SHRM 2011: Helping Employees Lighten Up

Weight loss is the most searched term on Google, says corporate health strategist Adam Bordes, and similarly, helping employees lose weight is the most sought-after goal of corporate wellness programs. In “Lighten Up: Daily Strategies for a Lighter, Healthier Workplace,” he gave SHRM attendees several steps to help employees trim fat from their waistlines.

Bordes, who often referred to attendees by calling them “ya’ll” – bespeaking his Nashville, Tenn., home – first pointed out a couple of problems during his June 28 session. First, employers and employees have the same bottom line goals in promoting wellness – to save money and put more money in their pocket – but those goals tend to be misaligned, as employers emphasize other, more intangible, benefits. Making this common goal clear is the first step toward having a successful wellness program.

Second, employers sponsor activities like stand-alone health fairs that simply don’t work, he says. Attendees admitted this themselves, as several raised their hands to note they sponsor such events, but quickly put their hands down when asked if they felt those events were successful. Bordes noted that while these health fairs may not cost much to produce, they don’t provide much in terms of return on investment (ROI). Why don’t stand-alone health fairs work? Bordes gave three reasons: (1) employees are being sold to (by vendors selling their services), rather than told how wellness will result in saving money or reducing costs; (2) no one is being taught during these events – typically employees are given handouts as they go from booth to booth and that’s about it; and (3) the fairs don’t answer the question of: What’s in it for me?

What will work generally for employers looking to incentivize employees to lose weight is focusing on the DEPLOY system, according to Bordes. This means:

(1) D: Deliver easily consumerable and learnable content – “you gotta teach people stuff,” he says. Part of this means knowing your audience. If, for example, a typical employee is a 50-year old grandmother who thinks an iPad is a personal hygiene product, a webinar is probably not going to be the most effective way to communicate.

(2) E: Encourage and entice employees to participate in a way that makes sense for them. To that end, you have to explain how the program will help them save money, and how it will help make them a better person.

(3) P: Promote, which involves choosing your communication method: e-mail or hard copy, for example.

(4) L: Leverage, which involves looking to resources like local businesses for assistance. For example, could a local gym provide group discounts to employees? Could a massage therapist visit the offices twice a month?

(5) O: Optimize, which involves regularly asking employees what they think of your wellness efforts, to get them better engaged. And it also involves realizing that seeing ROI may take time, particularly when it takes three to five years to see a marked improvement in employee health, but the average employment term for a worker is 2.5 years – “the employee is gone before you see any improvement,” says Bordes.

(6) Y: Yearly Events, which involves events like health fairs – done right. Here, he noted that health fairs work if they aren’t the only wellness activity an employer is conducting. “You need to have people in front of your employees” teaching them regularly about wellness, according to Bordes. This means regularly bringing speakers into the workplace to discuss wellness – but first make sure you build a relationship between the speaker and employee in terms of name recognition or periodically providing updates and other material about the speaker. Securing a speaker with high-name recognition might be costly, but keep in mind that “if you have a cool speaker, people will pay” to hear him or her, according to Bordes. Also, you could offset speaker fees by partnering with a local business to co-sponsor the speaker’s appearance. Furthermore, a high-profile speaker could bring media attention to your wellness efforts. Finally, having contests helps employee engagement – the more stuff you give away, the more likely employees are to participate, Bordes says.

Coming up later: Bordes’ four steps to healthy living. It is making me change something I’ve been doing…