Posts Tagged ‘employer wellness’

The Wellness Scam Impervious to Facts

June 19, 2021 — A special kind of wellness woo as taken root in HR departments all over the world. Corporate wellness is a $53 billion industry selling an appealing narrative. Acme Widgets can cut its health costs and boost productivity if it nudges employees to adopt healthy habits. Healthy lifestyles will save us from illness, right? So businesses […]

Wellness That Didn’t Work Out

May 27, 2020 — It seemed like a good idea at the time. Build incentives for employees for wellness into health benefit packages. Employees “volunteer” to give up some health privacy in order to have their employers collect health data on them. They get a little financial incentive to participate and then more incentive if their health data improves. […]

Hoping for the Magic of Wellness to Kick In

April 18, 2019 — The data are stubbornly refusing to cooperate with the wizards of workplace wellness. A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds no effect on health or economic outcomes. Professor Eric Topol aptly sums it up in a tweet: The folly of “workplace wellness” programs: no clinical outcome improvements despite billions of […]

Fitbit: Helping Employers Peek into Your Lifestyle

February 17, 2019 — The consumer market for activity trackers is shrinking. Smartwatches have put a dent in the sales trend for Fitbit’s old bread and butter product – the fitness tracker. Of course, the company has responded with a pretty good smartwatch to compete with Apple. But a big part of its strategy is to make a buck by helping […]

Life Is Short, Wellness Be Damned

August 21, 2018 — This is a plea for perspective. For all of human history, people have yearned for longer and healthier lives. That pursuit became an obsession for some notable entrepreneurs in the Victorian era. For example, the wellness obsessions of John Harvey Kellogg and C.W. Post gave us Corn Flakes and Grape-Nuts. They became big brands through […]

Chow Time at Work

June 13, 2018 — It turns out that advertising for Philadelphia Cream Cheese captures a slice of reality – chow time at work. In a new study presented at Nutrition 2018, CDC researchers found that many workers routinely get a big chunk of empty calories from office food. In fact, 22% of workers get nearly 1,300 calories from workplace […]

Will Healthcare Purchasers Transform Obesity Care?

March 15, 2018 — Packing a suitcase is simple. Getting a plane safely into the air is complicated. But tackling obesity is complex. That’s how Susan Campbell, the senior leader for wellness strategy at American Airlines, described the challenge confronting her airline. American and other healthcare purchasers are finding a way to reach beyond simplistic approaches to obesity. Campbell […]

Overgrown Placebos: Corporate Wellness Programs

February 25, 2018 — Employers love to say that they have a corporate wellness program. But how much actual wellness do these programs bring to employees? Not much, says a new randomized, controlled study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Placebo Wellness You’ll hear plenty of anecdotal reports. People are sooo much healthier if they participate in […]

A Stupid Weight Loss Contest at Work: It’s Not Wellness

January 23, 2018 — NBC canceled The Biggest Loser for good reasons, but Schlumberger doesn’t seem to care. Yesterday, this oil industry employer kicked off a $10,000 workplace weight loss contest. They might be telling themselves they’re promoting employee wellness. But they would be wrong. At Best Counterproductive, Dangerous for Some The Biggest Loser was a controversial spectacle from the very […]

Wellness Penalty/Incentives Lose Again in Court

December 23, 2017 — They’re dead for now. Those godawful coercive wellness programs will be illegal on January 1, 2019, thanks to a new court ruling this week. A judge finally threw out EEOC rules that allowed companies to impose big penalties on employees who don’t step on the scale and lose weight. Some employers called them incentives. But […]