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One of the biggest challenges for making wellness programs work is incentives. Here are five such challenges — and solutions to fix them — identified by InteliSpend:

• Flawed Wellness Program Design: “Programs fail when they focus excessively on metrics and tests instead of behaviors. This just encourages employees to ignore the program, or worse, cheat the system… Good programs work to change behaviors. Things like exercise programs, strength training, nutrition programs, and smoking cessation programs. And great programs give regular feedback as employees achieve their goals.”
• Misguided Behavior Focus: “A whopping 87.5% of healthcare costs are due to an individual’s lifestyle…the metrics you choose will have to tie in directly with the behaviors that are driving health costs the most. There is no one key metric for determining the health of your workforce. There are several metrics, and you’ll have to use the ones that track the needed lifestyle changes.”
• Absence of Tracking: “When designing a program, be sure to provide incentives to track accurately, as well as engage in healthful behaviors. And remember, you’re not just looking for compliance or participation in one-off events. You’ll want to track changes in behavior over time.”
• Ineffective Incentives: “Many wellness incentive programs either use penalties instead of incentives (not a good idea), or else use incentives that employees don’t find all that rewarding… Incentives should be able to nudge the employee along their behavioral change, and so need to stay fresh over a long period of time.”
• Lack of Engagement: “A good wellness incentive program becomes almost like a game. There are clear goals to achieve, frequent rewards for achieving them, and multiple ways to track progress. Rewards are exciting and memorable. And all throughout, there’s a clear communication with the ‘player,' done in a language they can understand.”