Targeted strategies can help lower your employee dropout rate
Flexibility, simplicity, personal contact help keep workers involved
Program "burnout" is the bane of every wellness professional's existence. An employee will enthusiastically begin a new wellness program and then just as suddenly disappear.
What makes employees drop out? What can be done to keep them involved? While there may be no easy answers, health professionals contacted by Employee Health & Fitness agree there are strategies you can implement that will keep employees involved and lower that dropout rate. They include the following:
· Be flexible. As much as possible, customize your programs to meet individual employee needs.
· Keep it simple. Nothing can turn an employee off faster than a complex program with even more complex record-keeping requirements.
· Stay in touch. Let your employees know that you care about them and that you miss them when they don't show up.
"Regardless of what the particular intervention is, when delivering your presentation, it certainly needs to be geared to the level of the particular employee or segment of the employee population you're dealing with," notes Tom Crum, MS, FAWHP, wellness director at Chattanooga (TN) State Technical Community College, past president of the Association for Worksite Health Promotion, and recently elected president of the Wellness Council of Tennessee. "You may have to gear that intervention a little differently - even word it a little differently - depending on the education level of the employees."
It's also important, especially with exercise programs, to provide your employees with a variety of options, says Crum. "You need to offer a wide enough variety of activities that you appeal to almost everyone," he says. "Some people won't want to go to the fitness center every day, but they may want to go outside. I personally have to have a lot of variety. I do a lot of bicycling, but some mornings, I want to go on the treadmill or the climbing machine. It would be foolish to try to box people into one given program for everyone; you'd be doomed to fail."
What makes employees drop out?In order to try to solve the dropout problem, it's important to understand when employees typically drop out - and why.
In part, the problem is seasonal, says Glenda B. Sajwaj, MS, manager of Live Well, the Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) employee wellness program in Chattanooga. The TVA recently received a "Gold Well Workplace" designation from the Wellness Councils of America. "January is a typical time everybody wants to start a program, but you usually see a dropout after a month or two months," she says.
Lucrecia Allen, MS, ACSM, CSCS, wellness director for the Catalyst Wellness Center at Mary Kay Inc. in Dallas, says the dropout period "varies from person to person, but you're looking at an average of six weeks to three months." Allen is an employee of the Cooper Institute for Aerobics Research, which contracts out her services to Mary Kay.
As for why employees lose that initial enthusiasm, "It's a combination of things," says SajWaj. "One group overextends themselves - expects more of themselves than they can do. They start in January and expect to lose, say, 20 pounds, quickly, then they give up when they don't see the results they expected. Another reason they give us is it's just a matter of time - while they can find time to start a program, it's difficult to continue balancing work, family, and so forth. That's why you will see [a smaller volume] in the summer - because employees have other [family] commitments."
Sajwaj says she typically sees an increase in participation of about 10% each January, but by March, that increase has evaporated.
"Employees also drop out when they begin to plateau, or they become bored," adds Allen.
Quite often, notes Crum, employees drop out because they really weren't ready to change in the first place, and wellness professionals should temper their own expectations accordingly. "You really can't get an employee to adhere [to a program], he says. "You can guide them, attempt to motivate them, but at some point, they are going to have to incorporate the change within themselves. It's an individual decision."
Strategies that workThat isn't to say wellness professionals can't influence that decision. There are some tried and true strategies that work and several new avenues wellness coordinators are exploring to help address the challenge of program burnout.
"We've had a step aerobics program for employees that's been popular for a long time," Crum says. "That's because every instructor has tried to gear it to the needs of the individual participant by incorporating different levels of intensity."
"With any programs we offer, we keep them simple, to the point. The goals are simple, too," says Sajwaj. She notes that past programs that failed did so because they were too complicated.
"One was our cholesterol education program," she recalls. "It lasted eight weeks, and the employee was required to be there all eight times." A lot of TVA employees travel frequently, says Sajwaj, which made attendance difficult. "Now, we've made it more flexible, incorporating self-help and more one-on-one counseling," she says.
It's also difficult, she adds, to be successful with long-term programs. Simplicity, notes Sajwaj, is critical. "We did a fitness program two to three years ago where employees got different point values for a large number of different activities, and we lost a lot of people - the hassle of keeping up with point totals became too great. We did it a year later and made it very simple. Employees simply come a specified number of times, work out for 'x' minutes, and they get a gym bag. We got a fantastic response."
Sajwaj has also learned that if you offer incentives simply for an eight-week program, you will get a dramatic impact on participation for eight weeks, but then you'll see a significant drop-off. "In the future, we want to have an ongoing incentive program that offers a variety of things people can do, different ways they can earn points, and be incented on an ongoing basis," she says. "We think that will help." (For an in-depth look at a successful ongoing incentive program, see story, at right.)
Up close and personalPerhaps the most effective strategy of all, say experts, is to develop and maintain a close personal relationship with your employees.
"You definitely need to know your members," insists Allen. "Notice what type of workouts they do. If someone has been coming in for two months and all he does is use the treadmill at the same speed for the same period of time, my job is to recommend something new or different. They may be too inhibited to ask for help. Even if the room is full of equipment, that one piece may be all they know how to use - or they may not know how to adjust it." If you notice that all an employee does is lift weights, for example, Allen says, your job is to inform them about cross-training - to offer a suggestion that they try something different.
You should also "train" your members to be aware that their presence is noticed and that their absence is felt. "We have one member who comes in every day," says Allen. "Today when he came in, he told us he would be in a seminar tomorrow. He knew that otherwise we'd call and ask him why he wasn't here."
When Mary Kay employees miss their regular workout, they receive a phone call, a card, or an e-mail message. "That's gotten a really good response," says Allen.
Sajwaj is also pursuing the personal approach. "Just this year, we started using a [workout] tracking program," she explains. "If employees are no longer coming to the fitness center, we will write them a note or give them a phone call, to let them know they're being missed and to see if there's something we can do to help get them back on track. It's basically part of trying to improve our services to what we view as our customers."
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