So this is what we've been reduced to, so to speak.
We can't get employees to lose weight on their own so now we have to pay them to.
The Mayo Clinic – whose experts know a little something about health care – polled 100 participants over the course of an entire year. What the eggheads discovered, of course, is that the people who received cold, hard cash stuck with their plans (and actually lost more weight) than those who got little more than the satisfaction of self-improvement.
Recommended For You
Researchers split the group of obese participants (boasting a BMI of 30 or greater) into four groups with similar goals: lose four pounds a month, up to a certain threshold. Two groups received nothing for their trouble, while the other two groups earned a paltry $20 a month for hitting their goals. However, the fourth group also racked up a penalty – having to pay out $20 into a bonus pool every time they missed their four-pound goal.
Oh, and if you stuck with the program for the whole year? You earned a spot in a final lottery to win the bonus pool pot. Kinda like a fat-asy football.
Needless to say, the incentivized groups blew the no-reward group out of the water, finishing the program at a rate 62 percent to 26 percent. What's more impressive is that the incentivized group dropped a mean of 9.08 pounds vs 2.34 pounds for the poor saps in the control group.
Anecdotally, the reward groups felt more confident in their ability to continue their regime on their own afterward, understandably enough.
I think the last number I saw suggested 80 percent of employers have instituted a wellness program. I'm willing to bet half of them are about like our own here: invisible.
In this day, when every other month features a new stat on our growing obesity rates, our falling life expectancies (compared to their rest of the industrialized world) and our still-growing health care costs, wellness needs to be about more than taking away the snack machines. And studies like this one show that we, as a society, need more than a sense of self-worth. We'll need that weight loss in cash.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
