In order for a wellness program to be effective, organizations need to incentivize the right activities that produce targeted outcomes for employee health. Incentives are designed to drive employees to adopt habits that over time lead to specific health outcomes.

Which health outcomes are most desirable depends on the employee and their current health status and level of lifestyle habits. For employees with high cardiovascular disease risk profiles, exercise , nutrition, and smoking cessation are priority outcomes.

For employees with mental health challenges, stress management and sleep may be the most important wellness factors to focus on. In order to produce optimal outcomes, wellness program managers must take an intelligent approach to incentivizing employee health habits.

A large part of finding the right approach is knowing how to prioritize certain wellness goals using incentive structures. Establish an internal wellness committee: An internal wellness committee is tasked with determining the main organizational wellness goals.

A wellness committee can be composed of employees, managers, and health experts who all provide input on how to incentivize the behaviors that lead to selected health outcomes. Select priority wellness outcomes: Using data collected from employee health risk assessments, committee leaders can determine which areas of health present the largest opportunity for improvement.

Create a list of target behaviors you want to encourage, activities you want to promote, or health risks you want to prevent through your employee wellness program.

Create an incentive hierarchy: Assign the most valuable incentives to the highest priority wellness outcomes. For example, if smoking cessation is a major priority for your organization, then offer the largest and most robust incentive to quit smoking in order to drive outcomes in this wellness area.

Adapt incentives: Be flexible as health outcomes are achieved. Have an internal system, like a wellness platform , that allows for your wellness committee to continuously review how effective your incentives are and how to adjust them as employees reach certain goals or milestones.

Below are some of the top FAQs about employee wellness program incentives. An important part of an effective employee wellness incentive program is having the ability to validate or verify that employees have completed or achieved the activity or set of behaviors they are incentivized to pursue.

Verifying employee activity ensures accuracy and allows for organizations to administer incentives that actually reward positive change and build momentum toward lasting improvements. The ability to verify whether an employee has completed an activity depends on the type of activity.

With most wellness platforms , verification happens through a combination of biometric screening, fitness device data, and self-reporting. Make sure that you choose activities that are verifiable when deciding which types of outcomes you want to incentivize.

Most jurisdictions today have strict health privacy laws that prevent employers or other parties from accessing private health information. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of HIPAA guarantees the rights of U. employees to keep their personal health information private from employers.

However, employee wellness programs are designed to be voluntary. Employees can choose whether they want to enroll in the program and can adjust the degree to which they participate, meaning that wellness incentive structures are legal provided the employee knowingly consents.

Watch the 2'12" video below to learn more about employee medical privacy rights under HIPAA. Wellness incentives, such as cash rewards or reimbursements for health-related products and services, may be considered taxable earnings, depending on the country.

In the U. Employee wellness programs can be highly effective at fostering health behavior change among employees. This leads to reduced organizational costs like:. In order for organizations to get the maximum return on their employee wellness investment, the program and the incentives need to be strategically planned and properly executed.

Organizations need to continuously revisit and adjust their programs and incentive structures to ensure maximum effectiveness in promoting healthy behavior change. Learn more about how to calculate the ROI on employee wellness programs. Choosing the right wellness challenge prizes and incentives is key to maximizing your employee wellness program.

Get the most from your employee wellness program by using the powerful Wellics platform. With Wellics, your organization can inspire, motivate, educate, and reward employees all in one platform. Monitor your employees' rewards from the admin account.

By tracking your top performers and achievers, you'll gain insight into how your employees respond to certain rewards, allowing you to adjust your wellness incentive programs accordingly.

Learn how our workplace wellness software can help your organization maximize your ROI on employee wellness programs and incentives using our comprehensive analytics tools.

Explore the benefits of the Wellics employee wellness program today. Originally published March 21, - PM, updated January 8, The year left an undeniable mark on the global workforce.

From pandemic aftershocks to.. Have you ever felt like you're just faking it until you make it? That despite your accomplishments,.. Leader and manager development has emerged as the top priority for HR leaders in , as revealed..

You can expect employees to be more likely to share what they purchased with their rewards and this generates more excitement around the incentive. You could offer them a choice of different gift cards or simply give them one for a site like Amazon where they can buy anything.

Providing your healthcare employees with a catered lunch every once in a while can go a long way when it comes to increasing morale. Good morale leads to increased loyalty, better motivation and increased productivity.

