Engagement Insights

• Introduction

• Engagement's
  True Role

• Why Health
  Engagement is
  so Hard

• Stiff Engagement
  Competition
• 4 Major
  Barriers

• Behavioral
  Science

• Motivating
  Employees

1. Too much noise. Your people are bombarded by advertising claims (many health related) at almost every turn. These health claims often conflict: e.g. eat fish for the omega 3s; don’t eat fish because of the mercury. (Watch this video for a humorous illustration). Because this noise confuses and annoys people, they often tune it out – particularly messages from untrusted sources. Unfortunately, employer health programs can sometimes become part of the noise people ignore.

2. The Trust Gap. In some cases employees are hesitant to provide personal health information, which is why some employers have to pay people to complete HRAs and why HRA answers are not always truthful. As this Gallup poll shows, if employees perceive that a program is from a health insurer, the trust gap is even wider. Trust, moreover, is essential for an effective program, because (among other reasons) it helps efficiently grab attention and promote behavior.

3. Insufficient Emotional Appeal. Each of your people have some intrinsic dream or desire – such as fitting into skinny jeans, getting a date, or avoiding a wheel chair (“Health Dreams”) – that can help your program engage them and promote healthier behaviors. Most programs, however, don’t efficiently tap into a diverse audience’s Health Dreams. The solution is to make your program more emotionally appealing to everyone you want to use it by appealing to their Health Dreams.

4. Insufficient hope and change. Many of your people lack sufficient hope that they can change their health behaviors. The best cure (and the most powerful engagement tactic) is often to help them make subjectively satisfying and objectively measurable progress toward one of their Health Dreams. This will generate more engagement then you thought possible. Unfortunately, some health programs fail to generate this type of progress because they don’t fully incorporate advances in behavioral science such as adequately helping people build healthier Intrinsic Forces – particularly mindsets, pleasures, desires, and habits.