Who wants to pay more for healthcare and workers’ compensation insurance these days? If you are looking for a way to effectively reduce workers’ compensation and healthcare insurance premiums, consider combining wellness and safety activities into an incentive program.
Reducing Stress
One joy of having an incentive program is all of the fun, creative activities you can plan to help reduce workplace stress. Clients of mine have designed employee wellness and safety programs that reward participants who exercise regularly, take part in pre-shift stretches and physical activities, volunteer for sponsored events and provide suggestions to reduce stress in the workplace. All of these activities help to reduce stress among employees while helping organizations to achieve a healthier workforce.
Decreasing Absenteeism
There are two main causes for employee absenteeism: sickness and injury. Both of these reasons are preventable with increased health and safety awareness. Another reason for people missing work is that they simply feel entitled to a day off, sometimes referred to as culpable absenteeism. One way for organizations to lower the instances of culpable absenteeism is to offer attendance incentives. By assigning a reward level to the number of days without an unexcused absence, you can encourage employees to have perfect attendance.
Increasing Health and Safety Awareness
Raising awareness about employee health and safety is easier when employees are given incentives. My clients have come up with a wide array of ways to increase awareness depending on organizational structure. Lunch and learns, lectures, safety meetings, mentoring programs and events with cross-departmental teams can all be designed to raise awareness about important issues. Employees who attend or participate in these initiatives often are rewarded after attending a certain number of meetings.
Some organizations go the extra mile in increasing health and safety awareness by providing information employee can take away after the meeting or including information in the company newsletter. After these materials are reviewed, the company will send an invite out that asks people to take an online quiz about the topic covered as a way to increase knowledge retention. Anyone who gets a perfect score on the quiz is then rewarded.
Improving Employee Retention
I believe that engaged employees are retained employees. A wellness and safety incentive program can help to increase employee retention if two-way communication, relevant rewards and consistent recognition are a part of the initiative. Newsletters and emails help to keep employees informed on issues important to the company and pertinent to employees. Feedback forms allow employees to keep management informed on issues important to workers. If your company has a wide variety of lifestyle merchandise available for employees to choose from, then you are giving them the choice of a reward and the program is much more relevant. Recognition nomination forms let people nominate co-workers for safe behavior and for helping with health and safety concerns.
Wellness and safety incentive programs both serve to foster a desired culture in the workplace. When you take activities suggested in this post and incorporate wellness and safety themes, you are able to design an incentive program that will effectively reduce healthcare and workers’ compensation insurance.