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Workplace Wellness Lab delivers leading insights, ideas and information on wellness, health management, and healthy living.

Our goal is simple: Workplace Wellness Lab provides regular and better information as an important path to create healthy individual outcomes, while helping change health care in America.

By connecting the audiences that matter – consultants, corporate executives, policymakers, thought leaders, journalists, customers, and more – we establish a positive, substantive, and influential voice within the wellness industry that makes the case that:

    • Left unchecked, current trends in health spend and outcomes are unsustainable.
    • Given that half the healthcare dollars in this country are incurred by employers, well-executed preventive care health management programs in the worksite are clearly enduring and valuable, helping drive improved workplace environments and individual outcomes.
    • Industry coherence around private sector innovation to drive effective health management programs is economically vital, given what’s possible in a spend category that is arguably one of the greatest challenges in America today.

Workplace Wellness Lab comes at this challenge principally from the employer point of view: What are the credible and demonstrated best practices in preventive care to structure programs that have an enduring impact? How can the impact be made explicit, as something that is both the right thing to do and a proactive business initiative that lowers the cost of care, as experienced by both employers and employees?

And Workplace Wellness Lab goes beyond the workplace. It’s a robust platform filled with ideas and insights from those that influence how employers think about this opportunity: research organizations, non-profits, think tanks and more.

From an editorial point of view, great ideas can come from anywhere. With that philosophy in mind, we will combine our own original content with other content across the web. We organize the content, with a view to making it as simple and useful as possible.

All content will be sourced. If we found it somewhere, we’ll tell you where we got — and how to get to that site yourself.

We also welcome your comments — criticisms, ideas, and, yes, we take compliments, too! Have a thought of what you’d like to see — or see something you think others should know — drop us a line.

Thanks for visiting – and please come back again!

Transparency is extremely important to us, so we are letting you know that we may receive a commission on some of links you click on from this page. See our disclaimer.

Are businesses moving away from demanding strict and immediate Return on Investment (ROI) measurements when evaluating their workplace wellness programs?

ROI certainly hasn't disappeared completely, but according to the Willis Health and Productivity Survey Report (2015), the emphasis may be shifting.

The report notes: “More organizations are realizing that the expectation of an immediate ROI for their wellness programs through medical cost reduction is unlikely. Worksite wellness requires a sustained effort, including annual program review and long-term program management. Companies who adopt a true culture of health better position themselves for increased pro tability in the long run.”

Screen Shot 2016-02-02 at 11.29.16 AMSo where is the focus — and how are companies that evolve from ROI measuring success?

The report adds that “more organizations are increasingly focusing on the value of investment (VOI) of health management and wellness programs. Employers are recognizing that there is considerable value to a healthier workforce beyond the value of lower medical costs. VOI-focused organizations embrace a wider set of metrics that include: absenteeism, worker morale, employee turnover, presenteeism costs, workers compensation, short- and long-term disability, employee loyalty and tenure.”

The authors note that “the focus on ROI, however, isn’t going away.” Given health care costs generally, companies still need and want to know how investments affect costs.

Other key insights from the report:

  • “Sixty-four (64%) of the survey respondents with wellness programs were VOI-focused versus 28% of respondents were ROI-focused.”
  • “Organizations with a Value of Investment (VOI) focus tended to be more satisfied with the impact of their programs.”
  • “Respondents valued “building a culture of health” over “targeting specific risks” and valued “targeting specific risks” over ‘shifting costs.'”
  • “Organizations with a VOI focus were more likely to value “building a culture of health” (66%) than organizations with an ROI focus (51%).”
  • “Respondents from employer organizations with a VOI focus were more likely to be concerned about improving productivity with their health management programs (51%) than respondents from organizations with an ROI focus (40%).”
  • “Organizations with a VOI focus were more likely to value building teamwork and morale (48%) than organizations with an ROI focus (25%).”
  • “Respondents from organizations with an ROI focus were more likely to be interested in targeting high risk and high cost claimants with their health management programs (57%) than respondents from organizations with a VOI focus (41%).”

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