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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.

A question that many companies with wellness programs frequently wrestle with is evaluating its outcomes: Is it achieving its return on investment? And if so, how do you quantify it? Although certain results — a reduction in healthcare costs and absenteeism–might be obvious, there are several metrics at play, such as employee engagement and retention, which could make evaluating your initiative tricky.

Consider this: According to a 2013 report by Aflac, “only 32 percent of those offering wellness programs say they have been able to determine the ROIs of their companies’ programs.” This is only a third of those polled, which is hardly an overwhelming majority. Yet as problematic as it might appear, there are some indicators that a corporate wellness program is working versus one that isn't.

Here are several tips to help you measure the effectiveness of your workplace wellness programs:

Use anonymous employee surveys

Asking your staff for in-person feedback via private one-on-one sessions or group meetings may not produce the desired result. Oftentimes employees, especially when they’re in the company of higher-ups, might feel compelled to disguise their true feelings about a wellness program simply because they don’t want to jeopardize their job by being seen as a troublemaker. In this instance, drawing up and distributing surveys that will allow them to answer questions about the effectiveness of your wellness program anonymously without fear of reprisals might be the solution. Certainly, the data you gather will help you gauge the effectiveness of your workplace wellness program. Similarly, if there are components that are working and some that are not, these surveys should also provide you with that information as well.

Leverage employee engagement

The term “employee engagement” can be very difficult for some companies to define as this behavior could be anything such as working late without being asked, said Healthcare Trends Institute. “Nevertheless, when companies look at data around employee benefit plan participation or measure their level of understanding around healthcare costs, for example, they may be hitting targets they weren’t able to achieve in the past—and attribute the gains to their health and wellness initiatives.”

For some companies, there is a distinct correlation between employee engagement and workplace wellness programs. In its 2015 study of workplace wellness trends, the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans found that more than half of those employers polled (54 percent) said their wellness programs have improved employee engagement.

Highlight job satisfaction

An interesting takeaway from the Aflac study is that it “revealed that 66 percent of employees enrolled in worksite wellness programs are extremely or very satisfied with their job, compared with 53 percent of employees whose company doesn’t offer a wellness program,” noted Healthcare Trends Institute. “What’s more, these workers are less likely to say they are extremely or very likely to look for a new job in the next 12 months (19 percent vs. 30 percent).”

Perhaps as much as a sizable savings in healthcare costs and lowered absenteeism, these statistics offer a clear picture of the effectiveness of a workplace wellness programs, thus validating its ROI from the company’s perspective.

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