There's No 'I' in 'Team'
Companies are finding that team
wellness challenges work better to create behavior change than individual
incentives. But team challenges have their limits, too.
In an effort to inspire employees to take charge of
their health, Kaiser Permanente in May launched an online nutrition program to
encourage employees to eat more fruits and vegetables every day.
Called Mix it Up, the program has a database of more
than 120 possible fruits and vegetables to choose from. Employees signed up with
the goal of eating at least five servings of produce per day. They have logged
in to the site through their computer or a smartphone application, clicked on
images of the produce they ate, then dragged them over to a virtual blender. Mix
it Up then added up the number of fruits and vegetables eaten per day and
tracked progress over time.
Mix It Up is just one example of team wellness
challenges that are catching on at companies nationwide. Team-wellness
challenges at the workplace are relatively new, says Steven Noeldner, principal
and senior consultant at Mercer. It's part of the "gamification" of workplace
wellness programs, he says.
Indeed, wellness gaming companies such as Keas of San
Francisco and Kairos Labs of Seattle are harnessing mobile technology and online
social networking to get people to change their behavior.
A total of 13,350 employees participated in the
six-week Mix It Up challenge. Registrants could sign up individually or as a
team with colleagues. Forty-four percent chose to work as teams, while the other
56 percent took the challenge as individuals. Seven hundred teams participated
in Mix It Up over the summer.
While Kaiser Permanente did not specifically encourage
team participation, it found that teams ate more fruits and vegetables than
employees doing the Mix it Up program on their own, says Nancy Vaughan, vice
president of national accounts at Kaiser Permanente.
More than twice as many people on teams completed the
challenge as those who competed individually. And though more people registered
as individuals, team participation success was about double that of individuals.
Overall, 32 percent of all participants increased their fruit servings, while 29
percent of participants increased their vegetable servings, the Oakland,
California-based integrated health system says.
While there is little research on team versus
individual outcomes in wellness programs in the workplace, anecdotal evidence
suggests that team challenges can be an important motivator, Noeldner
says.
"More people tend to participate on team challenges;
people do like competition," he says. "It's not inconsistent from what we know
from behavioral economics."
However, Noeldner cautions that employers should view
team challenges as just one aspect of their wellness offerings.
"These activities are typically short in duration," he
says. "I think there's some limits to it."
While most people would benefit from adding more fruits
and vegetables to their diet or walking several times per week, other aspects of
their health status also need to be addressed, Noeldner says. For instance, a
diabetic would benefit from a tailored, ongoing program that could include a
personal coach, he adds.
Challenges can lose their novelty as well. "Any
organization that uses these types of campaigns has to think about changing them
regularly," Noeldner says. "There's a clear drop-off in the number of
participants in repeat campaigns."
And some team challenges can have unintended
consequences. Team weight-loss challenges have spurred the use of diuretics,
laxatives and crash dieting at some workplaces, he says.
"Often times, short-term contests don't support
long-term healthy behavior changes," he says.
