No significant effect of the programme on employee health measures or medical use. (Source: Getty/Thinkstock Images)
Maintaining a work-life balance is a task of its own. Before the pandemic hit us, life was all about racing against time trying to fix professional demands and personal desires. A study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, calls out the value of workplace wellness programmes and the industry that supports them.
According to the co-author of the study Professor David Molitor, Gies College of Business in Champaign, IL and the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA said, “Many employers use workplace wellness programmes in an attempt to improve employee health and reduce medical costs, but randomised evaluations of their efficacy are rare. Our randomised evaluation found no significant effect of the programme on employee health measures or medical use.”
“A significantly higher proportion of employees in the treatment group reported having a primary care doctor after 24 months. The workplace wellness programme also significantly improved a set of employee health beliefs on average. But we found no significant effect of the programme on employee health measures or medical use, demonstrating a mismatch between employee perceptions of workplace wellness programmes and actual improvement in health. These findings shed light on employees’ perceptions of workplace wellness programmes, which may influence long-run effects on health,” Professor Molitor added in the report by medicalnewstoday.com.
The study involved around 4834 employees, out of which 2770 were women and others men, with a mean age of 43.9 years. These people were taken part in the wellness programme which surveyed their health and wellness activities and the study was gathered for 12 to 24 months.
For Professor Julian Reif, also of the Gies College of Business and the National Bureau of Economic Research, and co-author of the study, said, “Many prior studies found that workplace wellness programmes improved health and reduced medical use, but those results were likely due to differences in who participates. Our study complements recent randomised studies and demonstrates the value of using randomised evaluations to determine causal impact.”