While I don’t exactly work in a gym setting anymore I’m very much involved in helping people get healthy, and this particular article is a commentary on some of that work.  Hopefully it’s valuable and interesting to those who read this blog, but if it’s not well too dang bad its my blog and I can write whatever I want(slams door).

There is a lot of talk about ROI when it comes to the field of wellness or health promotion and I think much of the current commentary around that is a bit shortsighted.

I never once was asked what the ROI on a training session or training package was when I owned the gym, most people understood that the ROI was improved health and a more fulfilling life.  The same goes when working with organizations, the health of their employees should be paramount and the ROI conversation is an important one but should not be the defining decision whether or not to implement wellness programming.

If you work in wellness or health promotion, and your unique selling proposition revolves around return on investment, you are selling yourself short. It’s universally understood that part of implementing a wellness program is to drive healthcare costs down with programs and resources that engage employees.

Return on investment is an important part of that sales message but if it stands as the singular message you are delivering to clients, then you have likely not grasped the essence of wellness or health promotion. The essence of wellness isn’t about saving money; it’s about providing and engaging people with the education and tools to live healthier lives.

In order to really deliver valuable solutions to help employees improve their health, we need to get buy-in from the c-suite that is based on something other than dollars and cents. We have to engage the CFO or decision makers, narrowly focused on the financials, with a passionately delivered message that focuses on improving lives and sprinkle in enough information about financials to make it relevant to the bottom line.

In an age where obesity and disease rates are skyrocketing and healthcare costs are climbing equally as fast, we need to be able to present a message that wellness is the right thing to do for employees and balance that with the opportunity to save dollars. When we deliver a message that is solely focused on dollars and cents we stand to lose clients if programs fail to deliver, and programs failing is a very real possibility due to many of the uncontrolled factors that affect our clients and the market. In fact, if a program fails, it’s really just an indication that the approach was not the right one and needs to be altered, or some of its component parts need to be altered.

The fallout and lost momentum of stopping and starting wellness programs with different vendors is likely to provide similar results to a fad diet that works in the short term but long term finds us gaining the weight back and sometimes more. So setting the stage in our wellness programs and allowing for some course corrections along the way with the focus being on helping people will be more beneficial than simply focusing on how much money it saved. We also need to be able to readily admit that programs will guarantee return on investment, but if we have successfully improved the health of the population with minimal costs or at the very least a break even then we have succeeded.

We may find that at times this particular tactic doesn’t effectively sell wellness and that decision makers are only interested in the bottom line. If this is the case we need to be able to walk away from a prospect as anyone not invested in the health of their employees at least to the exclusion of the bottom line will likely lead to frustration and the inability to really affect change within the organization. There is plenty of business to be earned from those more interested and open minded to what employee wellness really is. By changing your message to be more inclusive of the benefits of employee health and well-being, with ROI playing a supporting role, we can stay true to the essence of wellness.