By Missy Popp-Lloyd, Director of Participation Strategy, Wellness & Prevention Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company.
There is no denying it—winter is fast approaching. We are all preparing for the frenzied remaining weeks of 2011. Thoughts of good food, loved ones and well deserved time off aren’t the only priorities that deserve our focus. If you want to lay the groundwork for a successful 2012 health and wellness program, you must begin planning now—the New Year is just around the corner!
Two Must do’s
First, identify clear program goals so you can monitor your success. While this seems obvious, a 2011 Buck Consultants survey found that * “only 37 percent of U.S. employers actually measure their program’s effectiveness”.
Second, map out an actionable plan to help meet those goals. Setting goals without a plan is like driving without directions. You know where you want to go, but have no idea how to get there.
Best Practices for Program Participation
In order to create a meaningful plan, we recommend focusing on six key areas:
1. Securing Management Endorsement
2. Providing Meaningful Incentives
3. Cultivating Program Champions
4. Establishing a Communications Plan
5. Providing Simple Access
6. Advocating Seamless Integration
While we don’t usually prioritize one area over another, we will in this case. Given that there are only a few weeks left in 2011, we recommend focusing on Establishing a Communications Plan.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate is the New Location, Location, Location
You can have the best program in the world, but if no one knows about it, you will have nothing to show for your efforts. When creating the communications portion of your plan, keep three words in mind: strategic, frequent and meaningful.
· Strategic: Communications should be tied to your goals
· Frequent: Messages should be ongoing, throughout the year
· Meaningful: Utilize known communications channels and segment communications
Here’s an example:
Your latest Health Risk Assessment results show a large percentage of your population does not engage in physical activity. You decide increasing physical activity is your goal for 2012.
In order to accomplish that goal, you identify several strategic communications throughout the year:
· New Year’s (January)
· National Employee Health and Fitness Day (May)
· Summer Wind-down (August)
· Holiday-focused campaign (November)
You choose to run multi-channel campaigns that will attract a high number of people to your initiative. In addition, you weave in personalized, segmented messages that speak to your population in meaningful ways.
We have found that segmented messages are vital to a program’s success. We commissioned a study in 2009 that surveyed 3,000 American workers and identified six segments of individuals. In particular, our segmentation focuses on how individuals like to receive their programs, a unique perspective in the industry.
Top Down and Bottom Up
Most communications plans are focused on the employee, but you must remember key stakeholders: senior leadership and program champions. Communicating frequently with these groups about program goals, success metrics and where you need their assistance is vital to the success of your program.
It is important to acknowledge that putting together a communications plan, while labor intensive, is often easier than say, garnering senior leadership support or building a champions program—two of the six best practices. If you don’t currently have either, that situation won’t change before January 2012. However, we encourage you to work with a partner than can help analyze those elements, and begin to create those programs throughout 2012.
The Other Best Practices
In our experience, program integration and access are at best “assumed to be working” and at worst, ignored. To have truly integrated programs when you have multiple partners is difficult. Analyzing your employee experience to insure a logical, user-friendly experience is paramount to driving participation.
An article on program implementation wouldn’t be complete without a mention of incentives. We do believe incentives are important especially as a jump-start to participation. However, we also believe that building programs that can establish participation goals without high dollar incentives is possible.
One final point. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention culture. The best practices are only meaningful when implemented in the context of your culture and no one knows your culture better than you. Remember that as you are reading this article, and many others, when creating or evaluating your programs. Implementing, maintaining and growing a wellness program will be one of the most challenging and rewarding tasks in your career.
About the Author:
Melissa Popp-Lloyd has more than 18 years experience in the health care field. Currently, she is the Director of Participation Strategy with Wellness & About the Author:
Prevention, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company, where she is responsible for creating products and services to support client needs including CAPTIVATE, a proprietary tool that analyzes organizations’ participation initiatives and recommends areas of improvement. At the beginning of her career, Popp-Lloyd worked in the wellness and prevention field in employer and hospital based settings. During her career, she has conducted over 450 corporate and conference wellness and health care presentations.
*”Working Well: A Global Survey of Health Promotion and Workplace Wellness Strategies,” Buck Consultants, 2011