This makes any costs you incur worthwhile. Company-provided lunches or snacks can make your employees feel more valued for the contributions they give day in and day out and give them something to look forward to. Eating lunch together also builds trust and relationships between employees which is never a bad thing!

One more benefit of bringing in lunch for your team is that they will go back to work after their break with the energy to finish out their day.

A great way to secure the performance of employees in the healthcare industry is to offer an incentive such as the pay-for-performance incentive. This system enables you to compare employees based on a particular set of indicators.

What the indicators will depend on several different factors such as their job roles and responsibilities. Those that achieve and exceed the indicators set are then rewarded financially.

This is an excellent way of highlighting high performers and giving them the recognition they deserve. Its main goal is to increase performance levels and get employees wanting to achieve more. The whole idea behind this is to enhance performance at the same time as decreasing the number of errors made but we are seeing way more of a shift towards non-monetary incentives.

Nearly 1 in 4 workers would take a pay cut in favor of a better work-life balance, according to an August report by Morning Consult and Prudential. This is something to keep in mind when crafting your incentive program. Sincere recognition is believed to be one of the keys to boosting the morale and performance of your employees.

You should be recognizing your employees for their outstanding performance and showing your appreciation for their work regularly. It not only improves productivity but also helps with engagement, loyalty, motivation, improves service and decreases accidents while working.

Sometimes you may find that all they need are simple things like a thank you note for going out of their way to put in some extra effort or a verbal thank you. You could go one step further and add recognition and gratitude as part of your company culture. A great incentive for healthcare employees could be to hold an annual employee recognition event where you create a nomination and award for certain areas of excellence.

Holding an event like this could encourage better performance and give your employees a real sense of achievement. A nice additional touch would be to provide prizes for those who won the awards.

If you already have a healthcare employee incentive program in place or are thinking about starting one you need to take the steps to make your employee aware.

With essential planning and communication, you will be sure to set your incentive for healthcare employees on the right track. Increased morale and motivation in a workforce are directly linked to business success.

Employees who…. Twitter Facebook LinkedIn. December 18, MTI Events Corporate Culture. Signs Your Staff is Overworked They are calling in sick a lot Engagement is low You can visibly see low energy levels They seem irritable They are making more mistakes than usual Offering carefully planned incentives for healthcare employees will help to attract new staff members and retain those who currently work for your organization.

Incentive Ideas for Healthcare Employees 1. Offering a spa day as an incentive is a great way to encourage a good work-life balance.

For example, patients in some states in USA have some benefits reduced or eliminated if they do not participate in health care screenings, keep their medical appointments, take their medications and adhere to health improvement programs as directed by their health care providers [ 65 ].

In particular, the rule allows, as part employee wellness programs, employers to reward or penalize employees who meet specific standards related to their health e. In order to avoid wasting public resources, such programs will provide evidence how such incentives schemes work in the longer-term and which method is most cost-effective.

Employers can improve the effectiveness of such programs by incorporating the behavioral economics principles discussed in this article. Evidently, incentive programs directed at both providers and patients have become increasingly widespread.

Although we have focused on patients and the public in this article, incentives are also frequently used to target provider behavior as a means to improve quality of care [ 67 ]. The behavioral principles described here may also be applicable to incentive design on the provider side and have the potential to alleviate some of the problems identified with current programs [ 67 ].

Pay-for-performance P4P where providers receive financial incentives to carry out specific care or improve clinical outcomes i. There is emerging important evidence on P4P, which reveals a mixed picture so far.

Studies in both United States [ 69 ] and United Kingdom [ 70 ] have found that initially positive effects were short lived.

In diabetes care for example, the existing literature indicates P4P incentives stimulate initial gains that later tend to level off, while withdrawing the incentives partially reverts the gains [ 8 ]. We believe that behavioral re-design of some of those P4P programs is very likely to improve their effectiveness.

Finally, behavioral economics also provides some arguments against using incentives in specific circumstances. There is some evidence from a meta-analysis of experimental studies, which revealed that after a behavior is associated with an external reward, people are less willing to enact the behavior without further external rewards; in other words, extrinsic rewards undermined motivation [ 71 ].

This is a debate article, so the presentation of the data is fundamentally descriptive and qualitative, because we do no aim to synthesize the evidence. Rather, we offer a theoretical investigation of incentive design and behavior change.

