Business.com - Wellness Programs

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Understand the benefits of Wellness Programs

BIO:

Randy Philip is a principal consultant at the Washington Insurance Consulting Group.

TRANSCRIPT:

I'm Randy Philip, Principal Consultant with the Washington Insurance Consulting Group located in Alexandria, Virginia. I and my partners have over 70 years of combined experience working with small employers and medium employers, working employee benefits.

Today we're going to be talking about wellness programs, and are they more than just a perk? What are wellness programs? Wellness programs encompass a number of things—a number of things to engage your employees, a number of things to make the employees feel that the employer is interested in them. Examples of that might be gym memberships, or where some employers might even have gyms inside the organization. A lunchtime workout—where the employer would bring in someone who could do yoga, someone who might do aerobics. Other examples are heart monitors—where an employer might motivate the employee or stimulate the employee by engaging them to wear a heart monitor or wear a pedometer so that their activities can be tracked.

Another part of the wellness package is where employers do health screenings. An employer might bring in a nurse or a nurse practitioner to come in to do cholesterol checking, to do high blood pressure checking, to check for diabetes, to do flu shots. What employers realize is that the more they engage their employees and their families and the more they can get ahead of some of those medical concerns—diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol—and get ahead of that ball, the better off it is for the employee and the employer.

Another benefit to wellness programs are to motivate employees to stop smoking. That could be where they bring in smoking coaches or where they actually even pass out the smoking nicotine patch.

Some advantages of wellness programs: It reduces the employees being absent from work. The other thing about this engagement of employees—this allows the employer to recognize employees for things other than work. It's great to say, "Hey John, you're doing a good job at your job," but it's also a wonderful to be able to tell John, "You're doing a great job at representing your team in being active and doing the things that you can do for yourself and for your team to be active."

For every dollar that an employer invests in a wellness program, it reduces the overall health care cost by $3.27. So there are some direct correlations; not immediately, but over the long period, there are some direct correlations to when employer invests a dollar, the payback in the overall cost—not just the premium that the employer is paying for health insurance, but just the overall employee cost.

The other benefit is that it increases the workers' morale—employees that feel that the employer is invested in them as an employee.

This has been Randy Philip, Principal Consultant with the Washington Insurance Consulting Group located in Alexandria, Virginia for business.com. Please remember the following points.

Benefits of Wellness Programs:
• Lower insurance premiums
• Reduce sick days
• Raise employee morale

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• business
• workplace
• health
• benefit
• basic
• plan
• care
• perk
• gym
• cost
• medical
• benefits
• employment
• employer
• company
• insurance

[thewolfster84]

thank you this is great stuff