How Leading Companies Are Approaching Incentives In Employee Wellness, Part Two

As part of our recent “Social vs. Financial Incentives: The Burning Question In Employee Wellness” webinar, we asked leading wellness managers how they use social and financial incentives in their programs. One response is transcribed below. (Note: This is part two in a four-part series. View the first installation here.)

“When it comes to incentives, [Excellus BlueCross BlueShield] tunes in to best practices that are going on throughout the industry. A couple of things that we are finding quite successful include:

• The first is with our health insurance premium incentive of $520 per year, which is tied to our health screening. People get $10 per week off of their insurance premium, and it is available to all employees at Excellus BlueCross BlueShield and its subsidiaries. It’s really exciting that this reaches all people who are helping to drive our company.
• The next thing that we’re really excited about is our online wellness incentives program that is really designed to help individuals take a more active role in managing their health care and be really proactive with it. Self-care is what is important to us. With this program, our employees can earn up to $500, and including their spouse or domestic partner they can earn up to $1000.

What we’ve learned from these two programs is exciting! When it comes to the health screening and participation, from 2005 – 2011, in the time before we offered a premium incentive for participation [we experienced between 10-20% participation], and after offering the $520 health insurance premium we average well over 80% participation. We’ll be looking to continually tweak this along the way, but this is a great start when it comes to participation, and we look to drive this participation in other wellness programs we’re doing.

The other program, when it comes to wellness/HRA participation, the online program that we give our employees access to, piloting for this program started in 2008, and we experienced a bit of a dip at this point in what we were trying to do. But we were getting it off the ground and running, and in the last three years of 2009 – 2011, we have had over 60% participation in the program, which is really exciting. A couple of other neat stats to go along with this is that during this time we’ve had about 46% of our participants complete 8-week fitness and nutrition programs, which is really nice to see people engaged in programs that not only help their overall health but tackle what they eat. We also see 53% completion of health recommendations based on their age and other questions they answer with the health risk assessment.”

– Kenneth Foresti
Health & Wellness Consultant
Excellus BlueCross BlueShield

Watch the full Social vs. Financial Incentives: The Burning Question in Employee Wellness webinar.

wellness incentives, social incentives, financial incentives