Avinash Saurabh

Let me start with a question so fundamental that you may even find it silly, that I am asking it.

“Do you feel more positive, energetic and productive when you are healthy compared to when you are not?” In my experience, I am yet to meet someone who answers the above question with a "No". We all feel and perform better when we are healthy. So it stands to reason that when 100, 1000 or 10,000 people feel healthy, they will collectively perform better than when they are not healthy. Hence, when an organization is healthier, it performs better.

It is very perplexing when I hear people complain, debate or proclaim that wellness programs don't work for an organization. I feel the real debate should not be to prove whether or not the wellness programs work, but to figure out how to make them work. In all fairness, the current understanding of the impact of wellness programs is not completely wrong. Companies have been doing multiple wellness programs like yoga classes, weight management, fitness sessions, stress management etc; and there is no conclusive data to link all these programs to any economic indicators that the organization would care about. To me, the lack of such data is not an indicator of the ineffectiveness of the programs. Rather, it points to a fundamental question - are we running the programs correctly?

Take, for instance, a weight management program. Many companies call in a dietician or a weight loss expert to their campus. Some even use app-enabled services. But when you put this program in the context of thousands of people at an organization, the reality is different. It is possible that not everyone is interested in the program, or, for that matter, even has the need to lose weight. The relevance of these programs for a large group, which in this case is an organization, is as low as 6 to 8%. Meaning, no more than 8% of the employees want to reduce their weight. So at the outset itself, the program is useless for most of the employees.

Then comes the issue of engagement. Out of the 8% people who might be potentially interested in the weight loss program, no more than 20% would be able to participate. This lack of participation is not because they are not motivated. It's because they may not be motivated in the 3rd week of January between 9th AM and 12 PM when the dietitian is at campus! After all, it’s their workplace; they might be busy, may have deadlines to meet or they may not be located on the same premises.

Current wellness programs don't work because they are not designed to work for a large group of people. Nothing to take away from the program itself; they are great programs and deliver amazing results for individuals. But they can't scale.

The programs run by companies are great personal wellness programs, they are not great organizational wellness program. To really craft an effective organizational wellness program, one which delivers results, we will have to work from the ground up. We need to think about personalization, program sustainability and behavior diffusion. Masquerading a personal wellness program as an organizational program will never create significant results. So how do we do it?

At zoojoo.be we have synthesized our learnings from delivering the program to over 150,000 employees into a framework that creates meaningful wellness results for the organization. Our implementation has been studied by the Indian Institute of Management - Bangalore, Georgia State University, and the World Economic Forum. Below, I have shared two major learnings that we had in the process of creating our framework, which I feel is central to the debate of making an organizational wellness program work.

1) Start with the end in mind Even before we design a program that would deliver results, we need to know what results we want. I can't stress enough, the importance of getting your desired outcomes in place even before you start. We have worked with multiple large companies and we always ask them, why they want to run a program like ours. What is it that they really want? The desired outcomes vary. Some want to increase productivity, some reduce absenteeism, some want to bring down the insurance cost associated with a particular disease, some want to foster team work, and some just want employees to engage. Depending on the outcome you want, the program that you create would change. It's also important to note that there are no right or wrong outcomes. Just zero in on whatever is most important for your organization. This will serve you as the North Star that guides every aspect of your program structure. Without a concrete written goal, you will just end up carpet bombing - run all kinds of programs and hope that something happens!

2) Design for behavior changes, and not outcomes One of the most common reasons why a corporate wellness program fails, is because employees don't engage with it. Employees don't engage because it is not relevant to them.

Let me give you an example. One of the international clients with whom we are working asked us to create a hypertension program for their entire workforce of over 5000 employees. The reason they wanted to do this was:

a) The insurance claims due to diseases related to hypertension was increasing each year

b) Their insurance data showed that year on year people from low and medium risk group of hypertension were moving into high risk group. So the program had to be run for everyone, to curb the movement.

The goal of the organization was clear, but the problem is that we can't run a hypertension program for everyone. If you roll out a disease management program for 5000 people, majority of them will not engage because they don't have the disease! Employees in low and medium risk group don't have enough motivation to engage. So what is the way out? How do we get the desired outcome?

The answer:

Instead of designing for outcomes, design for behavior changes that will lead to those outcomes. We broke down the entire hypertension program into a series of micro goals or habits that employees must form; and then ran programs for those micro goals. Employees may not be interested in reducing the risk of hypertension, but enough of them would be interested in 5 minute power breaks to do desktop exercise. And guess what, a power break like that helps you bring down the risk of hypertension. We identified over 50 micro goals clinically linked to a reduction in the risk of hypertension; and nudged employees to engage with them. Over a period of 12 months, we helped employees achieve 5 to 6 micro goals, hence collectively bringing down the risk of the organization. The results:

a) Insurance claims due to diseases related to hypertension came down by 5% (first time in the last 6 years)

b) The movement of employees from low and medium risk group to high risk group came down by 17%

Avinash Saurabh

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India 4K followers 500+ connections

Experience

OneJam.io

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Education

Sikkim Manipal University of Health, Medical and Technological Sciences

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Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

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