At least that’s the message conveyed by a recent blog post, written by Health Shackleford, which appeared in Employee Benefits News.  We at DailyEndorphin tend to agree with its main premise:

Wellness is about more than reducing health care costs. It’s about creating massive value for organizations. Some might suggest this is stretching reality a bit. Those people have never seen a properly implemented and continually supported an employee wellness program over time.

His post also does a nice job of explaining why we need to step away from the spreadsheet, look at the bigger picture, and understand there are multiple (many of them often hidden) factors involved in measure true “ROI” resulting from wellness programs:

One recent report cited, almost apologetically, that although there was no short-term financial return, the wellness program in question did reduce hospitalizations by 40% for targeted conditions. It’s a sad day when there’s not enough value in preventing numerous employees from having heart attacks to unequivocally declare such a program as being a wild success, simply because these outcomes didn’t immediately deliver a hard financial return.

As the author puts it so eloquently, why not just do the right things for the right reasons and then expect the desired (and some unexpected) results to follow?  Be sure to go read the whole blog post right away and then possibly re-think your wellness program strategy if you’re putting too much focus on hard ROI.