable global health burden is lifestyle related, organisational health schemes have traditionally tended to focus more on managing ill-health, but not enough on keeping people healthy and happy before they get ill.
Create healthier habits
Even though the wellness sector is forecasted to be worth $7trn worldwide by 2025 and there are more products promising to make us healthier than ever before, without engagement they are largely ineffective.
Behavioural scientists tell us that, as humans, we are highly irrational in hugely predictable ways.
And by harnessing behavioural economics through workplace wellbeing schemes, organisations can help employees make healthier lifestyle choices.
By influencing behaviour for the better in this way, we can unlock more productivity and generate benefits everyone, including employers.
How to get employees to engage
To unlock meaningful behaviour change – especially across a large population – benefits offered by a wellbeing programme have to be appealing and accessible to a diverse range of people, regardless of age and location.
They also need to be communicated effectively and accessed through a coherent and understandable structure.
More broadly, this needs to be sustained through meaningful engagement, which can be hugely challenging for organisations when looking after its people.
Incentives and rewards
The Vitality Programme is the world’s largest behavioural change programme linked to insurance (some benefits of which are also available to an uninsured workforce).
It is designed to provide a set of tools and rewards accessed by employees via the Vitality Member App.
Engagement with the Vitality Programme is sustained through daily touchpoints, such as tracking activity, achieving points targets and redeeming rewards such as free coffee, cinema tickets and cashback on healthy food.
Changing behaviour
Through this engagement, we see our members benefit from almost one year of additional life expectancy, even in their first year. Those who track higher levels of physical activity, on average, also incur up to 46% lower healthcare costs.
All this helps to prove that by using the right nudges, at the right time, employee behaviour change can be achieved on a large scale.
As well as keeping staff happy and healthy, this can unlock productivity and help to retain and attract staff within businesses of all shapes and sizes - at a time when this is most needed.
Supplied by REBA Associate Member, Vitality
At Vitality, we take a unique approach to insurance. As well as providing high-quality comprehensive cover, we provide a complete wellness package that can help boost employee engagement and productivity.
