When it comes to wellness and safety programs, you end up dealing with a lot of broken promises. Your employees intend to participate in challenges and make big lifestyle changes, but too often don’t follow through. And that leads to the biggest broken promise of them all – the one that every incentive program provider in the industry is making – the promise of engagement.

A program may promise 75% engagement, yet only create lasting change in less than 15% of your people. (And those are the people who would have been motivated to change without a wellness program.)

Meaning month in and month out, you’re paying thousands of dollars for the majority of your people to stay the same. It’s not that they don’t want to change; they just haven’t had a good enough reason to.

Buyers, be wary of vendors who claim to have 90%+ engagement. Here are 4 ways to debunk the engagement myth and not get fooled by false engagement claims:

1. Ask your incentive program vendor how exactly they define engagement. Many vendors will count a program log-in or sign-on as engagement. Look for a higher standard! At GoPivot, we consider 30% engagement to be very high. A better way to measure engagement is based on activity or challenge participation metrics, whereby each activity or challenge will have its own unique performance and engagement metrics. If you want to understand how engaged your employees are, take a closer look at your average engagement across all activities, and pay close attention to high and low performing activities.
2. Set clear objectives for your program, and measure that change over time. Say you have a high diabetes prevalence amongst your employees and set a goal to move 50% of those diabetics within a normal A1C range within 6 months. Just because your steps challenge is performing off the charts, or 80% of your employees have logged in to watch the monthly safety video doesn’t mean that you are any closer to managing your diabetic population.
3. Select a vendor that offers a pay for results program, as opposed to PEPM. If your wellness or safety program provider doesn’t offer a pay for results program, and instead, you are paying a fixed per employee per month charge for even those folks that don’t participate, chances are neither engagement nor your program goals are being closely monitored. Look for a vendor who will shoulder the risk for your program’s success.
4. Multi-channel communication is critical to engagement. If your vendor doesn’t offer a standard communications package which can be deployed via multi-channel, such as – email, web and mobile app messaging, push notifications, SMS/text, and print or direct mail – then they probably won’t be able to reach your diverse employee population that likely ranges from millennials to baby boomers, and desk employees to factory workers.

That’s why there’s GoPivot. With no pointless rewards, no misfit solutions, and no wasted dollars, we’re transforming the industry. It’s the only way to give everyone a reason to change.