Use Your Workplace's Wellness Programs to Lower Its Healthcare Costs

Employees with unhealthy habits—including poor diet, smoking, and a sedentary lifestyle—tend to suffer long-term health problems. Care for those issues comes with high costs, with resulting insurance claims falling upon their employers’ healthcare plans. Nevertheless, you can address these problems by encouraging holistic wellness among your staff members. The most effective means of doing so is to implement effective employee health programs in your workplace.

Below, we describe a workplace wellness program, how it affects healthcare costs, and how to implement one in your organization:

What Is a Workplace Wellness Program?

The definition of workplace wellness involves more than physical health. The term refers to the care and management of employees’ physical, mental, emotional, and social conditions. Therefore, a workplace wellness program promotes or improves one or more of these conditions among employees.

How Workplace Wellness Affects Healthcare Costs

Holistic well-being is the most effective approach to mitigating long-term healthcare costs. An assessment of 56 workplace wellness programs found that properly implemented programs can reduce healthcare spending, workers' compensation claims, disability management claims, and absenteeism by 25%. In other words, healthy employees have less need for remedial healthcare and thereby avoid its attendant costs.

Furthermore, less remedial healthcare translates into fewer doctor’s appointments and co-payments. Finally, employees participating in wellness programs have a better chance of landing in the “low-risk” health insurance category. Reduced risk entails lower premiums for employees.

How You Can Implement an Effective Workplace Wellness Program

Use Your Workplace's Wellness Programs to Lower Its Healthcare Costs

There’s no limit to the number of programs you can offer, and wellness initiatives require only a few steps to set up. To begin, survey your employees on their health. A holistic approach could offer insights into areas of improvement and establish programs that focus on specific health concerns. Alternatively, you could let employees decide what matters most to them.

Here are some examples of workplace wellness programs you could create:

  • Nutrition coaching
  • Fitness/Weight loss programs
  • Smoking cessation challenges
  • Stress management counseling
  • Hydration goals

Having decided on an area of focus, you should establish a wellness committee—an internal, employee-run body to drive interest or initiative. This committee will work alongside management to create goals for the program, such as lowering healthcare costs.

Finally, you can implement your new workplace wellness program with the help of a well-being app built to facilitate health initiatives and provide universal access.

Launch Successful Employee Health Programs with Givhero

Givhero offers such an app, leveraging intrinsic motivation to increase adoption, retention, and engagement in employee health programs. The platform motivates employees through health challenges, custom goal setting, progress tracking, leaderboards, and charitable donations. Givhero supports successful workplace wellness programs by increasing employee engagement while reducing the administrative workload by 80%.

Launch your next workplace wellness program and decrease healthcare costs with one powerful app. Contact Givhero today at (240) 801-5927.