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Along with improved employee health and productivity, corporate wellness programs can help reduce overall healthcare costs. As workers feel better, there's less need to run up physician bills. And, with a healthier workforce, insurance premiums go down.

According to the World Economic Forum, companies with wellness programs “have averaged $700 in savings per year per employee” with an “ROI of up to 755 percent in reduced health care costs and higher productivity.” Also, a 2013 study conducted by Rand found that more than 60 percent of polled employers revealed that their wellness programs decreased health care cost with approximately four-fifths of survey participants adding that it decreased absenteeism and increased productivity.

Further, the 2015 Aflac WorkForces Report found that nearly four in 10 brokers (39 percent) said they helped their corporate clients lower health insurance premiums as a result of their wellness programs – an increase from the 34 percent posted for 2013 and 2014.

Yet other costs – including employee financial costs – continue to rise. A recent report by AON disclosed that healthcare costs have skyrocketed to more than 134 percent the past 10 years wrote Workforce in an article on the cost-shifting among companies. But, “at the same time, large employers have seen record low increases in their healthcare costs. In 2015, the average rate increase was 3.2 percent, according to the report.”

Some companies are adopting a more “holistic” and less nuts-and-bolts view of the ROI of wellness programs. While many concur that they often do lead to lower healthcare costs, companies are leveraging other metrics to measure the ultimate success of such initiatives.

“We’re moving from wellness to well-being,” said LuAnn Heinen, vice president of the Washington, D.C-based employer advocacy group. National Group on Health.

Heinen, who helms the group’s Institute on Innovation in Workforce Wellbeing, told Workforce: “In traditional wellness programs, we measure success by participation and ROI on medical costs, but in today’s approach it’s not about ROI. It’s about productivity, and business metrics, and retention, and customer satisfaction. It’s not about health and benefits in silos, but about broader well-being, and that includes social connectedness, financial security, emotional health and job satisfaction. The old way of getting everybody to do the same thing is being abandoned.”

So what questions should companies ask when considering a wellness program? Some include:

• What kind of programs are you interested in launching?
• Do you want to help employees stop smoking? Reduce their cholesterol? Improve their diet and lose weight? How about exercising more?
• Or are you interested in a comprehensive initiative that takes into account all of these pressure points?

Merit Resources, a provider of human resource solutions for small to medium-sized businesses, offers some best practices to follow when designing a wellness plan:

• “Your program must promote health or prevent disease.”
• “Your program must give eligible individuals the opportunity to qualify once a year.”

“You have to disclose program terms and conditions in all printed and online materials.”