The benefits of rewarding healthy behavior

Having a healthy lifestyle is precious. It makes you feel good, gives you more energy, this encourage you to live even healthier, makes you more resilient to setbacks and ultimately results in a happy lifestyle. A positive reinforcing cycle. However, developing a healthy lifestyle is hard and mostly needs some encouragement. Both intrinsic as extrinsic encouragement. Therefore, Fitter empowers organizations to reward employees for healthy behavior. Read why and how we do this!

Why organizations should enable and encourage

As an employer your workforce is critical to the success of your organization. It is one of your most valuable assets. That’s the reason why Human Resources became an important division within organizations with an extensive workforce. Manage your employees correctly and they will bring you prospher.

Let’s take a look on a couple of critical success factors of HR:

• Ensure strategic fit – Make sure that the way of working and the policies are well aligned with the strategy of the organization;
• Rewarding, Appreciation and development – Wages, salaries, bonus structures and development opportunities. It is critical for an organization to manage this carefully to retain employees;
• Become an attractive employer – Having the best and brightest employees is a huge competitive advantage. It is important to be an attractive employer;
• Safety and Risk Management – A save workplace is obligatory. Safety and Risk management is broader than soly preventing workplace injuries. Reducing stress at work and preventing inappropriate behavior is also part of Safety and Risk management;
• Productivity and Sick leave – Having employees is great, but the number of FTEs is not equal to the amount of billable hours. Unfortunately, people get sick and they are not 100% productive in a normal working week.  Reducing sick leave and optimizing productivity is key to success.

By enabling and encouraging healthy behavior, with a well thought-out Employee Wellness Program, all of above critical success factors can be accomplished. This enablement and encouragement of healthy behavior is not an one-off action. It should be a part of the identity and strategy of the organization. This can be established by creating an Employee Wellness Program with an Employee Wellness Platform. Like Fitter! Our platform is designed to reward healthy behaviour.

The power of rewarding instead punishment

Rewards are more effective than punishments. We sometimes tent to emphasise on what is “wrong” or negative, since this is irritating us. Totally understandable, but also questionable. Punishing someone for being irresponsible, living unhealthy or being less productive could lead to a temporary improvement. The driving mechanism is fear for the consequences. But repeatedly inducing fear by punishment will not lead to long term results. In the contrary, people can become numb and become even less motivated to improve their behavior.

Rewarding good behavior acts like a nudge in the right direction. It is like a little energy boost, since someone is proactively (you do not have to ask for it) encouraging your attempt to do better. Like we described in the introduction of this article, once one is in this positive reinforcing cycle of good behaviour it makes it easier to improve. This is also the case for Employee Wellness. Encourage your employees to live a healthier life by giving them a gentle nudge into the right direction. The Fitter platform empowers organizations with the right tooling to give this nudge towards healthy behavior.

How Fitter rewards healthy behavior

We believe that becoming, and staying, healthy should be fun and challenging. Via the Fitter Mobile App employees can keep track of their vitality scores divided into four pillars: sleep, nutrition, physical activity and mental health/stress. We reward employees with FitTokens when they keeping track of their vitality, joining challenges within the organization and improving on their personal goals. When someone acquired enough FitTokens, he or she can spend it on (health) products and services within the in-app store. Creating a positive reinforcing cycle of healthy behavior!

Get more information about the Fitter platform