Gamification.  Game Mechanics.  Buzz phrases of the day?  Perhaps.  Yet more and more, you’re likely hearing about them in the context of health. And how employers are using them to create healthier workforces.

A recent Towers Watson survey reports 26 percent of employers support or are considering supporting employee health management with the use of online games (up from just 9 percent in 2010).

And earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal featured an article on the topic: “Pitting Employees Against Each Other … for Health.” The author, Anna Wilde Mathews, talks about how employers are leveraging game techniques to help employees improve their health.  Here’s a quick video, which provides a nice summary of the article.

So what do game mechanics have to do with health?

Game mechanics are a powerful tool. They’re a great way to engage your employees in good health – both in the employee health programs you’ve put in place, and in those all-important offline behaviors you want them to engage in – like getting enough physical activity, eating healthy, avoiding smoking, and more.

Game mechanics help ensure employees can easily learn how to participate, what they need to do to make healthy behavior changes, and better understand their progress against goals.  They make things fun and spark competitive spirit.  What’s more, they offer short-term reinforcement cycles and help keep momentum going over the long-term – which is crucial for sustained engagement and behavior change.

Earlier this year, Tom Abshire, SVP Products and Marketing here at Virgin HealthMiles presented a webinar about the role of game mechanics in employee health programs.  You can check out the recording here.  In the webinar, Tom shared four keys to effectively use game design techniques and game mechanics to engage your employees in your workplace health improvement efforts:

1. Break long tasks down into small, achievable short-term goals that reward achievement.
   Achieving health goals is a long process. Even with a sizable personal or financial goal or incentive at the end, it’s hard for many individual to take those daily steps towards better health.  With game mechanics, you can break down these long paths into small steps that make the long-term goal achievable. Game mechanics can help create small victories that support developing habits.  And things like incentives and levels can reinforce achievement.
2. Turn tasks into paths. Actions into habits. And effort into play.
   Conversely, at times we need our employees to focus on a number of related, but disconnected tasks. Employers usually have a range of programs you want employees to take part in.  Game mechanics can be an important tool to help employees make sense of the range of programs you offer by creating paths to follow and certainty on where they should start.  Points and incentives can help them understand what’s most important or where they need to focus next, based on their specific needs or the plan design for their segment.
3. Convert users into players.
   Game mechanics can convert users into players.  This speaks to the shift in motivation.  As users, we’re externally motivated to achieve a task – to get the job done.  By converting users into players, motivation shifts internally. With internal motivation, we’re more likely to pursue the next step in the program, discover what other tasks or challenges that are available that can help us advance or achieve. We’re more open to collaborating, not just competing. Game mechanics can open up another dimension of motivational possibilities.
   
4. Create a unifying experience around a changing array of tasks.
   Gamification can be important in creating an overall unifying theme, tying together the disconnected incentives and game mechanics that individual programs attempt to employ.  This is critical when you’re changing partners or your overall plan design.  Employees can more easily adapt to and understand the changes when the changes happen within the familiar context of the overarching game.  A unifying game also allows for better cross-promotion of programs – increasing the awareness and perceived value of your overall health and wellness strategy.

If you’re considering using game mechanics in your employee health initiatives, be sure to keep this in mind: if you’re asking your employees to engage and change their behaviors, you need to support them with things they want to do.

Your gamification strategies shouldn’t be too complex. Otherwise, you’ll lose your employees’ interest and they won’t participate. And low participation won’t lead to very much impact for your business or improvements in workforce health.  To see success with your gamification strategy, keep things simple and interesting.  Use game mechanics everyone understands – points, levels, rewards, badges, leaderboards, etc. – to drive adoption of healthy behaviors and ongoing engagement.

Buzz phrase, sure.  But game mechanics aren’t all hype. Since the very beginning, we’ve incorporated them as a key component of our engagement mix. And we’ve seen them help employers and thousands of their employees reap significant benefits – like participation rates nearly three times the industry average and significant workforce health improvements and cost savings.

Learn more about how game mechanics can drive employee engagement and better health in your organization in this free white paper.