However, despite the recent flurry of scientific theories and reports, there are not enough examples of successful transition from science to policy. This approach is useful in social sciences but is limited.

For example, nudges or economic interventions that show strong effect on the collective behavior of populations are put at the same level with others that show only a tiny, and probably statistically insignificant, trend. At present, we do not have a complete enough picture of which configuration of incentives works best.

So, it is worth pinpointing areas which need more research and areas where plenty of robust studies support a given recommendation. After reviewing the mounting evidence on the uncertain effect of financial incentives to improve health behaviors, Thirumurthy, Asch and Volpp [ 74 ] conclude that the principle that individuals respond to incentives has considerable empirical support, but the devil is in the detail, because the magnitude of effects differs substantially based on the nature of the behavior, the size of the incentive, the population involved, the social context, and the design subtle design choices in how incentives are situated, framed, or deployed can have substantial effects on their success.

Therefore, investigating different ways of joining up some of the psychological mechanisms of action — loss aversion, hyperbolic discounting, and increasing payoffs — may lead to real improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of existing and novel incentive designs.

Incentives based on combinations of individual and group goals have also shown promising results. Furthermore, a potentially powerful approach is combining both patient and provider incentives, but whether this is cost-effective has yet to be determined [ 8 ]. Further insights from the behavioral sciences could allow us to combine incentive schemes with other policy tools to ensure long term effectiveness.

As many people revert to past behaviors once the incentive is withdrawn, combining commitment devices with incentives may be useful in ensuring long-term behavior change. There is limited evidence from a Cochrane review that commitment contracts can potentially contribute to improving adherence to diagnostic procedures, therapeutic regimens or health promotion and illness prevention initiatives [ 75 ].

We would encourage those designing incentive schemes to consider how some of the lessons learnt from smaller scale and more experimental studies can be examined in a more naturalistic setting, thereby avoiding randomisation bias. Rigorous evaluation and dissemination of the outcomes from current and future schemes is also necessary to add to the limited evidence that tells us what does and does not work when using incentives.

The ultimate criterion by which to judge the merit of such interventions is whether they improve the health and well-being of the individual; and the more is the latter, the merrier is the incentive scheme [ 77 , 78 ]. Mokdad AH, Marks JS, Stroup DF, Gerberding JL.

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J Med Ethics. Download references. Professor I Vlaev was supported by the National Institute for Health Research NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care West Midlands CLAHRC WM initiative. Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK.

Centre for Health Policy, Imperial College London, London, UK. Department of Surgery and Cancer, Imperial College London, London, UK. Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science, London School of Economics, London, UK. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. All authors made substantial contributions to conception and design of the article, and participated in drafting and revising it.

IV and DK conceived and wrote the manuscript. AD and PD reviewed the articles for inclusion in the text, and also reviewed and edited the writing. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Correspondence to Ivo Vlaev or Dominic King. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4. Reprints and permissions. Vlaev, I.

et al. Changing health behaviors using financial incentives: a review from behavioral economics. HIPAA might allow the incentive to help slightly obese workers reach a BMI under 30; however, the law would also require that morbidly obese workers receive the same incentive to meet a less drastic and more realistic target BMI.

All of this is perfectly legal, as long as group health plans abide by HIPAA and insurers and employers abide by the Americans with Disabilities Act, plus other applicable federal and state laws. Still other federal laws governing health incentive plans include civil rights laws, pay and age discrimination laws, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act ERISA , and the tax code.

Several states have statutes that explicitly disallow hiring or firing workers based on their tobacco use. IBM: Carrots Only. Alabama: Targeting Highest-Risk Workers. Scotts Miracle-Gro Gets Down to Detail. To earn payments, employees must meet specific requirements such as weight loss, diet change, or attainment of physical fitness goals , with each option.

Carrots Healthy Eating Option: food tracking, meal planning, goal setting. Physical Activity Option: walking, running, swimming, aerobics. Preventive Care Option: preventive care recommendations and maintenance of personal health records.

New Hire Rebate: new employees complete an online health assessment and visit Web-based health resource. Incentives will kick in for employees who choose to participate. Beginning in , employees can receive the discount if they have shown that they are within set boundaries, or are taking steps to get healthier.

Scotts uses both incentives and disincentives. They include:. Free medical services for employees and covered dependents. Sticks Scotts offers a voluntary health-risk appraisal called Health Quotient. If an employee takes the appraisal and is in the mid- to high-tier range of risk levels, he or she can opt to consult a health coach and take steps to lower risks.

