Recently, the city of Charlotte issued a challenge to its employees: log your workouts on a website that tallies points for each department. Amongst City Hall, trash talk ensued. Christina Fath, the city’s wellness administrator, recalls that, if Human Resources was in the lead, ‘Budget would come back with a reply-all, saying “We’ll walk at lunch.”’ The six-week challenge garnered the participation of 469 municipal employees, which is twice the number of people involved compared to other years. The 8,800 hours of exercise logged by this year’s group is equal to almost half an hour per employee per day – and now more employers want a piece of the wellness action. According to John Tozzi a corporate wellness writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York, ‘Tying workplace wellness programmes to online games or social media lights a fire under workers as no number of posters in the break room can.’
But why does social media work so well in corporate wellness programmes? Brad Bell, an associate professor of HR at CornellUniversity, explains, ‘That social aspect creates some level of accountability. You know that if you don’t show up, people are going to notice.’ Tozzi adds that this motivational aspect is no small thing. ‘Getting staff to take care of themselves isn’t easy,’ he says. ‘In a recent survey of 512 employers by Towers Watson (TW) and the National Business Group on Health, companies called workers’ bad habits their biggest challenge to keeping health benefits affordable and cited lack of engagement as the toughest obstacle to changing employee behaviour.’ Perhaps this is why Charlotte isn’t the only town that has put its faith in the social aspects of corporate wellness programmes.
San Francisco start-up Keas runs a website where its clients’ employees can form online teams of up to six players and compete to earn points. Like in Charlotte’s city hall, workers do this by working out more, but Keas takes it one step further by asking employees to also eat better and manage stress. Participants are also rewarded for taking surprisingly addictive online health quizzes. Keas co-founder Adam Bosworth comments, ‘People would literally spend hours a day taking tens and tens of quizzes. The HR people, frankly, were not thrilled to see people spending an hour a day learning about their health…At the end of the day, it’s the social support of the game that keeps people playing.’
Tozzi details, ‘Fitbit, a San Francisco company that makes a pinky-size wireless gadget that helps people track their walking and other activity, didn’t target the corporate wellness market but quickly got pulled into it. In early 2010, six months after the $99.95 Fitbit went on sale, semiconductor company Tokyo Electron bought one for each of the 1,100 employees at its U.S. subsidiary. Since then, Fitbit has supplied hundreds of employers, including 25 Fortune 500 companies…The novelty factor draws in employees who wouldn’t ordinarily participate, especially gadget-happy men…A study in progress involving staff at one insurance company suggests participants take 40% more steps six months into the programme. And the website encourages competition without forcing workers to get too personal.’
Then you have a company like HealthPrize Technologies, who draw on the same psychology that gets people to play slot machines or join airline loyalty programmes. When employees refill prescriptions or log on to record taking their daily dose, they are rewarded with points that go up on a leaderboard. While those at the top of the leaderboard gain prizes such as a $100 gift certificate to Starbucks or Amazon, Katrina Firlik, the neurosurgeon that co-founded HealthPrize Technologies, asserts that employees are more concerned with the gaming and social aspect of the programme. She even recounts, ‘There was a woman who was going to have major surgery the next day, and she e-mailed us that she was worried she was going to slip in her rankings.’
