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.

More Personalized Experience Drives Even Deeper Employee Engagement, Behavior Change; More Actionable Insights Into Population Health Risks Help Employers Create Culture of Health

Traditional wellness efforts have failed to help organizations improve workforce health. Historically, they’ve been “one size fits all” – an approach that’s yielded low employee engagement and proven ineffective at driving real, sustainable employee behavior change.  And their insufficient data and reporting (if any) have offered few, actionable insights they can use to drive real workforce health improvements that help lower healthcare costs. At Virgin HealthMiles, we’ve turned the tides on this model, and today, we’re unveiling our Spring ‘12 product release.

Spring ‘12 helps organizations better motivate employees and drives higher employee engagement with a more personalized digital health experience based on better segmentation and more detailed data.  With Spring ‘12, employers get even more methods to collect detailed employee health data and enhanced real-time reporting so they can better measure and manage the impact of their employee health investments.

“Individuals are motivated by different things at different points in time.  What motivates one person may not motivate another. And what motivates someone today may not motivate them tomorrow. A ‘cookie-cutter’ approach won’t help employers create the culture of health or the lasting employee behavior changes they desire,” said Tom Abshire, senior vice president of products, marketing and member engagement for Virgin HealthMiles.

“But that’s been the approach most providers have offered employers. Here at Virgin HealthMiles, we do things differently. We take a consumer’s point of view and create a compelling, personalized experience that drives deeper engagement and leads to long-term healthy behavior change. With Spring ‘12, we’re equipping employers with more ways to target and tailor their programs for their workforce. And we’re offering new products and data collection methods that provide the data and insights employers need to optimize their employee health investments.”

With Spring ’12 release, employers can drive even better results and impact from their employee health investments.

Key Benefits of the Spring ’12 Release: Better Insight into Employee Population Health Driven by New Biometric Capabilities, Improved Health Assessment and Enhanced Real-Time Reporting

• Personalization, Detailed Data Drive Higher Motivation and Increased Employee Engagement:  Health and wellness programs won’t work if they don’t appeal to employees. Spring ‘12 leverages a more complete data set and enables employers to better target and tailor their programs to specific employee segments.  Employees can also utilize new tools to gain a better understanding of their health and develop a personalized set of health activities they find compelling. Developing their own plan increases employee motivation, engagement and behavior change.

• Expanded Suite of Methods to Collect and Measure Detailed Employee Health Data:  Spring ‘12 offers more methods to collect detailed health data and helps employers gain valuable insights to help guide decisions, strategy, and increase employee engagement.  Spring ‘12 includes expanded biometric screenings and health assessments, which provide employees with a better picture of their overall health and areas for improvement.  Armed with this data, employees can make more informed decisions and change lifestyle behaviors that lead to better health.

• Enhanced Real-Time Reporting Helps Organizations Target their Wellness Investments, Optimize Impact:  Spring ‘12’s enhanced real-time reporting helps employers better utilize data to identify, segment and market solutions that drive maximum employee engagement.  Improved real-time reporting helps organizations see which health areas are most important to address and then act on clear data to develop a strategy.  With real-time insights, organizations can focus or adjust programs to optimize their impact.  Enhanced reporting also enables employees to see all of their own, personalized data in one central place. This makes it easier for them to understand where to focus for improved health, set goals and track their progress over time, and personalize their experience and engage in activities that motivate them most.

Spring ’12 is now available to current and prospective Virgin HealthMiles clients.  Learn more at http://us.virginhealthmiles.com/resources/Pages/Spring12_WhatsNew.aspx.

Last week, Andy Pfeifer, director of total rewards for Timberland, a global leader in premium-quality footwear, apparel and accessories, joined Ed Dougherty, vice president of client and member services at Virgin HealthMiles, to present “How Timberland Leverages Social Connections and Technology to Create a Culture of Health,” a webinar featuring best practices for creating a culture of health and engaging your employees in long-term healthy behaviors.

During the webinar, Pfeifer shared how Timberland, a 1.4 billion dollar global brand leader, moved from a passive to active wellness program with a 67 percent enrollment rate and medical claims trending 10 percent lower in 2011 than 2010.

The webinar also covered:

• Issues businesses face as a result of unhealthy workforce
• How shifting your wellness program focus to prevention will improve the health of your workforce and provide other measureable results
• How to replicate Timberland’s success using social networks, technology and other best practices
• Challenges HR managers must address when determining the right wellness solution, including how to drive awareness/engagement, what incentives to offer, and how to measure program impact
• How to work around tight budgets using  incentives to drive engagement and options to fund them
• How effective program design, motivation, measurement, management will help you plan a successful initiative and create a culture of health in your organization.