To screen employees for unhealthy behaviors, many wellness programs use a health risk appraisal as a first step. Some are more tailored than others. Such tools also reflect medical standards for health indicators such as blood pressure and cholesterol, established by clinical experts based on evidence from patient studies.

Disease-specific organizations, such as the American Heart Association AHA and American Diabetes Association ADA , post benchmarks on their Web sites. Some doctors urge people to take action if their total cholesterol level is above , for example, or when their BMI reaches the overweight and obese range.

The state employs more than 37, people. Getting people below this very high level is much more important in terms of mortality and morbidity than getting people to look like [fitness experts] Jack LaLanne or Kathy Smith.

Getting people from a seriously high risk situation to a somewhat less but still risky situation may be the most cost-effective approach. government and private health care spending is predicted to increase by about 6. In , energy costs were tied with health care costs as the most weighty concern.

National Coalition on Health Care 2. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation 3. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services 4. Business Roundtable. Some companies are using carrots only. IBM, for instance, offers cash payments for completing certain assessments.

The programs include some on-site fitness centers and, due to the widely dispersed work force, Internet-based assessments.

That figure includes more than , payouts last year. The company still offers a smoking cessation program through an interactive Web site and telephone counseling. It no longer hires tobacco users in certain states. Meanwhile, its wellness program aims to encourage smokers to quit.

While it is true that incentives can boost the productivity of your staff and eventually lead to better work efficiency, not all will work for you. As a healthcare facility, you can tell that an incentive is perfect if it compensates, rewards, recognizes, or appreciates your staff. Additionally, incentives should promote good behavior in your workplace, not just the goals you want to achieve.

You should be careful not to give the impression that incentives are your staff's entitlements, and you should not go out of your budget to make a particular incentive work.

At DearDoc, we understand that you need to take care of your patients in the best way possible. For that, we offer cloud-based software solutions that help to reinvent the way new patients meet their doctors. We are determined to change the standards of healthcare service provision and help our clients schedule more patients.

Reach out to DearDoc today for solutions that can help you grow your practice:. Problems we Solve Solutions Why DearDoc? Pricing Resources. Get Started login. Operations July 6, What is an Incentive?

The Difference between an Incentive and Motivation Incentives and motivation have different meanings and should never be used interchangeably.

How to Improve Staff Productivity Using Incentives People working in the healthcare industry crave recognition, support, and appreciation for all they do.

Here are some examples and tips on how to go about it: 1. Offer a monthly spa day After a long working month, offering a spa day for your staff can help them regain their physical shape and get them ready to go again. Provide gift cards For the longest time, cash has been the main reward option for many employees in the healthcare industry.

Employee recognition Employees that perform excellently deserve recognition. Better pay for productivity A financial incentive will keep your staff happy any day. Give extra days off Medical staff is humans too. How to Tell Whether an Incentive is Good for You While it is true that incentives can boost the productivity of your staff and eventually lead to better work efficiency, not all will work for you.

Reach out to the Experts At DearDoc, we understand that you need to take care of your patients in the best way possible. Latest Blog. A Quick Guide to Healthcare Email Marketing August 2, A Guide to Healthcare Video Marketing July 7, Editor's Pick No items found.

Related Post. Helping employees recognize and enjoy the benefits that come regular exercise will increase the odds that they will become a maintainer. Helping employees experience the intrinsic rewards that come from healthy behaviors will help them enjoy healthy lifestyles for many years to come even without the wellness program.

Wellness professionals and companies often discuss whether or not to use incentives or disincentives within their incentive program. In other words, which is better to encourage behavior change, carrots positive rewards or sticks punishments? Remember, the goal of every corporate well-being program should be to help employees adopt and maintain healthy behaviors for life.

Some employers insist that the only way their employees will change behaviors is if they are punished for unhealthy behaviors. Punishing employees is the same technique cowboys use to train horses! To get a horse to do a target behavior, trainers make the right choice easy and the wrong choice painful.

Employers do the same thing when punishment is used to encourage non-smoking or having healthy blood cholesterol, etc.

It is no surprise that the companies that punish employees are also most likely to have a toxic culture. There are many logical arguments for and against the use of punishments as a way to change behavior. We live in a society where punishments for poor behaviors are common place.

