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 In a nine-month comparison of workplace wellness programs with and
without “enhanced” features, researchers from Pennsylvania health
insurer Independence Blue Cross found participants in the enhanced
programs logged more steps, lost more weight and reported more
improvement in energy and mood.
“Giving out rewards as simple as tokens generated a lot of
camaraderie among the employees,” said lead author Dr. Aaron Smith-McLallen,
a social psychologist at Independence Blue Cross in Philadelphia.
“We noticed that employees motivated each other,” he told Reuters
Health. “They even started their own walking groups and went on
weekend walks together.”
Researchers compared groups of employees at companies that were
participants in the Independence Blue Cross Wellness Partner
program. In all, 13 groups of employees ranging in age from 19 to 77
years were randomly assigned to either the standard walking program
or an enhanced version.
All participants received pedometers to log their daily steps, and
each week they logged into a website to upload that data. Two weeks
before the program started, then three, six and nine months into it,
all participants also got physical health screenings and answered
questionnaires about their mood, stress levels and overall health.
The standard walking program included flyers and posters to be
distributed in the workplace, and a toolkit for employers with
suggestions for optional ways to motivate employees to participate.
The enhanced program included all these as well as monthly rewards
for employee participation, coaching, feedback, competitive biweekly
challenges and monthly wellness workshops.
A total of 474 people participated in the study, roughly half in the
standard walking program and half in the enhanced version.
Employees in both groups increased their step counts during the
first 10 weeks, according to the results in American Journal of
Health Promotion. But step counts started to decline in the standard
program group after week 10.
Overall, people in the enhanced program averaged 726 more steps per
day and were more likely to meet the recommended 10,000 steps a day
compared to the standard group.
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Even at the end of the study, participants in the enhanced program
were logging almost 1,000 steps a day more, on average, than those
in the standard program. The enhanced group also tended to log into
the website and enter their step counts more often than the standard
group.
In all groups, men who upped their step count by at least 1,000 per
day compared to the beginning of the study lost an average of 3.8
pounds and women who did the same lost an average 2.1 pounds.
A higher average number of steps was also tied to improved energy
levels, mood and sense of overall health.
It’s hard to know which part of the program was really the key
ingredient to improvement, said Dr. Kevin Volpp, director of the
Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics at the
University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who was not part of the
study.
“The challenge with these interventions is to disentangle the pieces
of the intervention, to figure out which components, like feedback
and incentives, had an impact,” Volpp said.
Still, the results are encouraging, he said. “When you get people to
engage in a walking program like this, they get excited about it and
that can rub off on others.”
For people who want to increase exercise, or want to start
exercising, walking is an easy way to do it, Smith-McLallen said.
“You don’t have to do it in a brisk way or elevate your heart rate,”
he said. “Just increasing the number of steps will have a lot of
impact.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/29pzUT4 American Journal of Health Promotion,
online June 24, 2016.
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