WellSteps would love to be your workplace health and wellness vendor, but if not, we want to make sure you still choose a good one. When you pick a good corporate wellness vendor, your employees will love it and your leadership will get positive wellness outcomes.
The Importance of Workplace Health Promotion Programs
More often than not, employers who are considering WellSteps as their workplace health vendor have already had a bad experience with previous workplace health and wellbeing companies. In fact, sometimes WellSteps is the third or fourth vendor to enter the workplace. This suggests that selecting the best corporate wellness vendor must be difficult for employers to do.
However, we have been at this quite awhile and we have identified most of the important characteristics of a successful wellness vendor. Being able to select the best workplace health solutions is important for a variety of reasons.
As trusted advisors, insurance brokers and consultants put their credibility and trust on the line when they make a recommendation for a wellness vendor. If the vendor does a good job, they look like a hero, but if the wellness program is a bust, they may lose the client.
What Criteria Should We Use to Pick a Workplace Health and Wellbeing Program?
The C. Everett Koop Health Project board for years has identified the best wellness programs in the United States and acknowledged them with the Koop Award. It is the most prestigious wellness recognition in the world. The application for the Koop award gives us a great list of criteria when selecting the best workplace health and wellness services.
The application for the Koop Award asks questions about how a company’s health promotion vision and mission are communicated throughout the organization. The questions in the application are roughly based around each of the steps in the AMSO behavior change model.
In summary, the application asks how the wellness activities and initiatives are communicated to the employees, what is done to engage and motivate employees to adopt healthy lifestyles, how employees are taught the skills they need to change behaviors, and what are the physical, organizational, and cultural environments that are created to nurture these new healthy behaviors.
Koop Award Requirements
Firstly, participation rates need to be in a good or excellent range. A good participation rate is 60-70%; a best practice participation rate is 80% or more. Workplace health and wellness programs need to be in effect for a minimum of three years and most importantly they have to provide proof that the wellness efforts have produced positive outcomes.
The proof of positive outcomes must be based on the entire employee population. It’s considered the best if the outcomes data can be compared between wellness program participants and non-participants. This is the most important part of the application.
How to Claim the Koop Award
To be considered for the Koop Award, applicants must describe the methodology used to evaluate their workplace health promotion program. They must accurately describe the impacts on health risks, health behaviors, financial outcomes and program cost effectiveness. The criteria used in the Koop award application are designed to identify the programs that have the most rigorous research designs and the most accurate outcome evaluations.
In essence, the award is really a research award. But, any wellness vendor that produces solid research that demonstrates positive wellness outcomes should be seriously considered for the award. Other wellness programs may be just as effective, but without reliable evidence of positive outcomes, it is impossible to know if the vendor can actually deliver an effective wellness program. Every wellness vendor has fancy marketing materials (or marketing pixie dust), but few have the scientific evidence to back up those claims.
How to Select the Best Workplace Health Promotion Programs
Below is a list of criteria that could be used to help anyone identify the best workplace health management programs. The information from the Koop Award application has been combined with the published evidence on the impact of workplace health services. At a minimum, this list can help you eliminate those vendors that may not make the cut.
1) Focuses On Health Behaviors
If the goal of workplace health onsite services is to reduce healthcare costs and improve employee health, then the focus should be helping employees adopt and maintain healthy behaviors. Healthy behaviors are the key to most wellness outcomes.
To be successful, a wellness vendor must stay focused on helping employees learn new behaviors. Health behaviors are directly responsible for elevated health risks. Employees who have elevated health risks are more likely to have chronic disease and high healthcare costs. Successful workplace health and wellness services are focused on helping employees modify health behaviors.
2) Provides Valid, Independent References
The most unbiased advice you can get is from existing customers of the workplace health vendor you’re considering. Don’t just ask for a list of cherry-picked references, ask for several dozen references from the wellness vendor and then contact a random selection from the list.
Ask them what they do and don’t like about their vendor. These person-to-person reviews are more valuable than online reviews, blog posts, or even company testimonials. When you interview current customers you get trustworthy information from people who have real world experience working with your potential wellness vendor.
3) Utilizes Benefits-based Incentives
You won’t improve employee health behaviors if the employees don’t participate in your workplace health and wellness offerings. That’s why incentives are so important. The most powerful incentives are those that are benefits based.
Program communications, leadership support, healthy cultures, effective wellness committees, and even small gift cards or awards are helpful. But none of them are as effective as benefits-based incentives. If your wellness vendor is going to be successful they’re going to need to motivate your employees with the right kinds of incentives. You can read more about how to do this here.
4) Passes the Test of Time
According to the SBA, 70% of companies fail during the first 10 years of operation. There is nothing magical about the 10 year mark, but picking a wellness vendor that’s been in business for at least 10 years increases the odds of getting one that knows what they’re doing.
WellSteps is beyond the 10 year mark. Our effectiveness has improved everyday as we have done everything from improving our technology to preparing to handle global security threats. Over the years we have improved and refined our services to such a point that we are a different company from when we started. As we continue to improve, it is exciting to see what we will look like a decade from now.
5) Uses Scientific Evidence, Not Just Marketing Pixie Dust
How do you know if an intervention or workplace health program works? How confident are you that a wellness vendor can do what they say? We get information from blogs, articles, white papers, advertising materials, and social media. Which of these sources of information do you trust?
The most reliable source of information we have is published scientific evidence. This evidence comes from data gathered by the well-being companies that have been peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals. The data have been independently evaluated and criticized by other scientists whose only desire is to see that the science is done correctly.
