Worksite Wellness: A Field Experiment on Participation Incentives and Selection into Wellness Programs

Workplace wellness programs have become a $6 billion industry and are widely touted as a way to improve employee well-being, reduce health care costs by promoting prevention, and increase workplace productivity. Yet, there is little rigorous evidence available to support these claims, partly because the voluntary nature of these programs mean that participants may differ from nonparticipants for reasons unrelated to the causal effects of the wellness program. Researchers will implement a randomized control trial with the aim of answering three questions: (1) how do incentives affect the level of participation in wellness programs; (2) what types of workers select into wellness programs, and how do incentives affect that composition; and (3) what is the causal impact of worksite wellness participation on health, health care costs, and productivity?

Learn more: 

• Evaluation Summary: The Impact of a Workplace Wellness Program in Illinois
• Policy Insight: The limited impact of US workplace wellness programs on health and employment-related outcomes
• Publication: What do Workplace Wellness Programs do? Evidence from the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study, Quarterly Journal of Economics
• Publication: Effects of a Workplace Wellness Program on Employee Health, Health Beliefs, and Medical Use: A Randomized Clinical Trial, JAMA Internal Medicine

Media coverage: 

• Workplace Wellness Programs Don’t Work Well. Why Some Studies Show Otherwise., New York Times
• Opinion: Your workplace wellness program probably isn’t making you healthier, Washington Post
• Are You Measuring The Real Impact of Your Employee Wellness Program?, Forbes
• Workplace Wellness Programs Really Don’t Work, Bloomberg