Change Your Thinking on Well-being Incentives

If you were an advertiser back in the 1950s, you had a difficult task.

Companies were pouring millions into advertising spend, meaning there were more forces competing for a consumer’s attention than ever before. Gathering feedback prior to launching an ad campaign was difficult and slow, while the race to get in front of the consumer continued to accelerate.

Advertisers had to pour money into campaigns they hoped would motivate consumers to act before they knew their effectiveness.

The end result was a great deal of wasted spend with little in return.

Why bring this up?

The same has been true with well-being incentive programming for decades.

Organizations continue to fund programs that they do not already know the effectiveness of. They assume they must invest hundreds of dollars per employee before they can understand if their programming was actually worth the investment.

Instead of looking at all of the non-monetary factors first, they begin with establishing an incentive, then building their well-being program.

Here’s a different idea.

Instead of starting with an incentive budget when you plan your program, look at the non-monetary factors that influence behavior.

• How does your leadership team model the core components of your well-being program?

• How well do your well-being program pillars align with your corporate values?

• How are passionate individuals being elevated as key voices within the organization to champion your well-being program?

• How much effort is going into building community around the initiatives you want to run?

• How compelling is your value proposition to employees for participating in the well-being program?

• How clear is the permission your leaders provide for employees to prioritize their well-being during the workday?

Advertisers today evaluate how their concepts grow organically (thanks to social media) before they pour money into boosting them. This gives them much more power. The concepts and ideas that grow organically are exponentially more powerful than ideas that do not.

You can do the same within your well-being program. Instead of starting with incentives and monetary rewards, begin with spreading your ideas organically and watch how employees respond.

If they respond well and momentum starts to grow, consider putting money behind the behaviors or initiatives.

As an example, leadership modeling and stewardship is increasingly becoming a key tool for organizations to improve the effectiveness of their well-being programming. Some organizations are seeing this play out and are making available a bonus for the leaders that carry out initiatives and inspire their teams.

If employees do not respond well to programming, the problem is with the structures around the programming or the programming itself.

For example, a lack of interest in completing an onsite biometric screening should lead you to evaluate how the benefits of the screening itself are being communicated and modeled.

Paying people to perform actions that are motivated solely by a direct monetary incentive will not lead to true behavior change, only short-term adherence. Spending time revisiting the bulleted list above is much more effective for the long-term buy-in of your employees.

Incentive programs should be a boost for your program’s growing momentum, not the source of the momentum itself.

If you’d like to learn more about how Propel’s technology and program strategies are saving our clients money and producing better results, schedule a strategy session with us by clicking here.

Implications for the well-being administrator:

• Incentives in the context of well-being programs should be used to accelerate progress already being made.

• Consider revising the structures around your well-being programming and the culture within your organization if momentum is lacking.

• Change your mindset to look for success before adding additional incentive.

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