You can’t change who you are but you can change your behavior. And sometimes, through consistency of habit, changes in how you act can truly alter who you become.
It’s no secret, as a culture we’re up against it when it comes to healthcare. People are living longer and the big time baby boom is still ramping up for its very costly dénouement. It follows that anything and everything we can do now to help people get and stay healthy as long as possible will be a boon for all.
The struggle to deal with runaway health costs runs the gamut from individuals to families to companies large and small. Everyone is affected. The irony? We, as individuals—taken in aggregate—are largely responsible for the mess. Heredity and early exposure to pollutants aside, how we behave—what we eat, how we handle stress, our relationship to the Barcalounger®, our work/life balance—these are the true predictors of our individual physical futures. What to do? Change the behavior. Change the future.
Companies have been arm-wrestling this conundrum for decades now. But it’s only recently that insights into how to truly affect positive behavior change, combined with the scalable means to impact large employee populations, have become available. The key, as it turns out was staring us in the face all along: Manageable, incremental steps ignited and made persistent by powerful intrinsic motivators that are deeply meaningful, personalized, purposeful, and mission-driven. Problem solved? Dream on.
It’s one thing to understand how to effectively initiate and sustain positive change in an individual—it’s quite another to deliver that experience across a broad population that, by its very human nature, demonstrates a near intractable refusal to rock the boat. As humans, we take our comfort zones very seriously. We also each carry within us a richly interwoven array of disparate physical conditions that absolutely cannot be effectively addressed as one-offs. The inconvenient truth—the Achilles’ heel of the industry—is this: you can build it and they won’t necessarily come. Driving population participation and engagement, as it’s known in the industry, is a million-dollar nut much in need of cracking.
The following are a few thoughts and tactics to consider applying pressure to; results, of course, may vary (as the lawyers never tire of saying):
1. HR is not marketing. Human resource folks don’t think like marketers. They’re not trained to do so and rarely have the time to figure it out on the fly. Still, they’re held to account when an expensive wellness program brought in under their aegis falls on its face.
What to do: Work with your digital partner to create a year-long, integrated promotional campaign; on- and off-line. Make it unexpected, provocative, progressive, and experience-based. Address entrenched skepticism head on. Don’t talk at, talk with. Lead from above and below simultaneously with authentic messages from the CEO and the garage attendant. Make it real. Make it aspirational. And sustain and build the effort.
2. Channeling health. A powerful behavior change solution delivers personalized insights, not just repackaged health information. Problem is, most of the channel communications promoting health and wellness solutions are anything but. Narrowing that experiential gap can help lead the way to significant up-ticks in participation.
What to do: Look for ways to make channel communications increasingly personalized over time. Wherever possible include program opt-ins for personalized emails, SMS, MMS, video blogs, even targeted display units (within the company intranet). Personalization amps up meaning and relevancy while ensuring that the communications are timely and actionable.
3. Device and conquer. There’s a revolution going on, often referred to as the “quantifiable self” movement that can play a significant role in helping drive increased engagement and prolonged individual success. From Nike+ to the mounting shelf-load of devices designed to talk to mobile and tablet apps, programs can now integrate potent, affordable health tracking activities and feedback as part of a meaningful, measureable behavior change initiative.
What to do: Develop a communication strategy that integrates with, and capitalizes on, this powerful movement at both the individual and group levels. Create a one-off promotional campaign that introduces self-measurement to your employee population. Build campaign variants based on the different devices being employed (i.e. pedometers, blood pressure readers, pulse monitors, body mass index measurements, etc.). Build momentum through cross-channel synchronization, for instance, footprints in the hallways herald a “Walk-It-Off” pedometer-centric event that’s promoted via SMS, and then amplified via real-time, intranet-based video blogging.
4. Seer to peer. Organizations get nervous when the words “social” and “health” are mentioned in the same sentence by their agency. Privacy regulations, when it comes to health information, are necessarily strict and uncompromising. No argument there. But, does that mean there’s no place for social when it comes to getting healthy?
What to do: Launch an anonymous company health network where employees can interact with one another around health issues and topics while not compromising their privacy. Departments can challenge one another—first group to reach 500,000 steps wins. The entire employee population can set, and then monitor, progress towards a healthy organizational goal. And perhaps most compelling of all, individual employees can buddy up (anonymously, at least at first) so that one employee can mentor and support another in overcoming a condition or barrier they’ve already confronted themselves.
As the healthcare debate continues to rage on unabated in Washington, all of us outside the beltway can influence the outcome through a proactive embrace of the latest insights, technologies, and solutions coming together now around the topic of healthy organizational behavior change.
