Health

The wellness effect

February 17, 2016

North America

February 17, 2016

North America
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Key Findings

  • There is a competitive advantage for companies with a wellness culture while lack of time is the biggest impediment to employee participation.
  • Employer motivations for offering wellness programs differ by company size.
  • The biggest challenge to wellness is stress; but employers and employees disagree on how best to remediate it.

Methodology

The employer survey, conducted in October 2015, includes 209 human resources (HR) executives and managers at US-based companies who have direct knowledge of their company’s employee wellness programmes. About a quarter of them work for organisations with between 2 and 49 employees, nearly half have 50-1,000 workers and the remainder have 1,000 workers or more. A wide variety of industries are represented.

The employee survey, also conducted in October 2015, includes 500 full-time workers based in the US, all of whom participate in an employer-provided wellness programme. Respondents are evenly divided between male and female, and each of the three main generational groups (Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials) is well represented. The majority of respondents are university-educated. One in five works for a company with 2 to 49 employees, two in five work for companies with 50 to 1,000 employees and the remainder work for companies with more than 1,000 employees.

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