Creating A Culture Of Health: Incentives For Employee Wellness Programs

A good incentive strategy doesn’t come overnight. This is just like any other strategy, where you have to consider all the things that could potentially motivate your employees while still being beneficial to your company.

Wellness incentives aren’t something that we learn about right as we walk into the corporate world, which is why we’re here to help you find your way around all the possible options.

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What are wellness incentives?

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Let’s start with the basics. What even are wellness incentives?  

Well, while some employees are naturally motivated to join the company’s wellness challenges because of the lifestyle, there will always be the ones that struggle to make changes in their life. These people are the ones that we should focus on right now, while still taking the entire company into consideration.

You can’t know what’s actually going on in the lives of all of your employees. Some may have serious issues with their physical and/or mental health that could keep them from participating in wellness programs and challenges.

Incentives are there to kickstart their motivation and to keep it going as the months go by. You don’t want to leave your employees to their own devices, which is why you need to encourage them.

That motivation comes from different things, and throughout this blog post we’ll go through all the different types of incentives that will help you understand the people around you better.

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Types of wellness program incentives

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Wellness programs, like Rolla, are based on challenges through which we reward employees for working on their wellbeing.

The types of wellness incentives can range from cost-effective to more expensive ones. Most companies choose those incentives for their employees to make sure that they fall into the company’s budget and are beneficial to all the included sides.

With that in mind, wellness program incentives fall under these categories:

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Financial incentives

These include gift cards for sports equipment, massages, or anything that’s individually interesting to employees. However, monetary incentives can also be cash rewards that let the employee choose where they want to spend the money they earned by winning the challenges.

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Reward focused incentives

Sometimes the best benefits really are the ones that take some stress off of the shoulders of your employees. For example, discounts on health insurance premiums, additional paid time off to ensure they have a healthy work-life balance, or other things that could potentially come to mind.

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Health-focused incentives

You should probably thoroughly consider these, as not everyone will appreciate this type of incentive. For example, you’ll always have those people who make fitness their entire life, but some don’t really find this lifestyle to be crucial.

So, if you want to introduce fitness incentives, you should make sure that you reward the people with the right benefits. Fitness incentives could include things like gym memberships, wearable devices (Rolla Band for example - wink, wink), yoga mats, or even meal delivery subscriptions.

These incentives could motivate your employees to move more and take better care of themselves, but just be aware that not everyone is able to do that.

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Budget friendly

Not every company is able to go all out financially for their fitness incentives for their employees through their wellness programs. Which is why there are so many different budget-friendly incentives that could just as easily bring happiness to the people who participate in your monthly health and fitness challenges.

These incentives include things like public recognition, small tokens of appreciation, or simple certificates that carry emotional value. Sometimes, all people need is a little acknowledgement to know that what they’re doing is being appreciated.

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Why use wellness program incentives?

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There are so many benefits to actually using wellness program incentives. With Rolla specifically, sometimes we forget that health is a lifestyle and not just a destination that you can get to.

Health and fitness is a long journey for many of us, but as long as we continue working on ourselves and getting 10% better each day, it gets so much easier over time.

With that being said, some people need the added push from their company. Which is why there are so many different benefits of wellness program incentives.

To start off with the obvious, they drive employee engagement while creating an environment that values the health of their employees. Companies today are becoming more and more aware of the importance of employee health, but it’s still hard to figure out the right strategy to keep everyone motivated.

Well, incentive strategies boost the engagement of employees in wellness programs. You can’t really expect people to participate continuously without some type of reward. Which is why, companies that offer health incentives report a 22% higher average participation rate in wellness programs.

Once they start participating and get even more motivated, they’ll give their all to win the challenges and to become the best at that fitness game. So, in the long run, they’ll benefit even more.

Wellness program incentives also bring the focus to the company, as your forward-thinking will be recognized within larger groups of people. You’re building the awareness of the importance of health and fitness within your company as well as outside your company.

Your commitment to your employees will become the thing that you’re most known for. We can speak from experience here, as employer branding will never be an issue, when you live what you promote.

Our product is what Rolla as a company lives for, and we do introduce different types of incentives to motivate our employees to never stop improving their health and fitness.

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What about outcome-based incentives?

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Outcome based incentives are the ones where employees can get a certain reward for a pre-determined outcome.

For example, you may choose to start a challenge where you’ll want to reward the person who loses the most weight within one month. Or you could also do this by rewarding the fastest person on a 5K run that your company organizes. Either way, this reward is outcome-based.

Unfortunately, this type of incentive isn’t easy to maintain for years to come. We were even able to see a decline in employers who use this strategy. There’s even a study that suggests that outcome-based incentives make the interest of the employees drop over a certain time period.

This means that this type of incentive isn’t a long-term solution for the health and wellbeing of your employees.

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How we do it at Rolla

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As 2025 is rolling around the corner (see what I did there?), we wanted to introduce a couple of new incentives. In the previous years, we wanted to promote a healthy lifestyle as much as possible, which is why we had so many incentives that our employees had something to look forward to through each milestone of their journey.

There were even outcome based incentives when we started developing our Diet module within Rolla One, where we motivated people to lose those last couple of kilograms before a B2B Run that we were participating in.

Other incentives were there to motivate people towards a long-term goal.

Now, we introduced something new. As our Health Module is our pride and joy, we genuinely wanted to use the gamification within Rolla One to reward our employees. Through their Health Score, they’ll be able to get a four-day work-week!

Depending on how high their Health Score is, they can get a full-time four-day work week. It’s definitely something new for our environment, but it’s also a way to keep our employees engaged.

To get a higher Health Score, all they have to do is take care of their stress levels, their sleep, and the amount of steps they take each day. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s one of those things where consistency matters.

With Rolla, it’s genuinely easy to introduce these incentives and to reward employees. Why? Well, because with the monthly challenges, there are always winners. So, we know who wins and who will get a chance next month.

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Introducing incentives came naturally to us, but you can just as simply contact us to hear how we can help you out.

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