At HMA our employees’ wellbeing is one of our top priorities.  We make it our focus not only for the benefit of employees being more productive, but also for the benefit of our clients as when employees feel well, they are more patient and go above and beyond to help our members.

Five years ago, HMA started our wellness journey with offering onsite challenges and small incentive for completing a Personal Health Assessment.  Since then, we have continued to morph our programs to encourage more engagement from HMA employees. 

This year, HMA’s wellness committee decided to change the format of our wellness incentive to mirror the changes we are seeing corporately in hopes to further drive engagement and more healthy changes for employees.

Our 2016 Wellness Incentive was a points-based incentive, where employees could participate in a variety of activities that were worth different point levels.  The more points received, the more incentive money earned.

In addition to making healthy changes, taking a Personal Health Assessment, and seeing a provider for preventive exam or recommended care, the program had various other activities that earned points such as: participating in a 5k, leading a wellness event, and volunteering.  We encouraged employees to focus on all areas of wellbeing – physical, social, spiritual, environmental, financial, occupational, psychological, and intellectual.

Our 2016 Wellness Incentive concluded on Monday, October 31^st and we have outstanding results.  One of the factors in our success was redesigning our movement challenge to focus on shared goals and offering collaborative ways to earn incentive points.  As Lindsay Harris, HMA’s Director of Strategy and Product Management, shared in her PSBJ article “Better waistlines and better bottom lines: Wellness programs can drive the employee engagement needed for financial success”, engagement grows when wellness goals are shared.

For our 2016 wellness incentive, we increased overall participation by 28%, 42% of the participants made healthy changes and we also saw employees encouraging coworkers to join them in a 5k, going on weekend hikes together, starting book clubs, volunteering together, and much more.  Wellbeing is becoming more engrained in our culture and helping to further increase employee engagement.