When The Wellness Program Sags, TryTailoring









One-Size-Fits-All

• Counseling: Telecounseling, individual counseling andgroup counseling provide personal interaction. They can be aneffective tool for changing unhealthy behaviors.
  But counseling is also expensive and time-consuming. Employersmight be able to offer counseling to just a handful of employees,and some busy employees won?t be willing or able to participate.Some employees who do participate might have trouble maintainingtheir motivation and confidence levels once contact with thecounselor ends. And some employees might feel uncomfortable about"spilling their guts" to counselors.
• Brochures: Printing a brochure or posting it online isan inexpensive way to reach a large number of employees. Butknowledge does not equal behavioral change, and generic materialsmay fail to address employees? specific needs. A generic brochuremight give great advice to overweight employees about exercisingmore and eating less, but it might not talk about why Sam Smitheats half a gallon of ice cream every night or how Laura Lane, asingle mom with 3 sons, can find the time to exercise.
• Incentive programs: Cash bonuses and point systems cangive people extra motivation to make healthy lifestyle changes. Asuccessful program is usually worth the expense. But participantsmight lose their motivation when a poorly designed incentiveprogram ends, and employers dislike the cost of paying forineffective incentive programs.

Visit The Tailor

A good tailored behavior change program canovercome many of the obstacles that traditional programs face byaddressing employees? needs with personalized coaching deliveredthrough the Web or the post office. A typical tailored programstarts with an employee survey. The program uses the answers togenerate a personalized wellness program that tailors everythingfrom visuals to sentence structure to meet each employee?sindividual needs.

Highmark Inc., Pittsburgh, a large health insurer, began offering atailored program to its employees because participation wasconvenient and employees in satellite offices around the countrycould participate as easily as employees on the maincampuses.

The participation rate was twice what wellness program managers hadexpected, and the company decided to offer the program for free toits 4.3 million health plan members.

Some of the results for Highmark employees:

• 71% of the participants who wanted to lose weight lostweight.
• 94% of the participants improved their eating habits.
• 83% improved their stress management skills.
• 30% of the smokers who participated stopped smoking.

Amy McKenna is manager of employer and managed care healthinitiatives at HealthMedia Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich. Tina Palaggo-Toy,M.S., CHES, is director of worksite preventive health at HighmarkInc., Pittsburgh.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, October 14, 2004.Copyright 2004 by The National Underwriter Company in the serialpublication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as anindependent work may be held by the author.