If you work in a workplace that’s similar to the majority of America, odds are your employer offers some sort of “healthy lifestyle” incentive program. Whether it’s in the form of giving insurance incentives to non-smokers or more money into a Health Savings Account for hitting daily step goals, new research suggests that roughly 80 percent of large employers offer some sort of health incentive program. But what is the best incentive to get employees to reach these goals? A new study tackled this topic.
For their study, researchers sought to determine what was the best way to motivate employees to achieve daily workout goals. The researchers tested three methods; a monetary gain system, a monetary loss system, and a randomized lottery system. Here’s a closer look at how the three methods were explained to the participants:
- Participants in the monetary gain group were given $1.40 each day they hit at least 7,000 steps on their pedometer over a 30-day period.
- Participants in the monetary loss group were given $42, and $1.40 was subtracted from their account for each day they failed to hit at least 7,000 steps over the course of 30 days.
- Participants in the lottery group were asked to guess a two digit number upon arriving to work (00-99). If either number in the two digit number they guessed matched either number in the “winning” number, they got $5, but only if they had reached their step goal the previous day. (For example, if someone guessed 47, and the number was 79, since both numbers have a 7 in it, the person would win $5 if they had met the previous day’s step goal.) If the person guessed the exact same number, and they had hit at least 7,000 steps the day before, they were given $50.
- There was also a control group who had their steps measured, but did not have any monetary incentive.
Study Results
After tracking participants over the course of 30 days, researchers uncovered that the threat of losing money was more effective than the prospect of gaining money or “hitting the lottery.” Study results show:
- The mean proportion of participants days hitting the goal for the control group was 30 percent. For the gain-incentive group, it was 35 percent. For the lottery-incentive group, it was 36 percent. For the loss incentive group, it was 45 percent.
- Only the loss-incentive group had a significantly higher mean proportion of participant days hitting the goal than the control.
Dr. Hanneke den Ouden, who did not participate the study, said the research falls in line with current theories on loss aversion.
“There is a very long literature on loss aversion, stating that ‘losses loom twice as large as gains,’ so in that sense you would expect potential losses to have a bigger impact,” said Dr. Ouden. “However, I am not sure this means that threat of punishment is a good long-term motivation strategy, as it might also lead to demotivation.”
Interestingly, because the data was tracked through smartphones, researchers noted that 96 percent of people were still getting feedback on their daily walking goals three months after the incentive program ended.
“In a lot of studies you see high dropout, but we didn’t see that here, and I think one reason is because we leverage smartphones, which people carry with them all the time,” said study co-author Mitesh Patel, MD.
Patel and colleagues wrote that future studies can build off their work to develop more strategies to help individuals hit their daily workout goals through workplace incentive programs.
“Future studies might compare alternate methods of using loss aversion to design incentives and could further test the optimal magnitude and frequency,” the authors wrote. “Insights from this study should be incorporated into evaluations of longer-term sustainment and may benefit from opportunities to incorporate social incentives, such as team-based designs that focus on peer support, teammate accountability, and unity toward a common goal.”