This issue isn't all that surprising when you look at personal behavior. Research has shown that less than 5 percent of people have written goals for themselves. The interesting part is that this small portion of the population far outperforms the other 95 percent of the population in achievement and in their respective industry.

So if this is the case, why doesn't everyone dedicate to writing down their goals? Many people get overwhelmed by the miniscule details such as time, budget or logistics. These are issues that can be simply answered by bringing in someone to help design your goals.

In the example of the wellness program, there are thousands of brilliant minds in the wellness industry that can provide you with direction and structure. My favorite quote to illustrate this is from Geoffrey F. Albert. He said, "The most important thing about goals is having one."

Since correct planning is important then, how do we get started? Remember a few bits of advice when putting together a wellness plan and goal setting:

1. Welcome cooperation – There are many people invested in your health management program, and they may not all have the same goals. Make sure to collaborate internally and externally with wellness experts to set the most impactful goals for your program.
2. Be flexible – As time goes on, your objectives and methods should change. In a field that is being reinvented every few years, if you are doing the same thing year after year, you have probably fallen behind the curve. Humility will enable you to see that no plan will be perfect from the beginning and allow you to admit some things didn't work and switch them out.
3. Be focused – Under-defined goals can be crippling. If you want to pick a broad goal like "we want to save money," you better have clearly defined steps along the way to accomplish that. If your goals are more specific, like "we want to lower the percentage of employees with metabolic syndrome by 25 percent this year" or "we want to increase generic prescription use by 50 percent," it provides a tighter timeframe, allows for success to breed confidence, and makes it easier to achieve your big picture goals.
4. Evaluate progress – Goals are amazing and helpful, but without a pre-determined evaluation process, you will never get the reinforcement of progress and achievement. This is another area in which an outside source can often give you a less biased assessment of which criteria you should be using. The worst thing that you can do for accomplishment is wait to set the evaluation criteria until after the process has begun. This will prevent you from being objective and, too often, the evaluation process becomes more about which metrics we can pick to show success.