Consider your 2012 employee health and wellness initiatives for a moment. Do they include opportunities for social interaction? Ways to foster healthy social communities? They should, according to a sampling of employees across the country.  We conducted a survey of over 1,300 HealthMiles members and found that employees are more likely to participate in programs if their social groups do; they’re more committed to good health if their colleagues are; they’re more physically active due to the influence of co-workers; and they even look to their peers for the latest health and wellness information. More specifically, the survey revealed that:

• The majority (almost 60%) of employees surveyed say that workplace community and social elements are either “extremely” or “very” influential when it comes to making the commitment to good health.  Only 3.8% believe that these elements are not influential at all.
• When asked what elements of workplace wellness programs are most effective at helping employees get back or stay on track toward health goals, not surprisingly, financial incentives ranked at the top. But almost 45% of employees said the opportunity for both social engagement and workplace camaraderie were the most effective elements.
• 38% of respondents say that their peers have kept them motivated and on track toward health goals; 35% say that peers help them increase their daily activity levels, and one-third of employees report that co-workers helped them get started with healthier behaviors.
• 46% of employees like to stay informed about what others are doing and sometimes get helpful tips from them.  Only 8% say that they do not rely on what others are doing.
• 52% of employees reached their daily physical activity goals with the help of their peers. Over one-third have lost weight due to peer influence, and 34% report improved morale and a better outlook due to workplace social communities. Seventeen percent report lower blood pressure as a result of peer influence, and almost 16% say they have a reduced risk of a health problem.
• And why does social interaction work?  Many (36%) feel that sharing their progress with peers keeps them accountable to their goals. Thirty-five percent believe that workplace social connections keep them motivated to participate.  Thirty-two percent say that competition with peers helps them to stay active, and 31% believe that exchanging information about what works and what doesn’t is helpful.

Check out the full survey report.

To further leverage the influence of social interaction to drive sustained, healthy behaviors, we’ve introduced Connections, a breakthrough solution that provides you with one social platform for all your employee health and wellness programs.  With this private, members-only social health community, employees build support networks; post updates to share goals and accomplishments; and create groups around common interests and healthy activities. Learn more about how you can leverage peer-to-peer motivation and support to drive engagement and better health across your multitude of employee health offerings.

It’s that time again, when organizations resolve to create healthier, more productive workforces. But many fail, mostly because they turn to the same old approaches that have proven to be ineffective over time. What follows are four approaches that drive real results, four best practices that we’ve learned through working with clients throughout the US,  that drive maximum impact from overall employee health and wellness strategies and investments:

Breakthrough #1:  Mind the Gap — The Desire for A Culture of Health and Today’s Reality
For years, creating a “culture of health” has been a goal for many organizations.  Yet a recent Buck Consultant’s survey found only 10 percent of U.S. respondents felt they’d fully achieved a culture of health in their organizations, while 85 percent intend to pursue one. How can companies close the gap between their desire for a culture of health and actually achieving one? Failed “Wellness 1.0” solutions aren’t the answer.

Lifestyle-related disease is driving much of our burgeoning healthcare bill. At the root of these diseases are personal health behaviors like not getting enough exercise, smoking, and poor eating habits. Often these behaviors are reinforced by personal relationships and become social norms. That’s one of the key reasons the traditional top-down push approach to health and wellness can only go so far.

To improve the health of their organizations, employers need to combine motivation, opportunity and triggers for the actions they want to encourage. Based on our experience working with leading employers, we’ve learned all three elements are a necessity, whether employers are seeking to create healthy habits or healthy cultures. Couple this critical mix with a proven, easy-to-use solution that drives healthcare and productivity savings, and our clients today are seeing real employee health improvements, while quantifying the impact on their overall health and wellness strategy.

Breakthrough #2:  Forging a Creative Health Partnership with Employees
Not surprisingly, employers who actively build a partnership with employees – one in which employees get the motivation and tools they need to make healthy behavior changes and employers reward them accordingly – see tangible outcomes. Leading employers are increasingly applying this version of the “good driver discount” to their employee health and wellness initiatives that, along with compelling incentives, turn what could have been sticks into carrots.

We pioneered the Pay-for-Prevention™ approach to employee health, and we’ve seen firsthand that this win-win strategy motivates employees. This approach helps employers align incentives for actual, ongoing performance and reward employees with cash or healthcare premium discounts for staying active and healthy.

