How Worksite Wellness Helps In Reducing Employee Healthcare Costs

Worksite wellness has become a trendy agenda inside businesses. Worldwide companies are in pursuit of using wellness to boost employees' performances. Apart from that, strategizing the right solutions helps employers to cut down on health insurance premiums. Employees also reap its benefits stemming from incentives like premium rebates.

Yet few are skeptical about pursuing it depending upon the options available to them. Often we come across questions like How much cost savings will we achieve? Or Which programs should we consider? And when coming to benefits and fines, Should we hold on to the carrot or the stick?

We shall delve deeper with these questions, as we justify how it affects your employee healthcare costs.

Why Is Worksite Wellness A Must For An Organization?

A healthy employee has sound physical, mental, and emotional satisfaction. It creates positive impacts on stress levels and expectations, contributing your employee's loyalty to your organization. They are more productive and lends excellent services while at work. These happy employees can directly lead to your customer satisfaction and bring growth to your business.

However, building a productive workforce isn't a piece of cake. The competitive corporate world expects its employees to work more than they are paid. Increased workload and deadlines have disrupted the concept of employee wellbeing resulting in unhealthy and stressed employees.

Also, a recent study from the U.S Department of Health and Human Services reports that:

• More than 59% of employees lack basic minimum exercises.
• 26% weigh more than their BMI, leading to a sedentary lifestyle.
• Over 24% has high blood pressures and other related cardiovascular diseases.

Employees being the pillar of organizational growth, it is vital to take care of their wellness. Un-attending these primary factors can result in some catastrophic situations for the entire organization. As employers recognized the need to foster worksite wellness, several corporate wellness companies came forward to counterfeit the issues by offering their well-designed programs.

How Can Employers Contribute To Worksite Wellness To Save Health Costs?

1. Implement a portfolio-based approach

It is a novel approach to organizing relevant assessments of the impact of worksite wellbeing at the organizational level. It helps in analyzing various metrics to broaden the perspective of your employee's health. Based on the interventions, proper guidance and solutions are suggested.

There is less possibility of wasting resources on trial and error of discovering an appropriate treatment. It helps enhanced engagement and saves costs on the overall process.

2. Offer integrated wellness programs

For the holistic development of your employees, offering a wellness program can prove beneficial. It helps employees achieve their short- and long-term health goals considering the financial affordability. It supports a physically active lifestyle that boosts your employee's productivity and engagement at work.

3. Prioritize pharmacy strategies

Employers are discovering new ways to decrease the medical expenses as the pharmacy benefit costs sores high. Evaluating carefully on expensive medicines is a way to keep a regular check on the costs. You may encourage your employees to use generic drugs or biosimilars as lower-cost is a useful option.

Also Read: Best Ways Employers Can Control Their Employee's Healthcare Costs

How Employees Benefit From Worksite Wellness?

Employees who actively participate in wellness programs offered by their company are more active and healthy than those who aren't offered any resources. These employees follow a nutritious diet to stay fit and productive throughout their work time. Also, it's not always the employers who enjoy saving benefits on insurance; employees also enjoy these benefits.

Worksite wellness initiatives help them to gain premium reductions from their employers as wellness incentives. These benefits vary from companies to companies. Some offer these rebates in individual systems or extend to employees' families that fulfill some health goals.

There are offers on achieving optimal ranges of biometric factors like BMI, Blood sugar level, etc. Some companies organize wellness campaigns to extend a group rebates on achieving health targets, like walking, smoking free cessation, or health assessments.

Offering such incentives will not only boost employee engagements but reduces the health cost of your business. It also allows your employees to achieve extra benefits for meeting health goals for themselves. It is a win-win strategy that uplifts the employee morale, elevating the work ethics.

Does Worksite Wellness Achieve Cost-Saving Targets?

Many employees, especially the young cohort from generation Z, are known to expect health insurance as their organizational perks. Offering premium health insurance is one way to retain your best employees. On the contrary, this perk has also left employers scratch their heads over the increased medical cost. Thus most companies face this affordability gap arguing the health costs as the prime issue.

Even though it's hard to identify the exact cost savings in these premiums, yet it is expected that these insurances focus on the ROI of incentives that are offered. Corporate wellness programs help in saving the guarantees contributing to employees' productivity and decreased workplace turnover.

These programs educate your employees about healthy habits, advising them to follow the sustainable way of leading life. As a result, such employees are less likely to fall sick, reduce absenteeism, and increase overall productivity contributing to shaving thousands of your business budgets on health care costs.

Conclusion

A right healthcare offering could be the carrot that retains your valued employees or lands a new one, especially those who are productive. Even a formidable salary is considered to be king in the decision process.

Yet, when that part of the compensation package is compared, healthcare coverage and its benefits move into the driver's seat, forming the core part of the worksite wellness.

Now I would like to know from you,

What are the worksite wellness strategies did you take to reduce healthcare costs?

Let me know in the section below.

This article is written by Rangana Atreya, a Content Marketer at Vantage Circle. Having a creative mind with a spiritful life, she takes inspiration from travelling and learning languages. For any related queries, contact editor@vantagecircle.com