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The Institute for Health and Productivity Studies at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has been blogging about an interesting partnership it has with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: “To define what makes a really great workplace health promotion program—the kind that does ‘work.'”

In a post that describes the project, researchers “reviewed the literature, sat down with dozens of experts and then visited nine companies… organizations that have won accolades for their programs and demonstrated that they do wellness right. Each firm was unique, yet all had incorporated a culture of well-being into their core values, and all had corporate leaders who believed this was the right thing to do for employees and the company’s bottom line.”

The report includes case studies on all nine companies. But for a quicker read, the researchers “identified nine best practices that are essential to building a top-quality workplace health promotion program.”

• “One Size Does Not Fit All: Workplace health promotion programs… must be tailored to meet the unique needs of each organization and its employees.”
• “Create a Culture Not a Program: Best practice companies begin the process of creating a healthy company culture by ‘baking' health and well-being into the foundation of their organizations.”
• “Use Incentives Wisely: Best-practice companies believe that incentives are most effective when used as a ‘carrot' to boost initial participation in health promotion programs; they become less effective as a strategy for maintaining long-term behavior change. “
• “Make Wellness Convenient and Ubiquitous: The more ways employees can engage in health promotion activities, the higher the participation rate and the better the results.”
• “Relentless Communication: Best-practice employers use a variety of message channels, such as e-mail, newsletters, break room bulletin boards, and the company intranet. Social media and mobile apps have proven to be successful means of reaching and engaging younger employees.”
• “Champions from the Top Down: When the CEO is on board, dedication to a culture of well-being trickles down to employees at every level of a company’s hierarchy.”
• “Measurement by the Numbers—But Not the Ones You Might Expect: ROI is far from being the only important measure of a health promotion program’s success.”
• “Wellness is Not Built In a Day: The best companies look at wellness as a long-term commitment.”
• “To Err is Human: Learning from Mistakes: All of the companies we visited saw their health promotion initiatives as growing and evolving as they progress.”