Big data will also be used more frequently to personalize wellness offerings to provide relevant feedback and support to help employees reach their goals.

For example, an intelligent computer system could recognize that an employee hasn’t completed an e-learning wellness course and send her a message asking if she needs assistance or prefers telephonic coaching instead. It may also try to motivate her by noting that her co-worker in accounting has nearly finished the course, or that over half of the firm’s employees had completed it. Alternatively, it might suggest that she focus instead on her other goals, such as improved nutrition, and ask her if she would like resources about that topic.

Another example: Using data reported by employees, an employer could ascertain that some are far more concerned with achieving financial wellness than they are with quitting smoking or losing a few pounds.

Thus, the employer could provide these employees with financial planning resources, rather than communicating with them about tobacco cessation or weight loss programs.

Incentives

While employers have long used incentives to encourage wellness program engagement, they are rethinking how to more efficiently leverage both financial and non-financial rewards. We will see shifts from individual incentives to group targets such as offering an afternoon outing for employees of a business unit who complete a fitness challenge.

Related: Taking the 5D approach to health

This approach is based on the growing recognition that people with strong social connections are generally healthier than those who are socially isolated and aims to help build social bonds and support a culture of health.

The use of non-financial rewards for program participation — such as social recognition from peers, certificates of achievement or perks such as preferential parking — will also gain momentum this year.

Employers will also begin shifting from financially focused to group-oriented philanthropic models.

For example, if employees at a firm’s sales division collectively walk 1,000 miles per month, the firm would make a donation to a local non-profit charitable organization. Or, at the individual level, for every employee who gets a cancer screening, the employer could provide a free cancer screening for a low-income individual in the local community who can’t afford one.

In short, with the help of advancements in technology, and a deeper understanding of how peers, supervisors, family and friends influence health, innovative employers will reposition their worksite health promotion efforts by moving to a consumer-first model that builds programs around the needs and goals of employees.