Very few workplace health solutions and programs have been able to publish scientific evidence that their solutions work. Every wellness vendor has well-designed brochures, press releases, white papers, and blogs, but none of these rise to the scientific level of peer-reviewed publications. Ask your prospective vendor to show you the peer-reviewed research supporting their product or service. Ours is here.
This science is expensive and extremely difficult to conduct but it is the only way we can know for sure what the wellness vendor is doing is actually helping people be more healthy. This is exactly why so few wellness programs are good enough to earn the Koop Award. This is how one WellSteps client won the Koop Award.
6) Stays Current With Technology and Security
With the use of technology, most effective workplace health and wellness promotion programs are really just tech companies. A simple question to ask your vendor is if they have a dedicated app for their end-users. There is nothing special about having an app other than it is a symbol that the organization is keeping up with the technology.
They may still have programs that don’t work but the fact that they are working hard to keep up with the technological trends suggests that there are some bright minds at work within that company. If your wellness vendor has an app most likely they have a robust data platform behind it.
If they have a robust data platform most likely they have given some serious thought to data security. Having an app is no guarantee that a wellness vendor will have effective programs but it does set them apart as a company that is progressive and tech savvy. These workplace health management programs have an eye on the future, not the past.
If they have a robust data platform most likely they have given some serious thought to data security. Having an app is no guarantee that a wellness vendor will have effective workplace health solutions and programs but it does set them apart as a company that is progressive and tech savvy.
7) Interacts With You and Your Employees
Every wellness vendor has a website. The temptation is to automate every aspect of the workplace health vendor’s program – so expect companies to use this automation and platform to do all the work. The technology should be used to assist corporate wellness vendors with the delivery and administration of their workplace health and wellbeing program.
The technology is a tool to be used to help humans change behaviors. Effective workplace health management programs will have real humans talking to real humans about how to plan, administer, and evaluate a wellness program. WellSteps calls these humans WellSteps Guides, but, regardless of the name, successful wellness programs will have a high level of human interaction with their clients.
They will help organize and participate in all of the meetings with the wellness committee. Your wellness vendor should be a human partner in helping you leverage the technology to reach and impact every employee. Ask the corporate wellness vendor you are considering to introduce you to the person or persons that will be helping with your wellness program.
8) Supports Culture Change
Adopting healthy behaviors is actually fairly easy. The challenge is to maintain these healthy behaviors for years. Worksites that can create health-promoting environments and a worksite culture that supports healthy living will experience a variety of positive wellness outcomes.
Ask your workplace health and wellbeing vendor specifically how they plan to help you create a healthy worksite culture. How will they evaluate your current culture, and what are some examples of things they have done at other companies to change the work environment?
We work with every one of our WellSteps clients to take a good look at their worksite culture using our free tool called the Checklist to Change. Then periodically, the wellness committee and worksite leadership pick one thing to change within their worksite environment. After several years of small, consistent culture changes, the entire organization begins to look and feel like a place where people want to work and be healthy.
9) Offers a Performance Guarantee
If your wellness vendor is really confident that their solutions will produce positive outcomes, they should offer a guarantee. They should even offer an ROI performance guarantee. For example, if after three years you do not see a positive return on their workplace health and wellness investment, the vendor should return some or all of your fees. A worthy corporate wellness vendor should stand behind their services. Here is the WellSteps Performance Guarantee.
10) Customizes Programming to Each Worksite
Every worksite is different. Each one has unique characteristics and challenges that make it hard to use a workplace health vendor that subscribes to the one-size-fits-all approach. Ask your wellness vendor if they are willing to customize your programming. Be sure to cover all essential questions. For example:
- Do they build out special campaigns or challenges specific to your worksite?
- Will their coders and engineers design and implement changes to the program from your specifications?
- Can they offer their wellness programming in specific languages that are used at your worksite?
This last criteria is really about whether or not the corporate wellness vendor wants to be a true partner or a supplier. Wellness suppliers sell a finished product for a specific price. Workplace health management programs that are true partners will do whatever it takes to create and administer a wellness solution that is customized to each location within an organization, while at the same time producing positive wellness outcomes.
So What Next For Your Workplace Health Program?
In short, hiring a workplace health vendor is a big investment for most worksites. And, unfortunately, there is risk involved. Hire the wrong corporate wellness vendor and you’ll waste your money. Contract with the right vendor and your big investment will turn into even bigger savings. Schedule a free demo with our team today and we’ll show you why so many companies choose WellSteps to be their workplace health and wellness program vendor.
When you make the right choice you’ll have a wellness vendor who is your partner for success. Wellness done right can transform an organization and its employees. The right workplace health management programs will help you reduce your healthcare costs, improve employee health, and help create a happy, productive workforce.
FAQs About Workplace Health & Wellness Programs
Why are Workplace Health Solutions Important for My Business?
Workplace health solutions provide your company with a sense of wellbeing from the inside out. When your team feels like they’re being taken care of, that upper management cares about their health it creates a sense of connection and loyalty. With the right workplace health solutions in place, you’ll also keep health care costs down and productivity up. Healthier employees are happier employees – and happier employees are more productive!
What Should You Look for in a Corporate Wellness Vendor?
A corporate wellness vendor should offer the following to their clients:
- Focuses on healthy behavior
- Provides references for your review
- Uses benefits based incentives that are always motivating
- At least 10 years of experience in the space
- Bases work on scientific evidence
- Is tech savvy
- Conducts in person interactions with you and your team
- Supports positive culture changes
- Guarantees their work
- Able to customize workflows as needed
