Companies love to sell wellness services, and employers love to buy them.
What could be warmer and fuzzier than cutting benefits costs by helping workers to live longer, healthier, more productive lives?
But Kunal Pandya, an analyst at Aite Group L.L.C., Boston, writes in a report on the U.S. prevention and wellness programs that lack of customer awareness and lack of clear participant incentives have caused many of the programs to fizzle.
The root of the problm is that the people who choose and help design the programs are employers, not consumers, Pandya says.
To succeed, program providers and sponsors must do more to reach out to consumers and offer consumers incentives that the consumers themselves value, not simply assume consumers want what the boss wants, Pandya says.
SO MUCH FOR CARROTS