What’s the best way to get employees involved with a company’s wellness program? Get the company’s CEO, COO, CFO and other senior executives involved with it, as well.

At least, that was the conclusion uncovered by a survey conducted by Willis North America’s Human Capital Practice, a unit of Willis Group Holdings.

The survey recorded results from 1,949 employers, 71 percent of which had 500 or fewer employees. Participants insisted two important factors in success of a workplace wellness program were management support and cultural support for wellness. 

Cheryl Mealey, national practice leader, wellness consulting, Willis Human Capital Practice, acknowledged that the survey, now in its fourth year, reinforces the need for those in the board room to become actively engaged in corporate wellness with their front-line subordinates.  

“The need for management support continues to be one of the top things for these programs to work,” she commented.

Mealey isn’t alone in this kind of thinking.

“If we’re going to implement a get-healthy program and senior leadership isn’t participating, then the credibility of the actual program would come into question pretty quickly, as would the motivation to participate,” noted Karen Cunningham, human resources director with AmeriFlex in Frisco, Texas.

Other findings from the survey noted that health care costs remain the primary driver for worksite wellness programs; roughly 44 percent of those surveyed reported insufficient time and staff to offer a wellness program; and only 28 percent of respondents admitted to having a specific strategy in place to improve employee engagement in such programs.

Cunningham, for her part, said getting employees involved in wellness programs can be difficult; in addition to leadership buy-in, organizational culture is an important factor as to whether a worker will take part in a smoking-cessation program or weight-loss clinic or not. Aside from corporate culture, she continued, employees may not be seeing the connection between their wellness (or lack of it) and higher costs to them in the form of higher health insurance premiums.

Another reason for potential disengagement is because employees might not know about the programs or realize they exist.

“It’s just like training an employee in anything else,” Cunningham explained. “You have to go through the steps of informing them; reinforcing it,; reinforcing it again; reinforcing it a fourth or fifth time. People learn, and understand, in different ways, so the best way to ensure employees are picking up on it and using wellness tools is to reinforce that in every way.”

Mealey said another way to encourage more employee participation and involvement is by building personal success stories and testimonials into the information process.

“When people see others who are experiencing success, they’re more likely to want to participate themselves,” she added.

Brokers of wellness programs can help boost program participation by helping employees – through employers – understand the program’s direct benefits, and to work with employers to build a positive reward and recognition system, Cunningham said. Leadership can furthermore enforce the benefits of wellness programs by setting goals for the entire company in addition to participating themselves, she added.

However, Mealey pointed out, employers also need to understand that wellness is an investment, one that should pay off in lowered insurance rates, among other things. She acknowledged that with a slow improvement in the economy, more employers will hopefully put more resources toward existing wellness programs, and perhaps launch new ones.

“Many have grandiose ideas of what wellness programs should do for them,” she said. “But as with anything, you get what you put into them.”