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What inspires a company to implement a workplace wellness program? Is it a genuine concern for employees’ health, a productivity improvement initiative, or a way to balance the health care budget?
Dr. Jeremy Bray, Jefferson-Pilot Excellence Professor of economics at UNC Greensboro’s Bryan School of Business and Economics, and collaborator with The Carolina Center for Healthy Work Design & Worker Well-Being, has found that only the rare employer adopts an employee wellness program purely for a potential return on investment (ROI).
“Our doctoral students are trying to find out why companies adopt them,” he said. “There’s a huge debate as to whether wellness programs lead to savings. Our hypothesis is that a specific disease-management program, like for diabetes, may save health care costs by directly tackling an issue, while a general wellness program, with discounts on gym memberships and the like, would take years to manifest cost savings.”
In recent years, his team has received funding from a UNCG Giant Steps Research Development Grant, which provides seed funding for projects that enhance UNCG’s external visibility, encourage research, and have the potential to leverage preliminary results to obtain significant future funding.
READ MORE | UNCG Bryan School continues to share economic expertise with NIOSH Center
Several UNCG faculty and graduate students have now worked on Wellness Council of America (WELCOA)-funded worksite health promotion research. They help Bray, UNCG professor of public health education Dr. Daniel Bibeau, and Department of Public Health Graduate Program Director Michael Perko analyze WELCOA data, reviewing corporate responses to the Well-Workplace Checklist that went online in 2008 and focused on WELCOA’s seven benchmarks for quality.
“We want to understand and align public policy, company, and employee motivations for wellness,” said Bray. “Our experience with WELCOA – the nation’s largest wellness member organization – gives our university the opportunity to make a big splash.”
Nilay Unsal, one of Dr. Bray’s former doctoral students and now a research fellow at Ankara University in Turkey, has encountered preliminary findings that suggest new adopters of wellness programs are more likely to implement health screenings to control health care costs. Companies with four-plus years of wellness experience are adopting smoking cessation programs with the hope of an ROI and nutrition programs to help control health care costs. Companies with 10-plus years of experience are more likely to implement physical activity programs with an eye on ROI.
The team hopes to help UNCG further develop its own wellness program, Healthy UNCG, and become a leader in innovation best practices. That means increasing opportunities for wellness education, practice, and research and creating campus space for piloting wellness initiatives.
Research by Dr. GracieLee Weaver, assistant professor in public health education at UNCG, has focused on the quality of worksite wellness initiatives.
“We have the potential to impact a large population of people through system-wide changes,” says Weaver. “We hope to help companies improve worksite wellness initiatives by tailoring supports based on expected performance and likely areas for improvement.” Weaver is now using Carolina Center pilot funding to incorporate healthy work design concepts into interventions to address opioid misuse in the workplace.
And even if workplace wellness programs don’t directly affect health care costs, they can still be impactful.
“Wellness programs may affect both absenteeism and presenteeism when employees show up but aren’t as productive as they should be,” said Bray, whose team says wellness programs can also serve as recruitment and retention tools for companies.