GiftCard Partners Blog

Since employers typically renew health benefits in January, employees receive their health benefits options for 2012 around now, giving employees plenty of time to think about what they want in their health benefits plan for the coming year.  As expected employees will be facing changes, most of which include paying more and receiving less coverage.  While employers engage employees in healthy practices with rewards for healthy behaviors through health and wellness programs, health coverage still comes at a high cost, and is often an easily downsized benefit. Here are 9 tips from
GoLocal Prov in Providence, Rhode Island on how to make smart choices when choosing health benefits.

You spoke and we listened. We’re gathering and publishing results of our 2011 Gift Card Usage Survey and we’ll be including success stories in each eNews. Health and Wellness Incentives Wellness incentives have become good business. They reduce health care costs for employers and increase employee productivity.  To enhance participation, rewards are given to employees for filling out HRA’s (Health Risk Assessments). HRA’s are used to assess the lifestyle risk behaviors of individuals as part of the annual Periodic Health Assessment, work-site wellness program, or other community health activities.  Health and Wellness Programs are measurable; rewards can be given via a points system or for participating in healthy activities like joining a gym, or for achieving healthful milestones like losing weight, decreasing blood pressure or taking daily walks during breaks. Here are a few ways that our survey respondents are using gift cards to engage, motivate and reward:

Employers are now finding ways to punish employees for unhealthy behavior.  Increasingly, employers are holding their employees responsible.  Instead of blindly providing health insurance to all employees on the same level, regardless of their health, employers are giving one kind of insurance to healthy employees, and a less desirable package to less healthy employees.  Deductibles are higher for employees who are over weight, who smoke, or who have other conditions that result from unhealthy behavior.  Employees can avoid this cost by participating in wellness programs, provided by the employer, but if they choose not to, they face the insurance increase. Some workers rights groups find these practices coercive, and unfair.  Opposition to these kinds of insurance programs stem from the fact that often, it cannot be proven exactly how much more a less healthy person costs a company, than someone who is healthy and in good shape.  At GiftCard Partners we believe that a Carrot Vs. the Stick approach, which offers rewards and incentives for good behavior, is far better than outcasting and punishing employees.  Although these practices promote a healthy lifestyle, is it fair to essentially reduce an employees paycheck when the company cannot tell exactly how much more that person is costing them?  
For more information read the full Chicago Sun-Times article If you have an opinion on these programs, or your company runs a program similar to this, leave us a comment.

This article was brought to our attention by GCP’s co-founder, Ed Shulkin (thank you Ed!).  It’s enlightening and heartening to know that there are companies out there that, like GCP, are striving for a complete balance of work-life. This article outlines the importance of promoting 5 factors of well-being into the workplace lives: career, social, financial, physical and community well-being. BUT, the true gems of this article are in the depth of the interviews and stories of how these factors are integrated into the cultures of companies like Zappos.

Here’s a corporate health and wellness case study that we think has some great new ideas peppered into it. Xceed Financial Credit Union’s in-house event and promotion team research wellness programs from across industries and designed their own program, which includes: