SmartPulse — our weekly reader poll in Smartbrief on Workforce — tracks feedback from leading managers and HR practitioners. We run the poll question each Thursday in our e-newsletter.
Last week, we asked: Do you monitor your employees’ health choices both inside and outside of work for a wellness program?
- We don’t track or ask our employees for health behavior information, 75%
- We don’t track anything but we do ask employees to volunteer information, 13%
- We try to track all of our employees’ health behaviors for wellness, 8%
- We only track what we can at work, 5%
While some of the wellness programs I’ve heard of are pretty high on the stalker quotient, if these results are any indication, they seem to be a very, very small minority. Three in four companies polled don’t do any tracking of health behaviors whatsoever and less than 10% try to track everything employees do. Perhaps a comfortable norm where employees are educated and encouraged to be well for themselves on a low, but constant, basis is better than draconian tracking, measurement and punishment that some wellness programs entail.
Lance Haun is community director for ERE.net, the main guy over at Rehaul.com and a member of the SmartBrief on Workforce Advisory Board.