Breakthrough #3:  Make it All Make Sense
A recent Forrester Research survey of U.S. employees found that with every health and wellness program offered, the majority of employees, between 63% and 86%, were unaware of the specific health improvement programs their employers offer. How can employees take action if they don’t know about or understand their employer’s health offerings?

Progressive organizations know the path to engagement is through awareness and are tapping tools to bring together employee health programs and incentives into one compelling platform. Through a technology-based solution that integrates a range of third-party programs, employers can promote, engage and incent all of their employee health programs centrally, making programs easier to discover and use, and drive better results from their health and wellness strategy.  For instance, one of our clients experienced more than 80 percent enrollment in its employee wellness program and realized a $3 million reduction in employee-only medical claims.

Breakthrough #4:  New Ways to Translate Small Steps into Big Results
Good health isn’t accomplished overnight. Rather, it’s the cumulative effect of small steps reinforced with positive feedback.  Even with big dollars on the line, financial incentives may not be enough on their own, especially when that reward is many months away.  Social networking and game mechanics are key factors in helping employees better understand what to do next, set short-term goals and celebrate their immediate healthy achievements, helping them stay on the path toward long-term health goals and incentives.  Social networking and game mechanics, in tandem with other behavior change strategies, help motivate employees long-term to stay on the path to good health by keeping it fun, engaging and rewarding.

Since 2005, Virgin HealthMiles has been at the forefront of developing innovations that help companies achieve significant workforce health improvements and cost savings.  These four breakthrough ideas are at the core of these successes.  Learn more about how we can help you get started with a health and wellness program or help you drive better results from all your existing programs.

Like many U.S. organizations, you’re probably offering employee health programs as part of your 2012 benefitspackage. But will they actually get your employees out there doing something about their health? Will you be able to measure the results? Are your incentives tied to the outcomes you want to see? Today, we’re offering 5 employee health and wellness program best practices, based on our experience with large organizations across the country.

1. Stem demand by taking action. Forget the passive programs of the past. They don’t work. To actually improve health and stem the demand for expensive
   medical care, employees need to engage in healthy behaviors every day. They
   need to eat better, get more physical activity, quit smoking – in short, they
   need to do something. Don’t just check the wellness box by offering a questionnaire; take action now with prevention-based programs so your employees can take action, too.
2. Tap technology to measure results. You can’t see the impact of your programs without measurement mechanisms in place. And for that, you need good technology. Technology that captures validated performance and program data and presents it to you in easy-to-access and easy-to-read reports. This way, you can measure the impact of your programs and manage your overall strategy.
3. Tie incentives to desired behaviors. Incentives are key to improving employee health. But make sure they’re tied to the behaviors you want to encourage, such as ongoing participation and performance in your prevention-based programs. One-time incentives do little to improve healthy lifestyles and bottom lines over the long-term. And be sure they’re meaningful to your employees. Aren’t sure what might be the most meaningful? Ask them.
4. Get social.  Health behaviors are heavily influenced by our peers. Leverage this powerful fact with programs that encourage your employees to support and challenge one another, hold each other accountable to healthy goals, form walking groups, share workout tips, healthy recipes, photos, success stories and more.
5. Evaluate cost-neutral ways to fund your wellness efforts.  Take advantage of things like the new provision under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) which will allow you to offer incentives of up to 30% of annual premiums in 2014 (an expansion of the current HIPPA regulation which currently allows up to 20%). This, in conjunction with cost-shifts and plan redesigns can yield enough cash to fund programs, incentives, and even realize potential net savings.

Question: do you know the impact your health and wellness programs are having on your employees? Are they helping to improve their health? Are your employees more engaged? Are they even using the programs you offer?

You’re not alone if you’re unsure about these questions. A recent Buck Consultants survey found that only 37 percent of respondents measure the outcomes of their employee health programs, and that a high percentage of respondents don’t know the impact of their health promotion efforts.  I imagine these employers probably want to know, they just don’t have an easy and accurate way to point to quantifiable outcomes. But without that, isn’t it difficult to justify having the programs in the first place?  

Unless employers want to simply check off the wellness box and call it a day, it’s critically important to the success of your programs – and to your overall employee health strategy – to evaluate and measure their performance.  How else will you know if your programs are working? How will you identify areas for improvement and make informed decisions about future investments in health and wellness? And let’s not forget about justifying your current investments. Your exec team will probably want to know what your organization is getting for the money.