Break the law and you get punished. The belief is that a punishment will help people extinguish or stop poor behaviors. There may be times when this approach is successful in a workplace setting. For example, some workplaces are extremely dangerous so safety is a number one priority throughout the organization.

Everybody agrees that employees need to be safe at work so failure to follow safety protocols could lead to termination or punishment.

In some situations, negative reinforcement can impact behavior but this reinforcement is often accompanied by fear. Fear can be a motivator when it comes to adherence of safety rules, but it is not very effective in helping people adopt and maintain healthy behaviors.

WellSteps has worked with hundreds of clients and we discourage all of them from using negative reinforcement sticks to motivate employee health behavior.

We believe this approach is counterproductive to the goals of the wellness program. Also, there is no evidence to suggest that a wellness program which uses punishments will have any long-term success. Maintainers are mostly likely to develop lifelong healthy habits when they experience consistent positive reinforcement over a long period of time.

What would you say if you were hired to consult with company about an incentive program that had over lines of activities, requirements, exceptions, rules, point totals and reward standards? Complicated much? This is a real company. Someone within the company had invested a lot of time and effort into getting this wellness incentive program designed and tested.

They had worked hard to create the program which used an elaborate Excel spreadsheet and point system. When the program went live, they were surprised that no one participated despite the sizable incentive reward. The program might have been too complicated and cumbersome.

The truth is that participating in that program would have been about as simple as completing a tax return! For a well-being incentive program to be effective, it must be easy to explain, easy to understand, and easy for employees to use.

Today, everybody has a smart phone and with the WellSteps app we have made it easy for our clients to validate their wellness activities with just a few clicks. Feel free to click on the links above to learn more about each of these components of wellness.

It is hard for most people to change behaviors, but it is pretty clear what it takes for them to succeed. The AMSO model of behavior change drives everything we do at WellSteps. This model includes four main components. In order for employees to successfully adopt and maintain healthy behaviors, they need to become aware of and educated about their target behavior.

They need to be sufficiently motivated to change. They need the skills and tools required to be successful. They need support from others. Lastly, they need a supportive environment with rules and policies that make it easier to maintain the behavior for life.

Wellness incentive programs are a tiny component of this larger strategy. There are many ways to motivate employees to improve lifestyles including: using punishments with the corresponding fear, explaining intrinsic benefits of healthy behaviors, helping employees to experience the pleasures that come from healthy behaviors, and providing positive peer pressure.

There are other ways to motivate employees as well. Behavior change is one of the most difficult things that we do as humans. Every successful well-being program has implemented some form of these wellness program incentive ideas to help employees get started with behavior change. There are many types of incentives and just as many different requirements that must be met for employees to earn those incentives.

In the past 10 years, WellSteps has helped hundreds of clients set up and manage well-being incentive plans. Some of these have been a huge successes and others—not so much. RELATED: Wellness Program Incentives: The Complete Guide for The goal of the wellness program is to help employees adopt and maintain healthy behaviors.

It is best when employees are internally motivated to be healthy. But sometimes employees get stuck in unhealthy habits and they need help adopting and maintaining healthy behaviors. The best way to do this is to provide small incentives, such as gift cards, to randomly selected employees who successfully complete different aspects of the wellness program.

We have great published scientific evidence that this incentive approach works. It is the incentive approach that WellSteps recommends to all of our clients. Employees can qualify for a drawing if they complete a personal health assessment, biometric screening, a behavior change campaign, or a challenge.

All employees do not get an incentive for completing the target behavior because that leads to entitlement. Instead, they earn the chance to win—sort of like the lottery, only not as big. Just having a chance to win is fun and is sufficient to motivate most employees.

For example, if a company with employees has complete a behavior change campaign, all employees are entered to win a small number of gift cards, prizes, or event tickets.

These small gifts given immediately upon program completion make the program more fun, create the opportunity for vicarious reinforcement, and provide substantial motivation to participate at very little cost. RELATED: 18 Wellness Program Incentive Ideas From the Best Corporate Wellness Programs.

Employers get even greater adoption of employee health behavior with a benefits-based incentive plan. Benefits-based well-being incentive programs typically offer employees:. Benefits-based incentives are considerably more expensive than randomly selecting winners of small gifts, but they also have more impact on employee engagement.

Benefits-based incentives are made available to all employees who do the work to earn the reward. The dollar amount of the benefit-based incentives should be large enough to motivate employees, but not so much that it creates an entitlement mentality among program participants.