![]() Instead, financial rewards come by providing opportunities for employees to make the choices that improve wellbeing, such as promoting group exercise, reducing time spent in chairs, helping employees balance work stressors, and engaging in conversation with employees about what they do to maintain good health. The trick isn’t to make managers responsible for individual health outcomes, a potentially disturbing structure that could lead to bosses snooping on lunch choices or demanding employees get gym memberships. Making bosses directly accountable for the health of individual employees is of course fraught with potential conflicts, according to Robbins, now a postdoctoral research fellow at the New York University School of Medicine. Compensation perks energize wellness actions by giving managers a tangible priority to what now is often nothing more than lip service.” “Employees want to work for companies they feel have their best health interests at heart. “The modern work environment is no longer just a place where people spend eight hours each day performing their job, but a place where employees want to be inspired to improve professionally but also to grow personally and maintain their health,” says lead author Rebecca Robbins ’09, M.S. The research appears in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. And what’s more, managers conveyed enthusiasm for switching to a company that offered compensation for the implementation of their ideas. Participants expressed strong support for the company taking a lead in workplace health, with 68 percent in favor of being of evaluated for their employee wellness actions. Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab found that linking as little as 10 percent of annual managerial salary increases to implementing wellness actions – such as installing a water cooler, providing healthy snacks at meetings and talking with employees about health goals – is enough to incentivize meaningful changes from managers in the workplace, results that could have a profound impact on employee health and workplace productivity.įor the study, Cornell researchers asked 270 managers in a range of industries, including business and administrative services, hospitality, tourism, education and healthcare, to compare two fictional companies: one that engages its managers in the promotion of good health and lifestyle choices, and another that does not actively do so. That sort of financial incentive may prove a popular new way to reward innovative ideas as employees increasingly expect a workplace culture conducive to health and wellness. But what about rewards that tie salary increases to efforts to improve the health of employees? Giving a boss a pay bump for boosting the bottom-line is accepted practice by businesses across the country.
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