So show them. Choose programs which provide real-time reports based on validated performance and health data.  Real-time, on demand reports which are available when you want them – not when your vendor conducts an annual review meeting.  Full of validated data, collected by devices such as activity trackers and biometrics measurement stations – not manually entered by employees.  These key components will allow you to easily and accurately measure real results and program impact.  Not only that, if you use an integrated solution for your incentives programs, the reports can provide information about how your employees are engaging in all of the programs you offer, making them much easier to manage.

And seeing program performance in real-time allows you to optimize as you go.  It’s much more effective to make small adjustments to your programs throughout their lifecycle rather than wait and make big changes once a year. Be proactive in program optimization with real-time information, rather than taking a retroactive look at what you could have done to make your programs more effective. This way, you can get much more out of your investments, and better adapt to your changing business needs.

Part 3: Make your Incentives Relevant and Valuable to Employees

Welcome back. Last week, I shared my first of three best practices when it comes to designing an effective integrated incentives program for employee health and wellness: determining the right structure for your incentives-based programs.  Today, I’ll discuss the second best practice, which asks you to consider not just how much you’re offering, but what you’re offering.  Make sure the incentives you offer are relevant and are of value to your employees.  Carefully consider these important factors: (more…)

Part 2: Determine the Right Incentives Structure

Last week, I began a series about how to design an effective integrated incentives program for employee health and wellness – one that brings everything you want to offer under one umbrella – by first suggesting some key considerations.  Have you answered those questions? If so, you’re ready to begin designing your program.

In my experience working with large organizations across the U.S., I’ve found that there are 3 best practices when it comes to developing a robust and effective program. Today, we’ll discuss the first one: determine the right structure for your incentives-based programs. To do this, you must: (more…)

Part 1: Key Factors to Consider

There’s no shortage of programs and tools to help improve employee health.  Prevention-focused programs, intervention programs, assessments and diagnostics… you want to offer a variety of them, but you’re a little overwhelmed – and rightfully so – at the thought of managing all the programs, the vendors, the incentives. And you don’t want your employees to have a disjointed, confusing experience, preventing them from participating.  You’ve heard from us, and perhaps you’ve read here on the blog, that an integrated approach is the way to go. One that brings everything together under one umbrella. You like what you hear… but what’s the next step? I’ve worked with numerous companies across the country as they’ve designed their programs and have seen that those who carefully consider these 3 key areas have the most success in designing effective integrated programs: (more…)

Often times, when I ask our clients what their hurdles are in launching a health and wellness program, I hear about the difficulties in reaching geographically dispersed populations.  It can be difficult to engage employees in multiple locations and make sure the program’s message is consistently disseminated across the entire organization.  There are some best practices to follow when choosing and implementing a health and wellness program that can alleviate the problem.

1. Implement programs that are broadly applicable.  I’ve found that for a program to have a significant impact, it must be applicable and relatable to everyone.  While everyone is different and has targeted needs, employers should take a preventative approach to wellness and provide an overarching program that addresses the population on a whole. The better job a company does to implement programs that apply across the board, the better the employee response and overall results. (more…)

Recently, our client Protective Life Corporation was the recipient of a 2010 Optimas Award from Workforce Management Magazine.Protective was recognized in the Partnership category for their work with Virgin HealthMiles to develop a wellness strategy that engages employees in improving their health and well-being.  This award got me thinking about partnerships and what makes a good relationship between an employer and an employee health and wellness provider. 

Here are some key factors we’ve learned from our experience to consider when developing a health and wellness program.

Identify specific challenges.  What are the challenges for your organization when it comes to employee health? What are the challenges for your employees? We often hear from clients that HR managers are tasked with motivating employees and spending too much time managing several incentives structures leading to sub-optimal program results.  On the flip side, employees often feel that that it’s not clear what is being asked of them and the incentives aren’t compelling.  Find a provider who can address your company’s specific needs.  If you’re managing a program with multiple incentives, you need a provider who integrates all of your incentives.  The bottom line is to find someone who can the whole experience easier for you and your employees and help you produce better results.

(more…)