Healthcare Intelligence Network

“There’s reasonable research that shows that culture and a strong communications strategy are more powerful than an incentive in creating change. And when the three of them come together, it’s extremely powerful,” explains John Riedel, president of Riedel & Associates Consultants, Inc.

Prior to his presentation during HIN’s webinar, Health and Wellness Incentives: Positioning for Outcome-Based Rewards, Riedel mapped out nine questions organizations should ask themselves when driving toward a culture of health:

• What’s the organizational support for employees?
• Does the organizational support manifest a commitment to health?
• Do you have a mix of programs and resources that serve all employees?
• Do you have health policies in place in the company so that there’s a tangible communication around the importance of health?
• Is senior management committed to workforce health?
• Does the company provide ways of encouraging healthy behaviors, and not just by providing incentives but also in ways that changes can be made that will help you?
• Does the company care about the well-being of their employees and does that come across?
• Are you providing your employees different types of incentives? Encourage them to participate in events.
• Are wellness goals aligned with the business strategy?

If you can answer yes to those questions, then you may not have a big issue with employees and ‘big brother’ syndrome. But no one size fits all.

Success is based on addressing challenges unique to your particular organization. And the beauty of it from my perspective, and I come from a systems thinking perspective, if you can come at these culture issues to a variety of different touch points in the organization, there are many ways you can start in.

One of the first things you want to do is make sure you’re establishing the wellness norms that work and make sure that you eliminate those that don’t. There are many companies who suggest, or indicate, that they are wellness-oriented. But often, there are understated policies that suggest, does my company care about my health? For instance, frontline supervisors who are still being evaluated on getting products out the door may be least interested in allowing their employees to take time off during the day for wellness activities. You have to get the message out to the whole organization.

Tags: culture of health, employee wellness, health and wellness incentives, wellness

Related Posts:

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 9th, 2013 at 10:00 am and is filed under Health Coaching, Incentives, Population Health Management, Wellness/Prevention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.