Missed this webinar?  Download a complete recording and learn more about how to use social connections and technology to create a culture of health in your organization. If we didn’t get to your questions during the webinar, post a comment and we’ll answer them here on The Uprising.

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.

Every day, more and more companies are betting on the power of incentives-based prevention programs to improve workforce health and bend the healthcare cost curve.  Yet, measuring and managing the impact of multiple employee health programs and incentives creates new challenges for HR managers. Tough challenges like making sure the majority of your workforce knows about the programs you offer and finding easy, effective ways to measure the impact of your employee health promotion efforts.

Here at Virgin HealthMiles, we thought… there’s got to be a better, easier way to help HR managers address these challenges. So, we’ve been hard at work creating solutions to help you do just that.  And today I’m excited to announce our Summer ’11 product release.  

Virgin HealthMiles Summer ’11 delivers a range of new capabilities to help you address these two key issues: 

• how to drive higher awareness, consideration and adoption of your existing employee health and wellness programs;
• and, how to more easily and accurately measure the impact of programs on your employees’ health and productivity. 

Here’s a glance at what’s new in Summer ’11:

• Integrated Incentives. This first-of-its-kind incentives platform leverages SaaS-based technology to help you promote and incent all of your wellness programs in one place, streamline employee communications, and drive higher employee engagement and better results from your health and wellness strategy. 
• New real-time reporting functionality. Real-time reports provide you with up-to-date and easy to access information to accurately evaluate individual program performance and overall health improvements, as well as target areas for improvement and future investment.
• International solutions.  If you’re a U.S.-based employer, you can now offer our award-winning HealthMiles program to your employees in other regions around the world, expanding the health and productivity benefits that Virgin HealthMiles provides.

Learn more about these capabilities at our Summer ’11 Resource Center.  Here you’ll find links to datasheets, white papers, surveys and webinars that will help you learn more about the value of Integrated Incentives, plus more on new features now available.  Feel free to bookmark this page and use it as a guide over time.

Virgin HealthMiles recently conducted a survey to find out how large employers are approaching incentives-based health and wellness programs.  We asked what they believe is their biggest challenge when it comes to managing these programs, and, not surprisingly, the inability to effectively measure program impact was the number one challenge.  This is consistent with what I’ve heard from employers for a long time: they don’t know, and have no way of knowing, if the programs they implement are actually doing any good.  Not only that, many employers end up awarding incentives to employees who may not be doing anything to help reduce the company’s health care costs.

Technology-based programs will address these issues, and more. First, when employees use devices that capture validated data – as opposed to entering it themselves – employers can be confident that the participation and health shift data they see in program reports are real.  They can also align meaningful incentives with healthy employee behaviors, knowing that they are rewarding those who are helping to reduce health care costs. In addition, technology-based programs provide the participation and biometric data necessary to measure the effectiveness of the program and manage overall health and wellness strategies.

What’s more, with an easy-to-use program based in technology, more employees are likely to participate. They’ll appreciate the simplicity of the tools they’ve been given to stay engaged in their health. And technology eases the administrative burden often placed on HR departments when administering programs and incentives.

With technology-based programs, employers have the ability to point to quantifiable improvements in employee health.  And they can be confident that they’re rewarding those employees who are making the effort to take care of themselves and helping to reduce the organization’s health care costs.  For these reasons, these are the programs that often get much greater support – and funding – from senior leadership, allowing them to remain in place over the long term.

Sadly, I’ve had quite a lot of experience talking to employers about failed wellness programs.  Among the common reasons for failure – including low participation (a dismal 15% average); trust issues (employees don’t want to provide insurers personal data for fear it will be used against them); reliance on self-entered data (which can mean tedium and inaccuracy); and no compelling call-to-action, like, say “Take care of yourself and you could earn a lot of cash and big discounts on your health insurance!” – we hear over and over that most programs don’t allow an employer to point to quantifiable improvements in employees’ health. Without this measurement ability, there’s no way to justify the investment in the program, which means wellness will continue to hover at the bottom of priority lists.

So how do you ensure, when you’re evaluating programs, that you can measure its impact and tie it to your company’s bottom line? Consider the following: (more…)