Executive Summary
Don't fall victim to the Extrinsic Incentives Bias. Money is great at some things, and not so great at others. I think this is one of those areas where money clouds the situation more than helps.
Extrinsic Incentives Bias
As stated in the wikipedia article, MBA students were asked to guess what motivates Citibank employees. They guessed the following:
- Amount of pay
- Having job security
- Quality of fringe benefits
- Amount of praise from your supervisor
- Doing something that makes you feel good about yourself
- Developing skills and abilities
- Accomplishing something worthwhile
- Learning new things
The actual results were very different:
- Developing skills and abilities
- Accomplishing something worthwhile
- Learning new things
- Quality of fringe benefits
- Having job security
- Doing something that makes you feel good about yourself
- Amount of pay
- Amount of praise from your supervisor
I assume you're a good boss, and that you pay your employees well and they are happy with their level to pay. As Daniel Pink says in Drive, pay is a demotivating factor -- it is demotivating to not get enough, but once you have enough, more isn't especially motivating for most people. So giving additional pay to your employees for being healthy probably isn't going to have the desired effect.
Safety First!
The safest workplaces do not reward people for pointing out dangerous situations, they change the mindset of the organization to truly believe that safety is the most important priority. That isn't done through money, it's done through actually caring about employee safety. Keeping employees safe becomes something people believe is the right thing to do, and the motivation becomes intrinsic. People are much more likely to continue doing something if they believe in it rather than if they're being paid for it -- if pay is your motivation and it stops, you won't keep the desired behavior.
In the specific case of a healthy office, you are also perpetuating an unfortunate assumption:
"It's okay to be unhealthy if I'm willing to pay $X for the privilege!"
Health cannot be bought. No amount of money can undo a heart attack or a stroke. No amount of money will undo the harm caused by a life of hard living (or sedentary living). You can't stay thin by bribing your waistline, and that understanding is fundamental to an organization that believes in health first.
Create a Health First Organization
So if you want to create an organization that believes in health like a factory believes in safety, what can you do? Here are some (non-exhaustive) ideas on how you could go about it:
Make it Easy to be Healthy
Everyone wants to be healthy (just like every smoker wants to quit), but we don't because it's hard. Make it easier. Give people the ability to:
- Enjoy healthy choices
- More easily than unhealthy choices
- At no extra cost
This means things like having fresh fruit and vegetables in the office to snack on, or at least getting healthier snacks. It means getting a great chef who makes fresh food in the office kitchen instead of just ordering a pizza. The staff still gets a great meal, they still don't have to put in any effort, and yet they will also be healthier for it.
It means allowing people to set up appointments with the company nutritionist who will meet them any time of the week in the office for free. They don't have to go and see them. It means having fresh fruits and vegetables delivered to employees bi-weekly so that they don't have to go out and buy them. It could mean giving healthy pre-cooked meals prepared fresh for people working late so that they don't need to stop for fast food on the way.
Set up a gym in the office, or offer free bikes to anyone who wants to commute in to the office, etc.
Pick whatever things match your budget and you think your employees will appreciate most. No need to make a fuss out of it, no need to mention it's for health, just make it easy to do.
Healthy Competition
If a group gets in to something, they are more likely to continue than if they're doing it alone. Try to find ways to give people an incentive to take the stairs over the elevator, or to go for that jog during lunch even though it's raining. Some things to consider:
- Do not compare people by absolute performance, but relative performance (pursue personal bests, not world records)
- Make sure people who don't compete aren't ostracized or otherwise feel that they should feel forced to
- Participation should be its own reward (or any reward should be feel-good and not significant)
One way of doing this would be buying everyone in your company and their families something like a Fit Bit. It records things like how well you sleep, how far you walk, how many stairs you climb, how many minutes you are active in a day, etc. When you use it, you get badges for accomplishing certain feats, which makes it a pretty good motivating tool for doing the right thing (kind of like what SE does for Q&A).
You could do things like giving a single Fit Bit to each group or team, and setting a monthly goal for how many stairs they should climb, or how far they should walk -- anyone in the team can use it on any day or at any time. Teams would then have an incentive to talk about who will be exercising, or running, or who climbs a lot of stairs, and start a discussion about exercise which will at the minimum raise awareness.
Alternatively, you could take the stats for everyone in your company (without making them public to their coworkers), and post averages by gender, by age, by team, by whatever so that people can set goals to beat themselves, and show how those group averages change over time.
You could even have people be allowed to just use them to make their own groups and see where they take it themselves.
You could hand out trophies or some other feel-good measure each month or year, or have the trophies pass around whenever a group loses them.
Lead by Example
Get healthy yourself (if you aren't already).
When you've been working long hours, let everyone know you're going to take a day off because you deserve it, and let the office know that taking a break is the healthy thing to do (and encouraged even by management). If someone looks stressed, encourage them to take a (free) afternoon off to spend with their family, or out on a golf course or something.
If you get them something like a Fit Bit, make your results visible on the company intranet or something of the sort so people can see how you're doing. Even if not, consider non-intrusive ways of sharing healthy things you're up to, like great restaurants you have been to (that serve healthy food), or great recipes you've found.
I think everybody here could benefit from having a healthier lifestyle.
- It's not your place to dictate how your employees live their lives outside of the office. Personally, I would be strongly turned off by a company thinking otherwise. – Telastyn Oct 30 '13 at 18:37