Wellness programs and means of getting employees to stay healthy: a response to Kristin Van Busum and Soeren Mattke.

This is a short writing in response to the “Financial Incentives: Only One Piece of the Workplace Wellness Puzzle” (1) by Kristin Van Busum and Soeren Mattke of the RAND Health Advisory Services, RAND Corporation, in Boston. We would like to thank Kristin Van Busum and Soeren Mattke for their time in reading our article and offering excellent suggestions to employers and policymakers in order to make workplace wellness programs more successful for all employees. We agree that offering financial incentives is just one “piece of the puzzle” for employers as they contemplate strategies to effectively deal with this “giant elephant in the boardroom.” It is good to see that there is agreement on the urgent need for addressing chronic illnesses in the workplace along with reducing the spiraling healthcare costs. Our article entitled “Corporate Wellness Programs: Implementation Challenges in the Modern American Workplace” (2) was limited in its scope; and consequently only offered a discussion on rewards “carrots” versus penalty-based “sticks”, incentives for participation in corporate workplace wellness programs along with an examination of some of the legal considerations that govern those incentives in the United States. The article did make mention of health risk assessments, stress management, smoking cessation, and other programs that are not always based on financial rewards or penalties, but naturally can be helpful for employees, employers, and society in general. We do like Kristin Van Busum and Soeren Mattke’s suggestion of creating a “wellness culture” throughout the organization; such a culture is an excellent way to get everyone to automatically make healthy choices based on the socialization and peer group conduct that can come with such a “healthy” environment. There are many ways to develop such an organizational culture for behavior management; nevertheless, such an approach can also be criticized as the manipulation and even “brainwashing” of employees, thereby removing the option of making a “free” personal choice for themselves. The idea of “peer pressure” or “social pressure” is naturally a reality in every workplace; but then so is intimidation or even “bullying,” which clearly is not encouraged or formalized by employers. As educators, authors, and practitioners, we have trained thousands of corporate and public sector managers in the United Bahaudin G. Mujtaba*, Frank J. Cavico Correspondence http://ijhpm.com Int J Health Policy Manag 2014, 2(1), 47–48